Alternate History Dewey Defeats Truman (for real)

[Circle of Willis]

Hi all. Now that I've sorted out enough things IRL to be able to read & contribute online more frequently, I've decided I should start by writing something, since I'm dreadfully out of practice. Thought doing a short timeline would help me get back in the groove and practice my writing - I hope this will be enjoyable to anyone who reads it, and that I haven't gotten too rusty and lacking in focus these past few years.

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When the 1948 election campaign began, all bets were on a resounding victory for Thomas Dewey and the Republicans over incumbent Democrat Harry Truman. Firstly, the Republicans taken the Senate, the House and a majority of state governorships in 1946. Second, opinion polls showed Truman trailing badly behind Dewey. Third, both Roosevelt’s second Vice President Henry Wallace and arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond had broken away from the party in revolt against the President’s refusal to reconcile with Soviet General Secretary Josef Stalin and support for civil rights, respectively, and they took quite a few progressive Democrats and Dixiecrats with them.

But although the incumbent had much cause for worry when he exited the Democratic National Convention in July, Harry Truman refused to show it. “Senator Barkley[1] and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it - don't you forget it!...We will do that because they are wrong and we are right!” He had defiantly proclaimed on the convention floor, to the applause and cheers of the delegates. He ran an aggressive, populistic campaign across the country that summer and fall, haranguing Dewey himself and the Republican Congress: he condemned them as out-of-touch, do-nothing, privileged fat cats who pandered to Wall Street’s concerns above those of Main Street, and even asserted that Communists around the globe were secretly hoping for Dewey to win because Republican economics would surely cause another Great Depression. Truman’s furor proved infectious, and his crowds grew in size and enthusiasm even as the pundits and pollsters continued to predict a Dewey landslide, with a chorus of “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” greeting the president at every stop he made by mid-September.

Conversely, the Governor of New York had initially planned to seem ‘above the fray’ and to run a cautious campaign, in which he would strive mightily to avoid saying anything controversial even at the cost of spouting empty platitudes instead. Perhaps Truman could have achieved an upset if Dewey had stuck to this non-confrontational style and failed to put up a defense against his blistering attacks. Unfortunately for the Democrats, it was not to be.

The most obvious trigger for Dewey’s decision to reverse course and adopt a much more aggressive campaigning style to rival Truman’s own, akin to his failed 1944 campaign against Roosevelt, was the inclusion of Charles Halleck on the GOP ticket[2]. Dewey had been narrowly persuaded by his campaign managers to pick the Indiana Congressman to be his running mate, and the conservative firebrand in turn had long pushed for Dewey to take a firmer and more assertive stance on the campaign trail, contrary to the wishes of said managers. Perhaps he’d finally gotten through to the top half of the ticket, or perhaps an errant comment from Truman – accusing Dewey once more of elitism and being beholden to Wall Street – had just gotten on Dewey’s last nerve. Or perhaps it was a combination of both.

Regardless of how it happened, by early September Dewey was matching Truman blow for blow: he had replaced his vague rhetoric with trumpeting of his successful crackdown on crime, his support of urban renewal and civil rights, and how small businesses in New York had flourished thanks to his policies. Furthermore he also began to castigate Truman for slow progress in combating the post-war recession and for not opposing the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe rigorously enough, though he did allow himself agreement with the incumbent on the Berlin Airlift.[3] The press picked up on this switch in tactics, and believing that Dewey must have been spooked by the success of Truman’s campaigning, some offices and radio commentators began to revise their optimistic predictions of a Dewey victory downward, though few would suggest that the race was even approaching a dead heat as late as October 31.

At first these observers’ growing pessimism seemed to be warranted. Come November 2, 1948, Truman seemed to grossly overperform his polling numbers, taking the lead in the popular vote and doing much better than expected in New York and New England, where Dewey had been expected to crush him outside of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Of the two Democratic breakaways, the Dixiecrat ‘States’ Rights Democrats’ were more successful, taking four states and 39 electoral votes, while the Communist-friendly Progressives walked away with precisely zero of both. In the end, the election came down to four states: California, Nevada, Illinois and Ohio[4].

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Spoiler: 1948 election map & stats

Party	Candidates	Popular Vote	Electoral Vote (266 to win)
Republican	Thomas E. Dewey (R-NY)/Charles A. Halleck (R-IN)	22,640,201 (46.4%)	270
Democratic	Harry S. Truman (D-MO)/Alben W. Barkley (D-KY)	23,469,690 (48.1%)	222
States' Rights Democratic	James S. Thurmond Sr. (SR-SC)/Fielding L. Wright (SR-MS)	1,175,930 (2.41%)	39
Progressive	Henry A. Wallace (P-IA)/Glen H. Taylor (P-ID)	1,157,328 (2.37%)	0

All four key states fell into Dewey’s column by razor-thin margins: approximately 20,000 votes in CA and IL, just below 10,000 in OH and 2,000 in NV. This placed him at 270 electoral votes, four more than the 266 he needed to win the election. What should have been an easy victory for Dewey had turned into a dangerously narrow race which kept both candidates and their teams biting their nails well into the morning of November 3rd, but in the end, Truman’s best efforts were not enough; the New York Governor did win, becoming the first Republican president in sixteen years just as most pundits had still expected.

Emphasis on most. The Washington Post, a paper published in Washington DC which had spent the last decade recovering from Ned McLean’s ruinous management, jumped the gun and declared President Truman had just won four more years in office on the front page of their November 3 issue. Suffice to say, the new president-elect was one of many who had a laugh at their expense that day.

President-elect Thomas Dewey holds up a copy of the Washington Post's November 3 issue in front of a mocking crowd​

Elsewhere, in little Albania an ocean away, a much more violent transition of power was underway. Pro-Soviet and pro-Yugoslav factions, respectively led by President Enver Hoxha and Deputy Premier Koci Xoxe, were butting heads in the mountainous Communist country, mirroring the recent rift between Soviet General Secretary Josef Stalin and Yugoslavia’s independent-minded Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito. Days after Dewey’s electoral victory, Xoxe mounted a successful coup and purged the pro-Soviet clique, including Hoxha himself. Having seized the presidency and arrested his predecessor, Xoxe promptly followed through on old plans to allow two divisions of Yugoslav troops into Albania (supposedly to counter a potential attack from Greece, where royalist forces were well on their way to defeating the local Communists) and to begin his country’s integration into its larger neighbor. By this time next year, the Yugoslav federation would be counting a seventh republic within its borders.[5]

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[1] Alben Barkley, Senator from Kentucky and Truman’s running mate in 1948.

[2] This is one half of the POD. Historically, though Dewey’s campaign manager had struck a deal with Halleck at the Republican National Convention in June to secure the Indiana delegation for him in exchange for the vice-presidential nomination, Dewey wasn’t informed of this and picked California governor (and future Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl Warren to be his running mate instead. ITL, Dewey wasn’t out of the loop when it was made and follows through with making Halleck his running mate.

[3] This is the POD’s other half. Historically, Dewey’s campaign was criticized thusly by a contemporary paper: ‘No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.’

[4] Dewey lost Ohio, Illinois and California – and with them, the 1948 election – by less than 1% IOTL. As well, in Nevada, the margin between the candidates was of about 2,000 votes.

[5] The butterflies begin to flap their wings...

 

[Circle of Willis]

1949

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” By reciting this oath in his famous baritone with one hand raised and the other on the Holy Bible, Thomas Edmund Dewey formally succeeded Harry Truman as the 34th President of the United States and took the duties of that high office onto his shoulders. The first Republican President since Hoover, the first to have facial hair since Taft and the second-youngest after Teddy Roosevelt carried into his new office a reputation as an honest but aloof and pompous man, even a stiff one at times, and three family members: his auburn-haired wife Frances, considered far prettier and livelier than her husband, and their two sons.

Dewey's first order of business was to form a cabinet. In this regard, most of his picks were conventional Republicans and thus confirmed quite smoothly with strong bipartisan support, despite significant Democratic gains in Congress the previous year.

Secretary of State: John Foster Dulles[1]
Secretary of the Treasury: Elliott V. Bell[2]
Secretary of Defense: Robert A. Lovett[3]
Attorney General: J. Edgar Hoover[4]
Secretary of Commerce: John W. Bricker[5]
Secretary of the Interior: John C. Vivian[6]
Secretary of Agriculture: Usher L. Burdick[7]
Secretary of Labor: Fred A. Hartley, Jr.[8]
Postmaster General: Edwin F. Jaeckle[9]

Of these, the only really controversial picks were his choices for Attorney General and Secretary of Labor. The president had tapped J. Edgar Hoover, the domineering and controversial Director of the FBI, to fill the former spot; there was speculation that Hoover had offered Dewey clandestine aid in the 1948 campaign in exchange for the position, bolstered by how nonchalantly Hoover (a man known to be jealously possessive of ‘his’ bureau) accepted Dewey’s nomination and how Clyde Tolson, his devoted deputy, was guaranteed to succeed him. This would, of course, effectively keep the FBI under Hoover’s thumb even after his promotion to Dewey’s cabinet. As for the Secretary of Labor, Dewey’s nomination of the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Act ruffled many a labor union’s feathers and those of politicians aligned to them, even if it was wholly expected and in line with the prevailing Republican economic orthodoxy, which was hardly friendly to union interests.

Much less controversially, Dewey also rewarded key aides from his time in New York and on the campaign trail with the usual patronage positions. Edwin Jaeckle was nominated to the office of Postmaster General while his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, was retained in a position even closer to Dewey himself as White House Chief of Staff, and his longtime press secretary James Hagerty would continue in that same role at the White House.[10] In a rather less orthodox appointment, he tapped Allen Dulles – brother to his Secretary of State pick and another 1948 campaign aide – to replace rear-admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter as Director of Central Intelligence, making him the first civilian leader of the young Central Intelligence Agency.

It would not be long before this cabinet and the relatively young, mustachioed President it served faced their first tests. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army had dealt their overextended, undersupplied and demoralized Nationalist counterpart multiple crippling defeats through late 1948, and were parading in Beijing by January 31 – just 11 days after Dewey’s inauguration. Dewey tried to up existing efforts to arm and supply the Kuomintang, but it was far too late: the devastation brought on by the Second Sino-Japanese War, persistent and uncontrollable corruption permeating the Nationalist ranks from top to bottom, and Truman’s and George C. Marshall’s ill-advised attempts to force a ceasefire (even to the point of threatening to suspend all aid to Chiang Kai-shek) which the Communists simply took advantage of had doomed the Kuomintang’s efforts to retain power, years before Dewey even started his second campaign for the White House. The National Revolutionary Army was in constant retreat all through spring and summer 1949, losing their capital Nanjing within three days of Communist forces crossing the Yangtze in April and Shanghai by early June.[11]

Though an exultant Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1 while the Nationalists on the mainland were obviously on the verge of total defeat, a silver lining appeared soon after was the Nationalist Chinese success in repelling PLA attempts to land on Quemoy/Kinmen Island. This gave the Nationalist government and supporters a safe haven to retreat to in the form of Taiwan, as Chiang Kai-shek would indeed do in December, though immediately following the fall of the mainland most American supplies and advisors were bound for Hainan (as the next frontline against the new PRC) instead. Through the ‘China Lobby’ and its congressional champions, such as Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota and Senator Bill Knowland of California, the KMT managed to retain relevance not just in its dwindling Chinese territories but also in the halls of Washington. And the Dewey administration, which looked for any way to lay the blame for China’s fall squarely on the shoulders of their Democratic predecessors, was all too eager to join itself to this lobby.

Even worse, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in August. This had come as a rude shock to the president and his administration, as they had been informed by US military intelligence and the CIA that the Soviets would not be able to produce nuclear weapons until at least 1953. In response, Dewey opted to authorize development on Edward Teller’s proposal for a ‘Super’ hydrogen bomb.[12]

While he was still reeling from the Nationalist defeat in Asia, Dewey at least had some good news in Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, joining the United States and 11 European nations into a defensive alliance to counter the spread of Communism, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO for short. And later in the year, the Greek Civil War ended in a resounding royalist victory: only a few thousand Communist fighters were able to flee across the border to Bulgaria, eventually ending up in Tashkent once the Soviets got a hold of them, while as many as 100,000 of their comrades were left at the non-existent mercy of the victorious royalists.

Moreover, the electoral victory of Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats ensured that West Germany would be led not just by anti-Communists (Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher was one), but a man friendly to American interests as well. And lastly, the Export-Import Bank, the IMF and the World Bank cleared their first loans to Tito’s Yugoslavia just as it absorbed Koci Xoxe’s Albania: Dewey and Dulles had agreed that exploiting the Tito-Stalin split would be a good way to curb growing Soviet influence, even if Tito himself was also an unapologetic Communist. None of these were considered great or shocking triumphs like the Red victory in China had been for the Communist bloc, indeed all of these developments had been years in the making, but the President was eager to trumpet whatever foreign policy victories he could in the wake of that calamity.[13]

Internally, Dewey took the reform programs he’d pioneered in New York to great success and worked to export them to the rest of the country, aided in no small part by the popularity of these reforms across the political spectrum. The first of his great achievements on that front this year, and certainly the one better-remembered in history books, was the passage of the Housing Act: even Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft and the other conservative Republicans in Congress were on board with the act, which provided for slum clearance programs, the construction of 800,000 housing units and research into new building techniques around the country.[14]

Dewey’s second domestic achievement was an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, increasing the minimum wage from 40¢ to 60¢ per hour and finally fully outlawing child labor in the United States.[15]

Thirdly, in the face of an economic slowdown later in the year, Dewey pushed for the passage of modest tax relief for the working and middle classes, and in particular less modest ones for businesses in general[16]. In so doing he signaled his commitment to promoting economic growth even at the expense of growing deficits, something the more conservative elements of the GOP resented but fully expected out of the liberal Republican figurehead, and which virtually no moderates and liberals objected to at this time.

Fourthly, Dewey – who had already proven himself a strong opponent of segregation as Governor of New York – strove to seriously enforce Truman’s executive order desegregating the military. Secretary of Defense Lovett and Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray were tasked with integrating all-black units and desegregating military bases, hospitals and schools, starting with the integration of the Montford Point training camp for black Marines into neighboring Camp Lejeune. The White House also leaned on the Veterans Administration to award G.I. Bill benefits to black veterans who had returned home with ‘blue ticket’ (considered neither honorable nor dishonorable) discharges, which had then been used as an excuse to deny them those benefits, as part of Dewey’s greater plan to alleviate black poverty by providing greater access to education and promoting the startup of new businesses.[17]

Finally, Cabinet officials weren’t the only appointments Dewey would be making this year. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy died in July; the president nominated Harold Stassen, former Minnesota Governor and his fiercest rival for the GOP nomination last year, to succeed him. Justice Willy Rutledge died two months later, and this time Dewey’s choice of replacement was Earl Warren, the Governor of California. Both men were reputed to be quite progressively-minded, and so like so much of Dewey’s actions to date, their nomination by the liberal Republican president may have mildly annoyed conservatives but hardly came as a surprise to them or anyone else.[18]

Perhaps the only person more vexed by this choice of Justices than Bob Taft and Vice President Halleck was Attorney General Hoover, who had shared his ambition to sit in a Supreme Court Justice’s seat at the earliest opportunity with his close associates. Evidently Dewey felt it was improper to bump him up onto the bench so soon after giving him a cabinet position…or perhaps there was just plenty of animosity between the two men, just as there had been between Hoover and Truman before. Still other Beltway insiders speculated that Dewey had made some other, bigger promise to Hoover to allay the latter’s anger, though they were at a loss as to what that promise could be.

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[1] The Dulles brothers were important supporters of Dewey’s in the 1948 campaign. Seemed logical that he’d give them the roles Eisenhower would a few years later IOTL, considering John was Dewey’s foreign policy advisor on the trail and Allen’s OSS experience.

[2] IOTL Bell was a close financial advisor to Governor Dewey, as well as a bigshot banker and news publisher.

[3] Lovett was Dewey’s SecDef choice had he won the 1948 election and, in addition to being a banker who favored huge military buildup, had already developed strong bipartisan defense and foreign policy credentials from his time as Assistant Secretary of War for Air under FDR and Undersecretary of State under Truman.

[4] According to Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, the Dewey-Hoover deal was real, motivated at least in part by Hoover’s extremely bad relationship with Truman. Hoover, Tolson and Lou Nichols had cooked it up with the expectation that Dewey wouldn’t just make Hoover his AG, but also give him a SCOTUS seat as soon as one opened up.

[5] Bricker was Dewey’s running mate in the 1944 election and a conservative Republican, a sharp contrast to the liberal Eastern Establishment figurehead Dewey.

[6] Vivian was Governor of Colorado 1943-47 and another noted conservative.

[7] Burdick was a Congressman from North Dakota and a liberal more in tune with Dewey than the previous three picks, best known for being the sole Republican Congressman not to support the Communist Control Act IOTL.

[8] Hartley was a Republican Congressman from New Jersey and, as said, co-sponsor of the Taft-Hartley Act which put the first major post-New Deal limits on union power and made future right-to-work legislation possible.

[9] Jaeckle was a longtime New York Republican grey eminence, party chairman 1940-44 and Dewey’s political mentor, having orchestrated the latter’s rise to the governorship and first presidential election campaign.

[10] Brownell was indeed Dewey’s campaign manager in 1948, and IOTL became Attorney General under Eisenhower. Hagerty was historically the White House Press Secretary under Eisenhower, but before that he was Dewey’s – both as Governor of NY and on the campaign trail in 1944 and ’48.

[11] The Nationalists’ backs were broken by the destruction of their armies in Manchuria and northern China through late 1948 and early 1949, but they had been on the back foot against the Communists for a while before that. The fatal Huaihai Campaign had ended even before Dewey was inaugurated ITL, just as it did historically.

[12] Just a little earlier than Truman’s decision to do the same IOTL, which came in 1950.

[13] Mostly the same as the course of European events in OTL's 1949, except for that mention of Yugoslavia absorbing Albania. Dewey’s an internationalist who would have no problem with NATO, unlike isolationist Republicans like Taft; much like the Chinese Civil War, the course of the Greek Civil War and the Tito-Stalin split had already pretty much been set before election day in 1948; and Schumacher’s SPD was hobbled by factors out of their and Dewey’s control, namely the loss of the most SPD-friendly parts of Germany to East Germany and fear of the brutal policies enforced by the Soviets & East German Communists there, which damned them by association despite his efforts to dissociate from the latter in the strongest terms possible.

[14] Pretty much Truman’s OTL Housing Act of 1949, which was actually sponsored by Taft as well. Dewey was a firm advocate of urban renewal and housing programs in New York when he was its Governor, and there’s no reason to think that would change if he were to move up to the White House.

[15] Also similar to OTL, the only difference is that Dewey and the Republicans passed a smaller minimum wage increase than Truman did – from 40¢ to 60¢ rather than 75¢.

[16] Truman did something similar in 1949, though in line with Republican economics, Dewey’s tax breaks are a bit more favorable to the middle class and businesses and a bit less so toward blue-collar workers.

[17] Historically, Truman passed the order to desegregate the military, but it went mostly unenforced until Eisenhower. Dewey – a Northern Republican with one of the best records in fighting racial discrimination among the state governors of the 1940s – has essentially started Eisenhower’s work early, with an extra eye on growing the black middle class by way of providing GI Bill benefits to black veterans.

[18] Other than being a perennial candidate for the presidency, IOTL Stassen was known as the youngest governor of any US state in his day and a liberal Republican like Dewey himself, though unlike the latter he was on board with the idea of banning the Communist Party outright. Warren had been Governor of California since 1943 and was appointed to SCOTUS in 1953 IOTL.

 

[stevep]

Interesting. A slightly more right wing US but not greatly so as the cultural divide was far, far less than from the 1980's - especially since the Dixiecrats are still very important to the Democrats at this point. I wonder if we're going to see a significant diversion with the Korean war, which I assume will still come along. Hopefully things won't go off the rail with Dewey accepting any of MacArthur's ideas for expanding the war into China or using nukes as things could get very, very nasty quickly.

Good to see an earlier move on desegregation and hopefully it will be carried through as well. Which could well split the Democrats into southern reactionaries and northern and western liberals.

 

[Circle of Willis]

Interesting. A slightly more right wing US but not greatly so as the cultural divide was far, far less than from the 1980's - especially since the Dixiecrats are still very important to the Democrats at this point. I wonder if we're going to see a significant diversion with the Korean war, which I assume will still come along. Hopefully things won't go off the rail with Dewey accepting any of MacArthur's ideas for expanding the war into China or using nukes as things could get very, very nasty quickly.

Good to see an earlier move on desegregation and hopefully it will be carried through as well. Which could well split the Democrats into southern reactionaries and northern and western liberals.

Thanks for the reply! Yes indeed, Dewey is very much a Rockefeller Republican before they were called that (then they were known as the 'Eastern Establishment', although I suppose ITL Dewey's name will replace Rockefeller's as an identifier since he actually won the White House). He's all about moderation and bipartisanship, with a firmly liberal lean.

Conversely the Dixiecrats will probably go up in importance among the Democrats, at least in the short term, since Truman's defeat vindicates their reason for splitting and lets them blame the civil rights plank he & Hubert Humphrey added for the 1948 loss. This is unlikely to mean any good things for Democratic party unity as the '50s roll on and the civil rights debate grows to overshadow all of America's other domestic issues in importance.

As for Korea being the first big diversion (especially since foreign affairs have gone largely the same as OTL up till now), all I can say is...




I'm planning to have the next update out later today, and to update this thread every 2-4 days going forward (a pace of at least two updates a week, basically). It probably won't go up to the '80s - I started with the intention of just practicing my writing and don't really have any plans past 1956, might go as far as 1960 at most. I don't think I'd be able to finish a longer timeline if I can't even clear this short one, after all. But who knows, maybe I'll fall in love with the timeline as I write it (it is after all my first one on the Sietch), or at least revisit and add a Part II to cover the '60s somewhere down the road.

 

[Circle of Willis]

1950

When 1950 dawned, foreign affairs as a whole was quite far down President Dewey’s list of concerns. The president was instead primarily concerned with the 1950 midterms and other domestic matters. He had been content to deny the PRC recognition and the defeated ROC’s seat at the United Nations Security Council; to slow down the withdrawal of US forces from Germany and Japan while reinforcing their growing military presence on Taiwan and Hainan; and to appoint Dwight Eisenhower to lead NATO forces in Europe. Satisfied by the success of Kuomintang forces – newly rearmed with US equipment delivered over the latter half of the past year, and further aided by American advisors & aviators – in crushing PLA attempts to gain a beachhead on Hainan in the spring[1], the president wholly fixated his attention on the domestic sphere for the first half of this year.

And Tom Dewey certainly had much to deal with there. Within his own party, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had burst onto the political scene as America’s newest and hottest anti-Communist firebrand, stealing headlines and people’s imaginations with his loud claims of the State Department being infested with over 200 Communist infiltrators. Secretary of State Dulles vehemently denied the allegations, of course, and insisted that State was perfectly capable of securing itself from Communist infiltration, thank you very much; a bipartisan investigative committee helmed by Maryland Senator Millard E. Tydings supported his assertions and found McCarthy’s accusations to be vague and spurious at best. McCarthy refused to give up, slamming Tydings as an “egg-sucking liberal”, and found a friendly patron in conservative leader Bob Taft, who regarded him as a useful attack dog with which to harass the liberal Dewey’s right flank without directly entangling himself.

Across the aisle, Dewey found himself taking flak from the Democrats on two fronts as well. Firstly, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver had gotten his way and oversaw the formation of a special committee to tackle interstate organized crime early in May. This ‘Kefauver Committee’ called over 600 witnesses to testify in widely-broadcast televised hearings, uncovered the existence of numerous crime syndicates on the local level all over the country, and most damningly proved Attorney General Hoover’s past denials of a national organized crime problem to be hollow.

The climax was provided by Kefauver calling on Dewey himself to testify as a witness. Dewey, who had made his name as a ‘gangbuster’ who fought the Mob in New York with every fiber of his being and successfully prosecuted Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano at the peak of his career, angrily accepted. Showing more emotion than virtually any American had expected out of their normally taciturn president, the president spent his time on the stand vigorously denying any allegation of having ties to the mobsters he battled, pointing to his sterling ‘gangbusting’ record, and agreeing that more action would have to be taken to curb the criminal problem. “You know that I’m an honest man and that we both want the same thing, Senator Kefauver, so I’m not certain as to why you called me to the stand and why your fellow Democrats on this committee seem so invested in tying me to the criminals I’ve spent my whole career fighting.” Dewey had concluded.

Kefauver had allowed the president to leave without further harassment afterward, pleased at both the positive publicity his hearings had garnered for him and the administration’s renewed commitment to cracking down on crime. That the hearings also embarrassed Hoover, with whom Kefauver had had an at-best rocky relationship since 1947, was just the cherry on the sundae. More partisan-minded Democrats were irritated at Dewey’s ability to deflect their attacks and their failure to draw any meaningful connection between him and organized crime, fearing that it would make him and the Republicans look good in the lead-up to the 1950 midterms. Above all, Dewey was still smarting at having been accused of having any ties to the Mafia at all, but also relieved that he had put this entire affair behind him while making himself seem much more earnest and personable to the public, and that he’d gotten public backing to chastise Hoover and compel him into focusing on organized crime rather than political enemies.

Many legislative initiatives to legalize gambling went down in defeat following these hearings, commissions were established at the state and county levels to combat organized crime, and FBI Director Tolson declared that the bureau would redeem itself with a national crusade against crime as soon as humanly possible. Chastened by the public hearings and pressured by Dewey himself, Hoover acceded to the Kefauver Committee’s recommendations that he direct his department’s Criminal Division and the bulk of the FBI’s resources to an aggressive nationwide crackdown on organized crime. Moreover, the IRS was directed to draw up lists of known gamblers and racketeers for special targeting, and Dewey leaned on congressional Republicans to introduce bills providing for the creation of a ‘Federal Crime Commission’: a body that would surveil interstate criminal operations, maintain a database recording their activities, and better coordinate FBI, state- & local-level law enforcement against said interstate crime syndicates.[2]

Much more painful to the president was the passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required Communists to register with the Attorney General’s office and provided the executive with authority to detain those suspected of disloyalty or partaking in subversive activity. Dewey was as ardent an anti-Communist as any other Republican, but he believed this bill went too far and had overstepped the line from ‘upholding public security and countering Communist influence’ to ‘infringing on the rights of the people, even those I disagree with in the strongest terms’. Thus did the president, who two years prior had argued against banning Communism altogether and commented “You can't shoot an idea with a gun” in his debate with Harold Stassen, veto the act the moment it crossed his desk.

What Dewey was not expecting was the force of the conservative backlash to his veto, and the strength of unity of the Taftite Republicans and Democrats. Pat McCarran, the senior Senator from Nevada and eponymous author of the act, found a ready ally in Taft, who saw this as a big opportunity to force the administration onto a less liberal route. Together, the Democrats and conservative Republicans were able to override Dewey’s veto and make the McCarran Internal Security Act a reality. Not only had the president embarrassed himself with his failed veto, but he had left himself open to attacks from the right that he was ‘soft on Communism’, which of course Taft’s new protégé Joe McCarthy (and privately Taft himself) were all too eager to pounce on.[3]

But starting in the middle of 1950, the importance of foreign policy skyrocketed and eclipsed that of domestic affairs. The Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) had made great progress in suppressing Communist guerrilla activity within South Korean borders, forcing North Korean Premier Kim Il-Sung to consider more direct means of reunifying the peninsula under his rule. Although Secretary of State Dulles had named South Korea, Taiwan and Hainan as falling under the American defensive perimeter in a speech earlier that spring[4], Kim nevertheless lobbied a reluctant Stalin for permission to attack South Korea, betting that he’d have Chinese support in the matter and that the Korean People’s Army could steamroll the ROKA quickly enough that no amount of American aid would come quickly enough to make a difference.

Stalin, though still cautious, was sufficiently mollified by these assurances and Mao’s crushing successes on the mainland despite prior US aid to Chiang that he gave North Korea the green light. When the North should attack, they’d also enjoy the air support of Soviet ‘volunteer’ pilots. If Dewey and Dulles had thought the latter’s tough talk could deter the spread of Communism, they were about to be proven to be as wrong on that count as they were on the speed of Mao’s breakthrough in China.

So on June 25, the KPA crossed the border at Ongjin under artillery cover, starting the Korean War. This was but the dawn of Operation Pokpoong, or ‘Storm’ – a blitzkrieg offensive, relying especially on their armored forces, aimed at rapidly overwhelming South Korea. Ongjin and other initial battles were lopsidedly in the North’s favor: the KPA was much better armed than ROKA, which was completely lacking in armor and anti-tank weapons with which to counter the North’s tank advantage. Within three days, even as the US frantically called an emergency session of the UNSC and secured a resolution enabling a ‘police action’ against North Korea (which succeeded because the USSR was still boycotting the UN following the PRC’s failure to replace the ROC in the Security Council), the North Koreans had overrun Seoul and South Korean forces were retreating in complete disarray toward the southeastern corner of their country.

The first US forces to be committed to Korea under the UN flag (drawn entirely from their garrisons in Japan) did so haphazardly and in piecemeal fashion, resulting in their failure to do much more than slow down North Korea’s southward advance, and for a moment it seemed as if Kim Il-Sung’s optimistic predictions of victory (no matter what the US did) would be proven correct. Clearly President Dewey and General Douglas MacArthur were reactively scrambling to respond to the North’s advance rather than acting based on detailed, pre-prepared strategies which, frankly, they did not have time to devise due to the rapidity with which South Korea had collapsed.

The tide only began to turn around the southeastern port city of Busan, where the Allies had established a strong defensive perimeter and fought an ultimately successful defensive action against the KPA’s increasingly frantic assaults from August into September. The combination of unmatched American air and naval support for their troops on the ground, the arrival of more & more reinforcements from the US and other Allied nations, and the KPA’s own overstretched logistics and mounting exhaustion added up to the first major North Korean defeat in the war.

But MacArthur was only getting started. While the North Koreans were still throwing themselves at UN defenses around Busan, the US-UN supreme commander had landed 75,000 troops around Inchon – well behind the front line – starting on September 15, having had the US Navy bombard North Korean shore defenses and clear the shores of their mines over the previous days. The North Koreans were caught completely flatfooted: in addition to concentrating most of their (quickly faltering) strength against Busan, they had been misled by American intelligence into thinking any hypothetical landing would be done at Kunsan far to the south. The next few weeks saw a complete reversal of the war’s tide, with the UN and South Koreans evicting the North Koreans from South Korea altogether and launching their own invasion of the now-crippled North by the end of the month.

At first, it seemed that it was truly the Free World’s turn to stomp one half of Korea into the ground. UN forces crossed the 38th parallel on October 7 and brushed aside remaining North Korean resistance over the next ten days until they reached Pyongyang, the Northern capital, which the KPA was only able to defend for all of two days before it, too, fell – one day less than the ROKA had managed in Seoul back in the summer. But China and the Soviet Union grew increasingly alarmed as the UN’s seemingly effortless advances took the forces of capitalism ever closer to the Yalu River, and as all calls for the UN to stop and fall back to the 38th parallel were ignored, the former decided late October would be time to act. The PLA amassed hundreds of thousands of troops (officially just ‘volunteers’) on their side of the Yalu throughout the month and struck on October 25, beginning their intervention by ambushing and virtually annihilating the ROKA’s II Corps just outside the border town of Onjong.

The Chinese followed up with another victory, this time over mostly American troops, at Unsan almost immediately afterward. MacArthur and his command staff were shocked: just days before the Chinese entry into the war, Dugout Doug had been confidently telling President Dewey that he had absolutely nothing to fear from China and that the Chinese would have to be suicidal to try anything, given America’s overwhelming superiority in firepower and airpower in Korea. Now UN forces were hastily withdrawing to the Chongchon River, a ways south of their previous positions on or near the banks of the Yalu, and yet the Chinese kept coming, slowing or stopping only to bring up more supplies and reinforcements. Their preferred tactic was to advance after dark, get as close as possible to the UN positions and only then attack, counting on the shock value and close range of these engagements to minimize the viability of the Americans’ air- and artillery-based firepower. By early November, the Chinese were so confident of their ability to throw the capitalist dogs off the Asian mainland altogether that Mao had planned another invasion of Hainan before the year’s end.

Dewey – never the strongest president on foreign policy after all – was terrified that Korea would fall to Communism on his watch: unlike China, this was not something he could blame on the Democrats. Worse still, his failed veto of the McCarran Internal Security Act had allowed McCarthy and friends to harry him on the home front, to the point that they were practically insinuating he himself was being steered by Communist-friendly elements and barely restraining themselves from just directly calling him a Communist in his own right. And the midterms were imminent, with twenty-three Democratic Senate seats and thirteen Republican ones up for election!

Thus, when MacArthur called him asking for a blank cheque to implement what he guaranteed would be a war-winning strategy, Dewey didn’t even bother asking him what this strategy entailed before agreeing; his statement concluded with “General, I trust you have and will use all appropriate measures to interdict this unlawful Red Chinese invasion and ensure the whole of Korea can enjoy freedom for Christmas this year.” He had still (in hindsight, probably foolishly) put almost as much faith in MacArthur as MacArthur had in himself, and needed the general to score a victorious miracle to salvage his political fortunes. That a pair of Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate him at the Blair House on the same day, failing only thanks to the heroics of the Secret Service and policeman Leslie Coffelt, further distracted Dewey from the Korean War.[5]

So imagine the president’s surprise when, a few days later, he woke up, freshened up, helped himself to breakfast, and saw the headline BOMBER LEMAY DROPS A-BOMB ON PYONGYANG, PEKING on his daily newspaper.[6]

According to his family the president nearly had a heart attack in his chair, and his stress was hardly alleviated over the next few hours as he made frantic calls to United Nations Command and his other allies to figure out what had happened before Stalin could phone him. Finally a picture of the situation formed before him: MacArthur had taken his blank cheque and used it to nuke not just a dozen cities and sites across North Korea, but also Harbin, Shenyang and seven other locations in Manchuria, as well as Beijing itself. Mao was already quite dead and, if not stopped, MacArthur and Air Force General Curtis LeMay were next planning to strike the half of Manchuria that hadn’t been glassed yet: after that, they were even considering a preemptive nuclear bombing of Vladivostok.

Dewey’s first act was to ring up UNC HQ and order MacArthur and LeMay to stop in their tracks, that no further nuclear strikes were to be carried out without his express authorization, and that he was definitely not going to provide said authorization anytime soon. He had half a mind to fire MacArthur on the spot when the latter suggested ‘seizing the moment’ and having Chiang go on the offensive to reclaim the mainland, but in an exercise of supreme self-restraint, simply told the general that that would not be happening. The next was to contact the Kremlin, and settle in for the longest phone call of his life.

Tom Dewey must have had one hell of a time profusely apologizing to and convincing Stalin that he did not, in fact, directly authorize the twenty-two nuclear strikes MacArthur and company had carried out overnight, and that MacArthur had acted on his own initiative. He would have had an even harder time persuading the notoriously paranoid General-Secretary that there was no plan to launch a preemptive strike, either on Vladivostok or anywhere in Europe, as a prelude to a general Western offensive against the USSR, so soon after the conclusion of the Berlin Blockade. In the end, a thoroughly unamused Uncle Joe gave the president a blunt ultimatum; retreat to the 38th parallel, abandon Hainan to the PLA, and all would be well. Refuse, and the Soviets would directly enter the war themselves.

At that moment, Dewey took a deep breath and opted to hold firm. He knew it could come to this. The man who stared down many a mobster as New York’s District Attorney now stared down the kingpin of global Communism and dared to call his bluff. The loss of life beneath so many unauthorized mushroom clouds was more than a little unfortunate, he argued, but what was done was done and he wouldn’t allow Stalin to use any tragedy as an excuse to further advance the Communist cause. Instead, the leader of the Free World had a counteroffer: Korea would be reunified under the South’s flag, because there was no saving the North now – Kim Il-Sung was as dead as Mao was. But MacArthur would be firmly reined in, US forces would not cross the Yalu, and mainland China would be left under the red umbrella. There was no point to making threats, because he knew damn well the Soviets had only just tested their first nuke the year before and there was no way they could’ve even come close to parity with the United States in the interim, but if Stalin really wanted to play that game, his retaliation (done knowingly this time) would make MacArthur look like Jesus Christ.

Remarkably, Stalin accepted. In hindsight it was clear as to why: the independent-minded Mao was a persistent thorn in Stalin’s side, and his removal from a still-Red China meant a Red China which would be much more dependent on, and servile toward, the Soviet Union. A war-torn, half-irradiated Korea wasn’t much of a prize by comparison; all the better that the US should have to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the peninsula. And although Dewey didn’t know it, he was right on the money when it came to the state of the Soviet nuclear arsenal as of 1950, and if anything probably thought the Soviets had twice or more the A-Bombs they actually had; a grand total of five, compared to still nearly 300 for the US. That Communist nations would become even more reliant on the Soviet nuclear umbrella in the fallout of what just happened to Korea, and thus generally less likely to question the Kremlin on any subject, was the icing on the (yellow)cake for him. Dewey himself couldn’t care less about why Stalin agreed to his terms when he leaned back and breathed a sigh of relief, he was just happy to have staved off the Third World War and even still won in Korea.

UN forces stormed back up the peninsula, pushing past the devastated and leaderless remnants of the KPA and any Chinese elements which hadn’t already gotten the memo to withdraw from provisional Premier Lin Biao (who, unlike the CCP leadership cadres who’d been in Beijing when LeMay dropped instant sunshine on it, was at the time recuperating in a hospital bed in the Soviet Union). By November 6, the papers back home were trumpeting an imminent victory for South Korea, America and liberty to a jubilant public even as Dewey privately stewed in fear and remorse at what he had allowed. That the Congressional elections the very next day produced a thin 49-47 Republican majority in the Senate, with Prescott Bush narrowly defeating William Benton for Connecticut’s Senate seat and Joseph Hanley doing the same in New York, and McCarthy could never again so much as imply a question about his patriotism was of cold comfort to the president who knew his carelessness had gotten 22 cities nuked and nearly started WW3. Who would dare call Tom Dewey soft on Communism now? Who indeed, Dewey sometimes questioned amid bitter laughter.[7]

Historiography of Dewey’s final decisions in Korea remained divided long after the man’s presidency had ended and he himself was buried. Partisan supporters of the president argue that he had made the most out of an unexpected situation which could have gone (even more) sideways extremely easily, turning a humanitarian disaster and an embarrassing failure of his chain of command into a resounding geopolitical victory that saved Korea from going red, punished Red China and put the Communist bloc on notice. Some scholars and pundits even go so far as to suggest he had actually planned all of it with MacArthur, essentially besting Stalin in a game of 80-dimensional atomic backgammon – not bad for a state governor with no foreign policy experience prior to being elected to the highest office in the land.

Obviously, more progressive-minded detractors do not agree with either assessment. They rail against Dewey’s carelessness and recklessness, arguing that war was only averted thanks to Stalin’s magnanimity and that Dewey (truly a man with the devil's luck) took credit for both that and MacArthur's recklessness to make himself look good in the aftermath. And fans of future presidential candidate MacArthur would argue that the president didn’t go far enough, that he chickened out when he had an opportunity to go all the way and destroy both the Soviet Union and China before the former built enough nuclear weapons to ensure any conflict between itself and the West would be one of mutual annihilation, dooming hundreds of millions and eventually billions to continued slavery under the Red yoke out of fear and/or to assuage his own conscience. Dewey himself preferred to talk as little as possible about Korea after Christmas 1950, privately considering it both the highest and lowest point of his presidency – and certainly the one he could let everyone else talk about, for a change.

====================================================================================

[1] Historically, the Nationalists were confident of victory on Hainan, but underestimated their adversaries and failed to stop the Communists from securing & expanding beachheads.

[2] Other than Dewey’s involvement and Hoover being AG instead of FBI director, these hearings proceeded more or less as they had IOTL. The main difference lies in more of the Kefauver Commission’s findings and recommendations being acted upon by the Dewey administration.

[3] This is a greater departure from OTL. Obviously, Truman did not veto the McCarran Internal Security Act IRL. For what it’s worth, and despite his failure ITL, Dewey’s instincts on the matter were firmly small-l liberal, both in our timeline and here.

[4] Slight difference from OTL, where Truman’s SoS Acheson left SK out of the American defensive perimeter in his comments.

[5] This also happened to Truman IOTL.

[6] Finally, a huge divergence from OTL’s events abroad. Obviously, the Korean War did not go nuclear IRL, and MacArthur was relieved of command by President Truman for insisting on dropping nukes on NK and China.

[7] The opposite of OTL’s 1950 Senate results where both Bush and Hanley were beaten, Bush especially narrowly.

 

[Buba]

widely-broadcast televised hearings

Not too early for such TV coverage?

Unrest in East-Central Europe upon news of use of nukes in the Far East? There were quite a few locals hoping for WWIII and liberation from Soviet (direct or indirect) rule, so I'd expect some riots.

Impact on Vietnam? China messed up by nukes and/or with power strugle at the top can meddle less? A President wishing to prove his anti-Communist credentials supports French more?

 

[Circle of Willis]

Not too early for such TV coverage?

Unrest in East-Central Europe upon news of use of nukes in the Far East? There were quite a few locals hoping for WWIII and liberation from Soviet (direct or indirect) rule, so I'd expect some riots.

Impact on Vietnam? China messed up by nukes and/or with power strugle at the top can meddle less? A President wishing to prove his anti-Communist credentials supports French more?

That's what I thought too, but to my own surprise it turned out that the Kefauver Committee hearings were watched by up to 30 million Americans by the time they finished running their course in 1951. Makes sense I suppose, despite TV still being a new invention, this would have been a lot of Americans' first chance to see notorious criminal figures like Frank Costello in person.

Re: Eastern and SE Europe, I think the Soviets have mostly squished rebellions in their own territories (the Baltic Forest Brothers, Ukrainian Insurgent Army, etc.) by 1950 and the Polish anti-Communist resistance was largely suppressed after 1946 IIRC, but there should still be reasonably active anti-Communist partisans still operating in Romania and Bulgaria, at least. They'll be making quite the mistake if they think they can count on aggressive American support after Korea however, as Dewey thinks he's proven himself much tougher on Communism than he ever had to be and will almost certainly shy away from further 'provoking' Stalin for a while to - in his mind - cool the global temperature, so to speak.

Likewise with Vietnam, China is less able to aid the Vietminh due to Mao and many other important CCP figures having just been vaporized, but the Soviets will probably step in to compensate and try to get another Asian 'win' after the PRC's failure to snuff out the ROC remnants on Hainan and Taiwan. And Dewey's accidental atomic victory in Korea has paradoxically made him more gun-shy, as I hope I implied clearly enough toward the end there - it'll take some work to snap him out of his funk, and even if he does become inclined to interfere on the French side, he certainly won't sign off on more usage of nukes (as was considered for Operation Vulture, an unused US plan to save the French position at Dien Bien Phu IRL).

That said, Vietnam's not the only place where the West can fight back against Communism in Asia, regardless of what Dewey thinks. There's also the couple thousand Nationalist soldiers holed up around Kengtung in Burma, and the early 1950s was before they degenerated into an oversized drug cartel - at this time they still had actual plans to strike back into China proper, and the ITL PRC is in a much more turbulent spot than OTL...

 

[Buba]

The post-war guerillas in Central Europe had been squashed by 1950, true, but look at 1956 events.

Thinking more about it - the PRC is gutted, losing most (I imagine some to be out of town or in bunkers) of its political and military leadership as well as part (most?) of its then industrial base.

I looked at the link:
An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live proceedings in March 1951.
Now, talk about ambiguous language ...
Still, an impressive figure even if means 30M in total over that month

 

[stevep]

Hell, I never expected that! Dewey made a serious mistake there but fortunately it worked out OK for him and for the west. Would MacArthur have had access to that many nukes in such a short period of time without someone questioning this and news getting back to the White House? IIRC OTL MacArthur was only talking about nukes in N Korea and conventional bombing of China, I believe logistics routes into Korea so this is a big escalation.

However assuming China was nuked, possibly largely military targets in Manchuria and a sample strike on Beijing/Peking which fortunately takes out Mao then that would seriously throw both China and the wider communist bloc into turmoil. Nukes and delivery systems are going to be an even higher priority for Stalin and the Soviets. He might also seek to avoid helping the Chinese with their own nuclear programme as their likely to be very, very angry about this and would consider them too much of a loose canon if they get nukes.

Would agree that there wouldn't be support for help for rebels in the wider Soviet bloc, especially since it would breach the agreement with Stalin and threaten wider war. Not sure how happy or not the European powers would be with this and India and the rest of the Non-Aligned bloc are going to be very upset and probably more pro-Soviet as a result. If it ever gets out that Dewey gave MacArthur such a blank check without asking what he intended he's also going to look very foolish - which given his rapid stopping of any further nuclear attacks seems very likely actually. Could well see a stronger Anti-Nuclear movement in the west, as well as also a stronger desire by Britain to develop its own capacity and France to start as well. [One thing for Britain is a much shorter and less costly Korean war is that the reduced expenditure is going to ease the pressure on the British economy. It was just starting to pull back from the serious economic pressures post-war when the new burden basically stamped out any recovery. Here things are going to be better and coupled with a stronger anti-nuclear movement, especially if Churchill is hawkish in support of US actions it might even mean that Labour wins the 1951 election.]

In the US its also going to have some impacts. Both those opposed to nuclear use and the hard line hawks are going to be unhappy for differing reasons. Although the size of the death toll, especially in China, could undermine the latter in public opinion.

In the short term, until the Soviets have an adequate deterrent capacity Stalin is likely to rely on support of independence movements to put pressure on the west so would expect at least as much anti-colonial conflicts as OTL. Its something that is small enough not to provoke a major crisis, let alone a nuclear attack - at least unless a total nutter like MacArthur gets into power and I bloody hope we avoid that! Also he can claim the moral high ground, especially since a lot of his own atrocities will be deniable.

The nukes of the time are fairly small so the devastation in China won't be too massive compared to the size of the country as a whole while the death of Mao could well help its development depending on the longer term leadership of the country.

Anyway a very interesting chapter. Thanks.

 

[Circle of Willis]

The post-war guerillas in Central Europe had been squashed by 1950, true, but look at 1956 events.

Thinking more about it - the PRC is gutted, losing most (I imagine some to be out of town or in bunkers) of its political and military leadership as well as part (most?) of its then industrial base.

I looked at the link:
An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live proceedings in March 1951.
Now, talk about ambiguous language ...
Still, an impressive figure even if means 30M in total over that month

True. Though in general, the Eastern European dissidents have the added problem of their own local Communist leaders not only being both able & willing to crush them with extreme force, but generally enjoying much better relationships with Stalin (on account of being Stalinist puppets themselves) than Mao did and thus being more likely to receive lots of Soviet help if they need it. They'd still definitely need American aid to succeed, and unfortunately that's highly unlikely to be forthcoming anytime soon. Then again, a situation like that unfolding (and him knowing his inaction, this time done consciously rather than accidentally, has again screwed tons of people) might just be what Dewey needs to snap out of his current state and start seriously pushing back against the Soviets again; at the very least it'd be a lesson that the world will not stop turning for Tom Dewey's personal problems.

Well, besides the one that hit Beijing, all of the nukes MacArthur deployed against China proper were aimed at targets in Manchuria, and he would've been using Mark 4 atomic bombs (maximum yield of 31 kt, 10 kt stronger than Fat Man) - devastating, of course, but not 'literally turn the entire target city into uninhabitable glass' like later thermonuclear weapons. To my understanding, the Soviets had already snatched away a good deal of Manchuria's preexisting industry in & after the last days of WW2, and what was left was further devastated by the fighting between the CCP and KMT in the postwar phases of the Chinese Civil War. I think it'd be fair to say that the strikes did damage China's industrial base even further, but there's so little of that left anyway (specifically in Manchuria) that, coupled with the imminent Soviet reconstruction aid, this will 'only' set their rebuilding back by several years or a decade rather than making it impossible to recover altogether.

Honestly, this has just left me surprised that they didn't do televised presidential debates before 1960. An audience of 30 million, no matter whether it was built up over all the hearings or if they all watched in one sitting, completely blew away all my expectations - before I started researching for this timeline, I thought a televised anything in the USA of the early 1950s would attract like a sixth of that audience at most.

Hell, I never expected that! Dewey made a serious mistake there but fortunately it worked out OK for him and for the west. Would MacArthur have had access to that many nukes in such a short period of time without someone questioning this and news getting back to the White House? IIRC OTL MacArthur was only talking about nukes in N Korea and conventional bombing of China, I believe logistics routes into Korea so this is a big escalation.

However assuming China was nuked, possibly largely military targets in Manchuria and a sample strike on Beijing/Peking which fortunately takes out Mao then that would seriously throw both China and the wider communist bloc into turmoil. Nukes and delivery systems are going to be an even higher priority for Stalin and the Soviets. He might also seek to avoid helping the Chinese with their own nuclear programme as their likely to be very, very angry about this and would consider them too much of a loose canon if they get nukes.

Would agree that there wouldn't be support for help for rebels in the wider Soviet bloc, especially since it would breach the agreement with Stalin and threaten wider war. Not sure how happy or not the European powers would be with this and India and the rest of the Non-Aligned bloc are going to be very upset and probably more pro-Soviet as a result. If it ever gets out that Dewey gave MacArthur such a blank check without asking what he intended he's also going to look very foolish - which given his rapid stopping of any further nuclear attacks seems very likely actually. Could well see a stronger Anti-Nuclear movement in the west, as well as also a stronger desire by Britain to develop its own capacity and France to start as well. [One thing for Britain is a much shorter and less costly Korean war is that the reduced expenditure is going to ease the pressure on the British economy. It was just starting to pull back from the serious economic pressures post-war when the new burden basically stamped out any recovery. Here things are going to be better and coupled with a stronger anti-nuclear movement, especially if Churchill is hawkish in support of US actions it might even mean that Labour wins the 1951 election.]

In the US its also going to have some impacts. Both those opposed to nuclear use and the hard line hawks are going to be unhappy for differing reasons. Although the size of the death toll, especially in China, could undermine the latter in public opinion.

In the short term, until the Soviets have an adequate deterrent capacity Stalin is likely to rely on support of independence movements to put pressure on the west so would expect at least as much anti-colonial conflicts as OTL. Its something that is small enough not to provoke a major crisis, let alone a nuclear attack - at least unless a total nutter like MacArthur gets into power and I bloody hope we avoid that! Also he can claim the moral high ground, especially since a lot of his own atrocities will be deniable.

The nukes of the time are fairly small so the devastation in China won't be too massive compared to the size of the country as a whole while the death of Mao could well help its development depending on the longer term leadership of the country.

Anyway a very interesting chapter. Thanks.

You're very welcome! I've heard a lot of conflicting stories about what MacArthur was proposing - a dozen to 20 nukes in NK and conventional strikes on China, 30-50 nukes for both NK and China, 30-80 nukes followed by a ground invasion of China to restore Chiang (which itself might well involve even more nukes to crack any future determined PLA resistance), all of the above but with extra nukes for Vladivostok to ensure the Soviets couldn't respond, etc. In the end, I rolled with the option I thought would best advance the story: hence, Big Mac gets some nukes to play with and to do more damage than just mauling NK alone, but far from the higher-ball estimates of what he was asking for, and doesn't quite get to put the wackier parts of his purported plans in motion.

Yeah, I think we can safely take a Sino-American detente off the table for the foreseeable future ITL, maybe ever. Mao, ironically, would probably enjoy a better in-universe rap as well since he got killed long before he could kick off the Great Leap Forward & Cultural Revolution. Everything you said about the anti-nuclear/anti-war movement being stronger, other countries being freaked out and the Eastern Bloc being even more paranoid & eager to develop nuclear tech (while the nuclear taboo has also been broken before it was firmly set) is likely to certain. Suffice to say that MacArthur's actions, while giving the US a short-term advantage, is likely to actually hurt American interests in the long run. Not so much that it'll result in a Soviet-wank or US-screw, since I don't intend this timeline to be either...but it's definitely not the crushing triumph he thought it'd be then and forever.

Re: Britain, my impression was that Labour had actually achieved a record amount of the popular vote (and it does seem tough to further increase that since nobody beat their record until John Major in 1992), but their voters were too concentrated in safe seats rather than the swing ones they needed to win, resulting in the Tory victory. That said, I've barely begun writing the 1951 entry, so I'd love to learn anything I can about both how a victorious Churchill might react to a US that's shown an itchier nuclear trigger finger and how a hypothetical continued Attlee ministry would navigate the '50s - not just dealing with the US and continuing their internal reforms, but also how they'd handle decolonization in particular.

I tried to imply the 'fallout' of Dewey's decision (or rather lack of one until it was too late to stop Mac) at the end there, if you'll pardon the pun. But yes, domestically Dewey himself has quite the tightrope to walk between the people who want his head for using nukes so soon after Hiroshima & Nagasaki on one hand, and those who will shut up about him being a commie plant but otherwise still want his head for not going all the way. The nukes might provide the former with fodder, but the Soviet bloc of the '50s will provide the latter with examples to suggest 'we could've avoided this if only President Dewey had Big Mac's big brass ones' too, sadly for the president.

Agreed on colonial conflicts becoming the new main theater for confrontation between the East & West. The Soviets, as you say, will want to avoid any further open hostilities with the West until and unless they achieve a strong enough deterrent, if not nuclear parity. And Dewey & most of his administration will be very happy if they can find someplace to combat the Soviets with little to no risk of direct involvement or the clash going nuclear. Lots of places and events to write about there over the next few years - Africa, Iran and the Middle East in general, Southeast Asia.

Yes indeed, as I mentioned in the other half of my reply, the US would have been using Mark 4 A-bombs against China, and while 9 of those would hurt like hell, they aren't actually much stronger than the nukes used on Hiroshima & Nagasaki (and certainly a lot weaker than the future H-bombs). While Red China will have been greatly weakened and made dependent on the USSR for much longer than OTL, they're not totally finished, and still have a chance to rebuild to the point where they can give Dewey's more hawkish detractors reason to say 'damn, we really should've finished the job back when we could still win a nuclear war'...

 

[stevep]

I must admit I don't know a lot about the early 50's - a bit before even my time . However the much shorter Korean war is going to boost the economy position as after 5 years of slow rebuilding and also heavy emphasis on exports to pay off debts and imports by some accounts things were looking up when the conflict meant another heavy military and fiscal burden. As you say Labour got more votes than the Tories and more than anyone for another few decades so it might end up going the other way. By this time according to some reports Churchill was at least borderline senile and definitely so by the time he was replaced by Eden.

In terms of de-colonization I would expect that it would occur faster under a Labour government, although they would seek to secure British interests, probably more commercial and economic ones than directly military than the Tories. The big issue is likely to be those parts of Africa that have a small but substantial white minority population which would be politically awkward as right wing elements are going to object strongly to them being 'sacrificed' to majority rule but those states didn't become independent until the early 1960's and Rhodesia as it was then went its own way so that would be a way down the line.

You might see an earlier and deeper Malayan crisis as the bulk of the communist elements there were from the Chinese minority, which along with decent organisation of the opposition to it were the main reasons for its defeat. Depends on how assorted Chinese groups in the region react to the large death toll in China from the US attack. This could also have implications in Indonesia as well which could go either way, swinging more towards Moscow and supporting the small but economically powerful Chinese minority or deciding that supporting the west as the stronger ally which could mean the Chinese seen some suppression there and breaking of their economic power. [Thinking since Britain is seen as the closest ally to the US it could get tarnished with some of the political fall-out in some areas. Hopefully this won't be a major factor but could also make it awkward with Hong Kong.]

Of course the big loser for a short Korean war is possibly Japan as the need for a local source for a lot of materials, as well as r&r for a lot of troops gave its post-war recovery a big boost. Probably not going to stop the Japanese economic miracle but could weaken and delay it a bit. On the other hand there's going to be a lot of US investment in repairing Korea, especially the north. This could drain funds away from other areas, including Japan or could give Japan and other regional sources for supplies and parts a boost still.

Anyway rabbiting on a bit but hope the above is useful.

Steve

 

[Circle of Willis]

1951

The irradiated ashes had scarcely begun to cool over Manchuria and North Korea when even more Communist-related problems surfaced to menace President Dewey. At home, although the atomic strikes against China and North Korea had effectively silenced all criticism of him supposedly being soft on Marxism, it had also done little to arrest ‘Tail-Gunner’ Joe McCarthy’s meteoric rise to national prominence. He had to switch targets, to be sure, but he still had plenty of crypto-Communists to fearmonger about beneath the president. In this he found not just an old ally in Bob Taft and other conservative Republicans, but increasingly Douglas MacArthur, who was trying to subtly (well, as subtly as MacArthur could, anyway) signal his willingness to take up the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1952 and believed the more hard-line anti-Communist types to be his natural allies in that endeavor.

McCarthy was further emboldened by the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage and the issuance of the death sentence to the couple, while Dewey categorically refused to even consider pardoning them or commuting their punishment. While the president did this because he genuinely believed the Rosenbergs were guilty and that their crimes merited nothing less than death, not because he was on board with McCarthyism, it didn’t stop McCarthy himself from proclaiming that once more he and the president were on the same side, much to Dewey’s own annoyance.[1]

Less controversially, the Twenty-Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was formally ratified early this year. This amendment imposed term limits on the presidency, formalizing the two-term tradition set by George Washington and recently broken by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Though it did not apply to Dewey himself, on account of its grandfather clause, the president nevertheless declared that he would not seek a third term; it would be enormously hypocritical of him to do so, he knew, for he’d been one of the amendment’s champions since the 1944 election. “Ours is not an imperial nation – not abroad and certainly not at home – and this amendment will go a long way to ensuring this remains true well into our future.” Dewey had publicly concluded.

Finally, in an unambiguous triumph for the president, New York State Industrial Commissioner Edward Corsi and his board of inquiry published a report on Mafia influence in the International Longshoremen’s Association, one of the largest and most influential unions in New York – and a longtime enemy of Dewey’s from his gubernatorial days. The report was scathing and encouraged Governor Frank C. Moore, Dewey’s handpicked successor[2], to open a broader investigation into the ILA’s corruption. That investigation in turn found that yes, the ILA and its lifetime president Joe Ryan did indeed have not-insubstantial ties to mobsters, resulting in a chorus of public condemnation and the empowerment of their chief rival the International Brotherhood of Longshoremen (which conveniently was more friendly to the interests of the NY Republican machine). In time, Moore would set up the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor to combat labor racketeering and the ILA in particular, with Dewey’s blessing.

Overseas, the consequences of the wintertime atomic bombings began to manifest in both America’s allies and enemies, and Dewey’s commitment to his secret agreement with Stalin would soon be tested. In France, the stridently anti-American Communists lost over two dozen seats in the June legislative election, but narrowly remained the largest party in the National Assembly. Consequently the less extreme socialists of the SFIO, the Christian democratic MRP, centrist CNIP and center-left Radicals all banded together into the ‘Third Force’, a highly unstable governing coalition-of-the-center that contended with both the Communists and the growing Gaullist ‘Rally of the French People’[3]. And in Britain, unease at the way in which the Korean War was concluded and the continuation of the post-war economic recovery without any undue stress from a prolonged war paradoxically combined to produce a second victory for the Labour Party: despite modest Tory gains they retained a slim majority of seats in Parliament, dashing the aged Winston Churchill’s hopes of returning to 10 Downing Street[4]. Moreover the European Coal and Steel Community came into being on April 18, reducing Western Europe’s dependence on Marshall Plan aid and laying the foundations of a larger free trade zone incorporating the continental NATO partners.

While Western Europe answered the question of whether or not to change their governments at the ballot, however, in the East this was obviously not possible in the Stalinist satellite states of the Warsaw Pact. In Romania and Bulgaria, where anti-Communist partisan activity was at its strongest in the Eastern bloc following the crushing of similar partisans in the USSR itself and Poland, anti-Communist fighting organizations dared move into the open and seize small towns in the Carpathian foothills and on the Greek border, respectively. At the same time, continued repression and rationing in the cities generated a backlash that anti-Communist forces took advantage of, sparking off riots in Bucharest, Sofia and other large cities and towns around both Balkan countries.

However, those who cried out "Vin Americanii!" – the Americans are coming! – in expectation that the US which had demonstrated its power in Korea would step in on their behalf, soon found themselves bitterly disappointed yet again. Dewey, still reluctant to further antagonize the Soviets and especially to do so in Europe, did not lift a finger to aid the counterrevolutionary forces, though General MacArthur did become the loudest public mouthpiece of more hawkish factions in American politics who advocated intervention here, and in the end the Communist militaries and security services (directly backed by the Soviets) crushed those rebels which didn’t wisely retreat back underground[5].

Outside of Europe, two concerning developments tied to the nationalization of foreign assets arose. Firstly Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was inaugurated as president of Guatemala, having won that country’s second free election since the fall of dictator Jorge Ubico late last year. Arbenz promised first and foremost to modernize and reform the country, turning what he described as a ‘predominantly feudal economy’ into a modern capitalist one; to include the indios, namely the native Maya, in the prosperous future he envisioned for the country; and to reduce Guatemala’s dependency on foreign companies. This caused him to be immediately perceived as a threat by the United Fruit Company, a major American corporation which also happened to be Guatemala’s largest landowner and employer – and to which the Dulles brothers, both major figures in the Dewey administration, had cultivated close ties. As of 1951 however, Dewey was unconvinced by the Dulleses’ claims of a pressing need to undermine Arbenz and did nothing against the latter, who admittedly had also had too little time to engage in any behavior that would concern the White House.

Secondly Mohammed Mosaddegh, a staunch nationalist supported by the Iranian cities, was appointed Prime Minister of Iran in April. A month later he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and confiscated its physical assets in his country, which unsurprisingly enraged Britain – to whom the AIOC was their largest overseas asset. Denouncing the act as nothing more than large-scale theft, the British spent the summer & fall blockading Abadan, sanctioning Iran, withdrawing their workers and freezing Iranian assets in British banks. The British ambassador’s arguments that this nationalization represented a victory for Russia and set a precedent endangering not just British, but Western international investments in general found purchase with the State Department, and consequently the White House. Themselves leery of nationalization and eager to buy favor with the Attlee ministry, the Dewey administration backed the British condemnation of Mosaddegh’s actions and refused to send American technicians and laborers to replace the ones Britain had withdrawn from Iran.

Also of concern to the Anglo-American allies was the assassination of Jordan’s king, Abdullah I, by a Palestinian angered at his willingness to reconcile with Israel. Of his two sons the eldest, Prince Talal, was more popular with the masses and had been publicly proclaimed to be the heir-apparent after WWII, but also known for his erratic behavior and had made no secret of his strongly anti-British sentiments (which were a big part as to why he was popular in the first place). The younger, Prince Nayef, did not enjoy such domestic popularity but was known to be reliably pro-British. The British government itself was divided on who to support in the matter of succession: Talal in order to avoid antagonizing the Jordanian populace and potentially strengthening Arab nationalism in the kingdom, or Nayef to ensure they’d never have to worry about a Jordanian king challenging Western influence. In the end, the latter faction won out, and Nayef seized the crown with the support of General John Bagot Glubb and the Arab Legion while Talal was receiving medical treatment abroad[6].

Lastly, the aftershock of the nuclear resolution to the Korean War was felt hardest in East and Southeast Asia. As America redirected economic aid away from Japan to the thoroughly devastated Korean peninsula, unrest shook the Allied occupation authority’s hold on the island nation, driven both by the sudden slowdown of the Japanese economic recovery and outrage at the usage of yet more nuclear bombs by the Americans (despite said occupation authority’s best efforts to censor the news for as long as they could). In Malaya, British High Commissioner Henry Gurney was assassinated by Communist insurgents of the Malayan National Liberation Army, whose appeal (previously largely limited to the Chinese minority) grew across racial lines in the wake of the bombings and consequently increased negative perception of anything that smacked ‘Western imperialism’.

And in China, the Soviets moved quickly to shore up Lin Biao’s entrenchment as Chairman of the Communist Party, ensuring a clampdown on all groups which could be even remotely perceived as being ‘revisionist’ and anti-Stalinist – both those inclined to reform and extreme hard-liners such as Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, who had been howling for an immediate attack on Macau and Hong Kong to avenge the death of their great Chairman. These figures quickly learned to fall silent and bow their heads in the presence of Lin and his Soviet advisers, or to lose those heads altogether.

But try as they might, the Soviets could not spread Lin’s authority over all of China in an instant with a snap of their fingers. In the more remote frontier provinces, far from the devastated Beijing, indecision and factionalism grasped the local Communists while Lin consolidated his power in the urban centers. Distant cousins Ma Hushan, Ma Yuanxiang and Ma Liang – all Muslim Hui generals loyal to the KMT, and all members of the Ma clan with blood ties to the exiled Governor of Qinghai Ma Bufang – had been leading an insurgency among the Muslims of the northwest since 1949, but the death of Mao and resulting chaos in China allowed them to make progress they couldn’t have dreamed about just a year ago and occupy large stretches of Qinghai, Gansu and even a sliver of Ningxia, constantly beating back the demoralized Communist garrisons and rousing more and more Hui support for their armies with each victory. Their Kazakh and Uighur allies, led by Ospan Batyr and Yulbars Khan respectively, achieved similar success in Xinjiang; another far cry from where they’d been, with ragged bands of near-mutinous and chronically undersupplied troops, the past summer.

Of course, the successes of the Kuomintang remnants in northwest China soon ran into its most obvious limit – the Soviet Union – while being further hampered by their remoteness from the coast, making it virtually impossible for the West to lend them a hand. As the PLA was still in disordered flux, it fell to the Soviet Army and the Mongolian People’s Republic to crush this renewed rebellion, which they did in the late summer and autumn of 1951 at the formal invitation of Lin Biao’s government. No nukes were needed here, for the conventional power of the USSR proved well in excess of what was needed to crush these three Mas and their non-Han allies on the battlefield: Ma Yuanxiang, the most senior of the trio, was captured and executed in October, while his cousins retreated underground. Both Batyr and Yulbars would also share Yuxiang’s fate by the year’s end.

Perhaps more dangerously for the PRC than the Muslim rebels had ever been, the Soviets did not leave northwest China after the suppression of the rebellion, claiming that they were still needed to eliminate counterrevolutionary elements which the Chinese military couldn’t handle in their current state. While true at the time, in hindsight Stalin was simply setting up the board for the de-facto incorporation of these areas into the Soviet Union; particularly Xinjiang, but permanent Soviet garrisons and local parallel administrations would endure for a very long couple decades indeed in the rest of Northwest China, despite those provinces nominally remaining part of the PRC.

The KMT-loyal counterrevolutionaries experienced far greater success in the jungles and mountains of Southwest China. General Li Mi led the ‘Yunnan Anti-Communist National Salvation Army’, as the KMT remnants in the southwest were known, from the Burmese village of Mong Hsat. They had retreated over the border into the unstable new country after the Kuomintang defeat in the mainland, and unlike the isolated diehards of the Northwest, these ones enjoyed the benefit of an American supply line running from Taiwan through Thailand: once Li’s men finished repairing the Mong Hsat airstrip Operation Paper, as the CIA called this supply line, was able to provide his force with supply drops five times a week. Li also found fertile grounds for alliances and recruitment among Burma’s minorities, which fought a guerrilla war against the increasingly Bamar-nationalist-dominated central government, particularly the Karen National Union.

Encouraged by the rapid successes of his Islamic allies up north, Li decided to launch his own expedition into China in mid-spring. Much like the Mas he found the Communist hold in Yunnan faltering, the CCP’s garrisons demoralized and unsure of who they were reporting to, while the Yunnanese people – never the most enthusiastic supporters of Mao in the first place – generally welcomed the return of the White Sun on a Blue Sky. Pushing past the disorganized and piecemeal response of local PLA commanders to his advance, Li reached the city of Dali by June 20, gathering recruits and outfitting them with CIA-provided arms or those taken from defeated PLA elements as he went, and made it into the provisional capital of the ROC’s restored Yunnan Province.[7] A month later the Southwestern KMT had driven the Communists from the provincial capital of Kunming with hardly a fight, Governor Chen Geng having fled ahead of Li’s advance when he realized he couldn’t muster enough troops to effectively defend the city after all of his subordinates’ failed piecemeal counterattacks earlier in the year. To say Chiang Kai-shek over in Taipei was ecstatic about these developments would be an understatement.

However, Li and Chiang wouldn’t get to enjoy the triumph for long: as the Soviets crushed the three Mas and their allies in the northwest, Lin Biao was eager to prove that he could defend the Revolution in China from the KMT on his own and without further compromising their territorial integrity. The central government gave Chen the army of 60,000 he asked for and sent him back to Yunnan with orders to crush Li, or die trying. With this new army he smashed the KMT ever backward across eastern Yunnan, retaking Kunming with hardly more resistance than Li had encountered from him on the way in, and by October 1 he was laying siege to Dali. There Li, having reinforced his ranks with thousands of Yunnanese recruits trained & armed over the summer and early autumn, was mounting a more effective stand than he had at Kunming: his men’s spirited resistance had frustrated both Chen’s initial offensive and his second strategy to go around Lake Erhai and scale Cangshan, a mountain overlooking the city from the west.

While this was all going on, Dewey and Stalin were once again confronting each other over East Asia. Stalin, as usual, was not willing to entertain a threat to the PRC’s continued existence and accused Dewey of breaching his agreement to not try to overthrow the CCP. Dewey, for his part, explained that Li Mi had seized the initiative to exploit the PRC’s weakness, that the CIA support he was receiving had been set in motion long before they struck their bargain and that a Kuomintang Yunnan was no more a threat to Beijing than Kuomintang Hainan and Taiwan. Evidently, whatever guilt he might or might not be feeling about the MacArthur-LeMay bombings didn’t mean he’d refuse to take obvious advantages when they manifested and the cost for doing so relatively low, nor was he going to capitulate to the Soviet Union willy-nilly; perhaps witnessing the consequences of his inaction in Europe, however necessary to avert the Third World War it might have been, had compelled him to take more seriously opportunities to push back the Red tide as well (however incrementally) – or perhaps he was concerned about the looming threat MacArthur, McCarthy and others posed to his right as he prepared to fight for re-election next year.

The sudden death of Governor Chen at the hands of a KMT sniper while surveying the stalled front lines around Cangshan, followed by Li Mi driving the PLA away from the city but running into a stalemate on the Yungui Plateau before he could reach Kunming, provided both sides with a solution. While he was basking in Chiang's congratulations the CIA would recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that Li cease his advance and dig in over his half of Yunnan; the PLA would restrain itself in a defensive posture in eastern Yunnan; and the United States would recognize the future incorporation of East Turkestan into the USSR, which virtually anyone paying attention to Asian affairs was predicting to be likely or inevitable within the next 10-20 years at most. The Soviets could focus on securing Europe (yet again) and stabilizing the rest of mainland China, but in particular reinforcing their hold on the northwest, without diverting troops to the southwest frontier. Thus 1951 ended with barely perceptible changes to the world map, the Soviet supply route through China and into French Indochina still intact, and both superpowers increasingly looking to colonial conflicts to be the outlets for their rivalry as the situation in both Europe and China stabilized, while for President Dewey himself, midnight on New Year’s Eve marked the true beginning of his fight for a second term…

====================================================================================

[1] As IOTL. Dewey himself had been a strong advocate for the death penalty and presided over the execution of nearly a hundred convicted criminals, many of them Mafia hitmen, while he was Governor of New York.

[2] Moore was originally state comptroller and later Lieutenant Governor under Dewey. ITL he’d have moved up to being Joseph Hanley’s Lt. Governor after Dewey moved to the White House (as Hanley had been Dewey’s Lt. Gov. since 1943), and since Hanley became a Senator in 1950 he'd naturally have succeeded the latter as the state governor.

[3] Historically the Communists won the most votes but actually lost seats due to how the Fourth Republic’s ballot system was structured, while the Gaullist RPF won the second-most seats. Here, the negative popular reaction to the American usage of A-bombs in Korea slightly changed that to allow the Communists to retain more of their seats, though the centrist parties still ended up having enough seats to form a coalition locking both them and the Gaullists out of power.

[4] Much thanks to stevep for the idea.

[5] Thanks to Buba for raising this possibility.

[6] Historically, the British did not lend any help to Nayef and he never managed to overthrow his big brother, who had a very short-lived reign of thirteen months anyway.

[7] Historically, Li Mi didn’t make it 60 miles past the Sino-Burmese border before being routed by a proper PLA counteroffensive, much less take Dali and Kunming.

 

[Captain X]

And fans of future presidential candidate MacArthur would argue that the president didn’t go far enough, that he chickened out when he had an opportunity to go all the way and destroy both the Soviet Union and China before the former built enough nuclear weapons to ensure any conflict between itself and the West would be one of mutual annihilation, dooming hundreds of millions and eventually billions to continued slavery under the Red yoke out of fear and/or to assuage his own conscience.

I have to say, I kinda of agree with that sentiment and kind of wonder if we actually could have crushed the communists in both China and the Soviet Union in the short timeframe where we held a nuclear advantage over the USSR, and how different things might have been had that actually happened.

 

[stevep]

CoW

Some very interesting developments there. Hadn't considered the impact in France but it seems likely that the communist would maintain more influence although they failed to gain power itself, which would have been a serious problem for all concerned.

Not sure what will happen in Jordan as Britain's support for Nayef could backfire as they fear or could help keep things more stable in the area. OTL Talal was displayed within a short period of time due to his mental instability and replaced by his son Hussain who ruled for a long time and was a moderate. Here he might end up as the leader of a popular anti-British faction which could cause problems in Jordan.

Of course with Labour in power rather than a Churchill led Tory Party will they be willing to commit to a military presence and what happens in Egypt with OTL's canal zone war then after that was 'resolved' Nasser's nationalisation of the canal itself?

Some other interesting results here with the establishment of the KMT statelet in western Yunnan but I can't really see that lasting long. Its rather too isolated especially if Burma becomes unfriendly to the west and once Lin Biao secures power in China its likely to be some tempting low lying fruit, whether by direct attack or a lower level insurgency by 'volunteers' against Li Mi's force.

Already a hell of a lot of butterflies and going to be interesting to see how it develops.

Steve

 

[stevep]

I have to say, I kinda of agree with that sentiment and kind of wonder if we actually could have crushed the communists in both China and the Soviet Union in the short timeframe where we held a nuclear advantage over the USSR, and how different things might have been had that actually happened.

I can't really see it. You can devastate cities and industrial facilities and cause huge casualties and suffering. However that will also generate a lot of bitterness not to mention hatred. Where is the US going to find the millions of men that would be necessary to garrison even the key areas of either Russia or China let alone both while it tries to find new rulers for those areas. E Europe you might be able to win although a lot of the open opponents of communism have already been crushed but an indiscriminate nuclear bombing campaign is going to cause fear of US actions by everybody and generate support for communism in two very large population groups. The Han Chinese will definitely hate such an attempted imposition, given what's happened already, albeit that assorted minority groups that have suffered under or mistrust the communists but their relatively small in power.

 

[Circle of Willis]

I have to say, I kinda of agree with that sentiment and kind of wonder if we actually could have crushed the communists in both China and the Soviet Union in the short timeframe where we held a nuclear advantage over the USSR, and how different things might have been had that actually happened.

It's certainly an understandable idea in hindsight - theoretically even a judicious use of A-bombs might kill less people than Mao did, after all - and one that I've thought of on occasion myself, mostly in the immediate aftermath of reading up on Communist atrocities. But on the other hand, the human cost of that endeavor (particularly if done in the early 1950s, before Mao could carry out his worst crimes) would probably cause America's international standing to crater, particularly with the 3rd World, and to make its preexisting allies wary of it at best as Stevep suggests. Though on second thought, not having the allies and standing to be the world's policeman may not even necessarily be a bad thing for the non-interventionist crowd (in the early '50s, still represented by political giants like Bob Taft) which would want the US to retreat from the globe after destroying Communism, anyway...

Of course, ITL this view would be a bit more widespread since MacArthur actually pulled the 'nuke Korea and China' trick off and it has (seemingly, and even if it was partly or moreso due to Dewey's damage control) worked out pretty well for America. That I wrote the narrative in such a way to (hopefully) minimize judgment of him & his disciples who share this idea isn't just because I took my storytelling cues from Deus Ex (that's to say, outside of the most extreme cases, my preference is to present political/philosophical/moral quandaries as open-endedly & fairly as I can and to let the reader decide who's right or wrong regardless of who wins or loses as the story goes on, instead of answering the question directly myself). Thanks to Big Mac, preemptive war against the commies while that's still genuinely winnable remains a credible concept in the mainstream conversation for a while longer, and it will have its share of defenders as this TL enters the 1952 Republican primaries.

CoW

Some very interesting developments there. Hadn't considered the impact in France but it seems likely that the communist would maintain more influence although they failed to gain power itself, which would have been a serious problem for all concerned.

Not sure what will happen in Jordan as Britain's support for Nayef could backfire as they fear or could help keep things more stable in the area. OTL Talal was displayed within a short period of time due to his mental instability and replaced by his son Hussain who ruled for a long time and was a moderate. Here he might end up as the leader of a popular anti-British faction which could cause problems in Jordan.

Of course with Labour in power rather than a Churchill led Tory Party will they be willing to commit to a military presence and what happens in Egypt with OTL's canal zone war then after that was 'resolved' Nasser's nationalisation of the canal itself?

Some other interesting results here with the establishment of the KMT statelet in western Yunnan but I can't really see that lasting long. Its rather too isolated especially if Burma becomes unfriendly to the west and once Lin Biao secures power in China its likely to be some tempting low lying fruit, whether by direct attack or a lower level insurgency by 'volunteers' against Li Mi's force.

Already a hell of a lot of butterflies and going to be interesting to see how it develops.

Steve

France is an interesting case. To my understanding the Fourth Republic was pretty shaky, only getting worse as the years went by, and the centrist parties seemed to spend half their time trying to maintain a coalition against both the Gaullist/Poujadist right and the Communist left (the other half was, of course, spent on internal bickering). For the time being the Communists' star not diminishing as much is unlikely to change a whole lot - they did recover significantly in the 1956 election IOTL after all, and that didn't turn France red or start mass riots. But you can bet they'll be able to cause more trouble as Indochina and soon enough, Algeria heat up.

Re: the Middle East, it's definitely going to be the next big powderkeg with so many major developments right around the corner. Nayef certainly has a dangerous tightrope to walk as his father, and historically his brother and nephew, did: despite his pro-British alignment and support from the Arab Legion, he's probably going to have to throw some bones to the Arab nationalists if he wants to avoid a major rebellion, mostly by way of making hostile noises at Israel (since his dad getting too friendly with them was what got him killed in the first place). As for Egypt...between King Farouk's rule having become extremely eccentric and out-of-touch, the growth of nationalism in his army, and the US and USSR both disliking him, it does seem like the fall of the monarchy there was a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. But I doubt Labour would be any happier with the nationalization of the Suez Canal than they were with Mosaddegh's nationalization of the AIOC, since they already took umbrage with the abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty historically.

Li Mi's Yunnan would be a strong contender for 'impossible' difficulty in any ITL video game made about this period, indeed. Other than his battlefield successes, his main break comes in the form of the CCP's anti-opium crackdown being disrupted ITL, which will with any luck delay or prevent the Southwest KMT's degeneration into a well-armed drug cartel (which is what happened to them after they got stuck in Burma IOTL) - opium production will remain concentrated in neighboring Sichuan Province for a bit longer in-universe, instead of being redirected southward to escape Mao's eradication campaigns. However drugs aside, Li's still got his work cut out for him just to establish a functioning state, as well as setting up defenses in the extremely likely event that Lin Biao returns for round 2 sooner or later.

 

[stevep]

Re: the Middle East, it's definitely going to be the next big powderkeg with so many major developments right around the corner. Nayef certainly has a dangerous tightrope to walk as his father, and historically his brother and nephew, did: despite his pro-British alignment and support from the Arab Legion, he's probably going to have to throw some bones to the Arab nationalists if he wants to avoid a major rebellion, mostly by way of making hostile noises at Israel (since his dad getting too friendly with them was what got him killed in the first place). As for Egypt...between King Farouk's rule having become extremely eccentric and out-of-touch, the growth of nationalism in his army, and the US and USSR both disliking him, it does seem like the fall of the monarchy there was a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. But I doubt Labour would be any happier with the nationalization of the Suez Canal than they were with Mosaddegh's nationalization of the AIOC, since they already took umbrage with the abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty historically.

Just to say on this point while Labour definitely initially supported Eden in 1956 I was referring to the clashes with Egyptian forces under Nasser attacking British forces in the Canal Zone in the years after the coup that removed the monarchy. This was 'settled' by an agreement in 1954 on a staged British withdrawal from the canal zone, which Nasser breached when he seized the canal in 1956. See Suez Crisis for a brief summary. You are probably aware of this but just in case you're not.

 

[Circle of Willis]

1952

The big event this year was, of course, the American elections – at least in the USA itself. Both parties’ electoral machines rumbled into action, campaigning from North Dakota to Florida and from California to New York to secure firstly the nomination for their preferred candidates, and then victory in the election itself. In addition to the White House, there were 35 Senate seats (21 Republican and 14 Democratic) and all 435 House seats up for election.

On the Republican side, the struggle between the moderately liberal ‘Eastern Establishment’ represented by Dewey himself and the inland conservatives championed by Bob Taft once again reared its head in full. At first glance it seemed as though Dewey could expect a comfortable cruise to a second nomination, if not a second term in the White House: he had a smashing victory in Korea under his belt, nobody could accuse him of being weak on Communism, and the economy was doing fine – all amounting to a recipe for an incumbent’s re-election. Dewey himself was quite sanguine about his prospects at the outset of the presidential campaign.

But the conservatives’ position was not hopeless. Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific and (admittedly highly destructive) savior of Korea, had been increasingly unsubtly signaling his intent to run for the Republican nomination for a year, and now was his chance. As a charismatic war hero, he presented a highly attractive alternative to the old and tired Taft: he could attack Dewey on both the Korean War and Communism in general, and the latter’s isolationism was growing less popular with every passing day of the Cold War anyway. Taft himself recognized this reality, and set aside his own plans to run yet again in favor of supporting a MacArthur candidacy[1]. It remains unclear why Taft, the champion of American isolationism, would throw in with as brazen a warhawk as MacArthur; the most popular theory, supported years later by the former's staff, was that MacArthur had persuaded him that a quick and decisive victory over international Communism would allow the USA to retreat inward without fear of further harm afterwards. Alternatively, perhaps he simply hated Dewey and wanted to see the president taken down a peg, though it's equally unclear what Dewey could have done in the past few years to anger Taft so.

Thus did the conservative Republicans insert MacArthur’s name into the New Hampshire primary ballot with both his and Taft’s permission, and he shocked Dewey, the party bosses & the nation by narrowly winning the aforementioned primary despite being in Japan at the time and thus doing no campaigning whatsoever[2]. As MacArthur’s candidacy became dead-serious, he found no lack of support from the hard right of the Republican Party, and American society outside of the South as a whole. Joseph McCarthy, Bill Knowland and other China Lobby hardliners, the Minute Women of the USA and similar organizations – they flocked to the general’s side like moths to a roaring flame. MacArthur was further delighted by the opportunity to give interviews to the press, which he used not just for bombastic grandstanding but also to lay out his campaign promises.

Over the spring a coherent platform emerged, showing that MacArthur wasn’t going to be running on his personality alone. In his interviews and through his allies he declared that if elected he would aggressively roll back Communism abroad, purge it at home by giving McCarthy and the HUAC free reign, and assure continued American economic prosperity with a massive armament program that would provide everyone not already on the front lines against the Red menace with a wage for helping feed, clothe and arm the former category. His foreign policy could be best summarized in his own words as such: “Korea was a good start, but the president – bless his bleeding heart – took pity on the Reds we’d lit up at the last moment. Now it’s a Christian thing to show mercy, and I understand why President Dewey might be moved to pity by what I and General LeMay did, but the Communists are the farthest thing from repentant sinners and I wouldn’t be an honest man if I said I thought they deserved his kindness. My own heart bleeds for the millions upon millions still trapped beneath the Marxist yoke, unable to worship or speak or work freely for fear of death: so I promise that when I’m inaugurated as your 35th president, I will not let them be forgotten, and dedicate as much of my efforts to breaking that damn red yoke over their heads as I will to keeping the American people free of it at home.”

Dewey was as stunned as anyone else at MacArthur’s victory in New Hampshire, and further alarmed that the general’s arguments seemed to be gaining traction in public. MacArthur and his supporters fiercely attacked his record on Korea and Communism, where he thought he’d made himself unassailable – haranguing his decision to stop at the Yalu, and implying or openly stating that the world would be a better place if he had seized the moment to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power in China instead of allowing the Soviets to stabilize the situation and impose their own replacement for Mao. As March and April wore on, MacArthur built upon his New Hampshire triumph with sweeping victories in the Midwestern states, boosted by Taft’s support despite the two men’s disagreement, leaving the president reeling even as he worked to consolidate mainstream Republican support around himself.

Fortunately for the Eastern Establishment, Dewey regained his footing after the Illinois primary and began to put up a stronger fight against MacArthur’s insurgent candidacy. He and his campaign staff stressed the importance of continuing the economic boom and advancing civil rights under the incumbent presidency, but they also took the time to formally articulate the ‘Dewey Doctrine’: the president’s foreign policy course of incrementally rolling back Communism by chipping away at its peripheral strongholds, instead of rushing to war with the Soviet Union and China. “While I laud General MacArthur’s righteous fury and share his loathing of that ideology of slavers and parasites,” Dewey had shot back in a carefully-prepared speech in Philadelphia, “I can tell that his anger, however warranted, has come to cloud his judgment and drive him into proposing a needlessly reckless approach to fighting Communism. The recent victory of our Chinese friends in Yunnan demonstrates that we can slowly but surely wear down the strongholds of this pernicious mental virus at little cost to ourselves, our allies and those we would liberate if we exercise more care in our foreign policy…”

The president’s recovery was shown by a string of primary victories in the east: from mid-April to the end of the month New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts fell into his column, and while not particularly surprising, each victory shored up morale in his camp (indeed, if he had lost any of these, no small number of political analysts believed he’d have to bow out of the race altogether). Further aiding Dewey’s cause was the growing dissension between the Old Right and the – for lack of a better word – MacArthurites among his opposition. The foreign policy divide between Taftite isolationists and those who agreed with MacArthur’s blatant warmongering was bad enough, but as the campaign ground onward, economics began to come to the forefront: the old guard of the Grand Old Party still desired the abolition of the New Deal and a reversion to the laissez-faire policies of Calvin Coolidge, which sharply contrasted with MacArthur’s support for a massive military-industrial buildup and reluctance to discuss the New Deal at all. MacArthur’s increasing flirtation with economic populism, built in to his military-industrial plans, ironically made him sound more like an especially militaristic Southern Democrat, and dismayed some conservatives (such as Everett Dirksen, the new Republican Senator from Illinois[3], and indeed Taft himself) enough that they began to reconsider their support for him altogether.

As both rival candidates approached the Convention on July 7, it became apparent that MacArthur was beginning to lose steam. The fervor of his supporters was blunted by Dewey’s well-organized and generously financed political machine, Dewey’s recent victories in the West Coast primaries offset MacArthur’s gains in Ohio and North Dakota, and less loyal MacArthur backers such as Dirksen and Bill Knowland were engaging in backchannel communications with Vice President Halleck, who still supported the president despite his own conservative inclinations. MacArthur was not blind to his campaign’s loss of momentum, but he reacted poorly to these developments: first stating that if elected, he would ensure the Soviet Union no longer existed by the end of his term in office (a bridge too far for most mainstream hawks who thought he was right about China), and secondly declaring that he’d make Joseph McCarthy his running mate if nominated, which came across as simultaneously desperate and pretentious.

Still, when the Republican National Convention actually opened in Chicago, MacArthur had enough delegates to put up a fight: 511 to Dewey’s 580. Four days of delegate-wrangling and backroom dealing ensued as both camps raced to secure the nomination. Vice President Halleck, WH Chief of Staff Brownell and Maryland governor Theodore McKeldin led the pro-Dewey faction’s efforts, while those of the pro-MacArthur one were directed chiefly by Taft and his allies on the Republican National Committee. In the end, the former were able to effect enough defections from the latter’s delegate pool (helped in no small part by how MacArthur’s increasingly extreme rhetoric had alienated supporters like Dirksen and Knowland) to secure Dewey’s re-nomination. Taft, ever a loyal party man even if he was no fan of Dewey’s, pressured MacArthur to concede with grace, which the notorious prima-donna general did after first extracting a promise from Dewey that he'd take more punitive action against Communists at home and wouldn’t simply sit idle if something like the abortive uprisings in Eastern Europe last year were to happen again abroad.

On the other side of the partisan divide, the Democrats were having an equally if not even more acrimonious race. Tensions within the New Deal coalition which had strained the party in 1948 were showing themselves once more with the Dixiecrats pointing to Truman’s defeat as proof that the party cannot afford to sideline their concerns, Northern urban progressives livid at what they considered to be a fatal betrayal of Truman over civil rights, and those party bosses and Northeastern/Midwestern union men in the center frantically trying to reconcile both even as they remained pessimistic about victory in the general election.

In the end, Dixiecrat arguments carried the day. Enough of the bosses & delegates agreed that Truman’s 1948 loss proved the Democrats could not afford to alienate the Solid South with support for civil rights again, resulting in Georgia Senator Richard Russell[4] receiving the Democratic nomination over progressive favorite Hubert Humphrey and even Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who had enjoyed broad popularity thanks to his recent anti-mafia hearings and was trying to reconcile both extremes. Russell, for his part, was not magnanimous in victory and outraged even reform-inclined Southerners as early as his convention floor speech: for his running mate he chose Kenneth McKellar, Kefauver’s octogenarian fellow Senator from the Volunteer State, who had close ties to longtime Memphis political boss E. H. Crump.

Throughout late summer and autumn, Russell mounted a populist campaign, but his extremely loud and uncompromising support for segregation alienated non-Southern audiences who might otherwise have been receptive to his promises to protect and expand the New Deal. Certainly it did him no favors with Northern blacks, or in other words, the only black American voters at this time – who had, until his nomination, been a substantial and growing part of the Democratic coalition. Conversely, Dewey continued to campaign on the pillars of continued economic growth, steady civil rights reform and strong but not reckless anti-Communism at home and abroad, which had much wider popular appeal. That Dewey had not taken a buzzsaw to the New Deal while in office, and in fact supported some social programs such as the Housing Act, further weakened the impact of Russell’s attacks on him, particularly with Northern farmers and union workers.

Consequently it was little surprise when November 4, 1952 came and went with the president winning a resounding victory: Russell did not win a single state outside of the Solid South, and even there Dewey’s bite-and-hold foreign policy found domestic application as he snatched Kentucky and West Virginia away from his Democratic rival by thin margins. The Republicans also made gains in both houses of Congress: in the Senate Ernest McFarland (D-AZ), the Democratic Senate leader, was toppled by Air Force veteran and Phoenix city councilor Barry Goldwater while John Sherman Cooper (R-KY) made a comeback in the Bluegrass State among other victories, and Republican gains in the Upper South and West also gave them a narrow majority in the House. Thanks to these triumphs, the Grand Old Party would enjoy a governing trifecta for the next two years.

Spoiler: 1952 election map & stats

Party	Candidates	Popular Vote	Electoral Votes (266 to win)
Republican	Thomas E. Dewey (R-NY)/Charles A. Halleck (R-IN)	33,317,455 (53.9%)	395
Democratic	Richard B. Russell (D-GA)/Kenneth D. McKellar (D-TN)	28,451,899 (46%)	136

Of course, simply because the US was having an election didn’t mean the world beyond stopped spinning until the results came in. Close to home, the democratically elected government of Cuba fell to a military coup engineered by Fulgencio Batista, the island nation’s previous president and longtime grey eminence, after Batista realized he could not win the presidential election this year. Far from his early days as a populist reformer, Batista instituted a corrupt dictatorship and hopped in bed with the Mafia, cultivating particularly close ties with kingpin Meyer Lansky: over the next few years, his Cuba gained a reputation as a gaudy and dissolute resort for American tourists with heavy wallets and little virtue.

Abroad, Britain faced another declining situation in Egypt, where riots exploded in January following clashes between the British garrison of the Suez canal and local policemen suspected of aiding the fedayeen – insurgent cells considered heroes by the Egyptian people, but classified as terrorists by the British authorities. The Cairo riot, nicknamed ‘Black Saturday’, chiefly targeted British property and establishments frequented by the unpopular hedonist sitting on the Egyptian throne, King Farouk; Shepheard’s Hotel, a symbol of British opulence and power, was singled out for looting and arson by the mob. Six months later, Farouk himself was overthrown in a coup by the nationalist clique calling itself the ‘Free Officers’, and despite appealing to Washington for help, received none from Dewey; the incumbent administration was unsympathetic to his position, having found it impossible to work with the erratic king, and both State and the CIA believed Muhammad Naguib (the ringleader of the Free Officers) could be more amenable to American interests.

A ways south of Egypt, the British further had no choice but to declare a state of emergency in their Kenyan colony, where a revolt by impoverished and landless Kikuyu natives had broken out against white British settlement of Kenya’s central ‘White’ Highlands. These so-called ‘Mau Mau’ rebels proved intractable and sought assistance from the Soviet Union, which was all too happy to begin hammering away at the West’s colonial empires and agreed to funnel whatever aid they could to the rebellion. Conversely, unlike in Egypt where they’d have had to work with a thoroughly unpleasant local personality in Farouk, in Kenya the Americans were fine with directly working with their British friends. The State Department’s position was that the Mau Mau should stop breaking the law and attacking British settlers, and that the US would provide aid to Britain in restoring order on demand; in 1952 however, the British were confident of their ability to suppress the Mau Mau on their own, and thus while PM Attlee welcomed Dulles and Dewey’s gesture he did not ask for any direct help at this point in time.

On a happier note for the British, this was also the year where they tested their first nuclear bomb, making them the third nuclear-armed state on Earth after America and the Soviet Union. Having been in the works since 1947, the 25-kiloton Hurricane was satisfactorily tested on Trimouille Island, part of the Monte Bello island chain off Australia’s northwest coast, in October. The A-bomb was detonated aboard a frigate to test the potential of ship-smuggled nuclear weapons, and obviously vaporized the unfortunate ship.

Over in Asia, the Treaty of San Francisco officially made peace between Japan and the US as of April 28 1952, and allowed for the end of the American occupation of the former after seven years. The Treaty of Taipei was signed on the same day, similarly bringing about a formal end to hostilities between Japan and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Japan’s first political test as a free democracy came in October, and was marked by over 80% turnout: healthy for a democracy, certainly, but these voters produced a result which did not please Washington. Despite the fragmentation of the Japanese left into the Right- and Left-Socialist Parties, the nuclear solution to the Korean War had left a Japanese populace already traumatized by Hiroshima & Nagasaki seething, and they made their displeasure with the staunchly pro-American Liberal Party known by voting for the Right-Socialists in particular en masse[5].

Consequently Jotaro Kawakami, the leader of said Right-Socialists, took power at the head of a coalition with the Reformist Party: while he sent assurances to the Dewey administration that he would not take steps against the American military presence in Japan, in no small part because (unlike the Left-Socialists) he was no Communist sympathizer and feared Soviet aggression from the north, Kawakami took an extremely dim view of America’s collaborators within Japan itself. He was particularly determined to challenge the criminal yakuza, whose power had ballooned alongside the black market in the chaotic and desperate first years of the occupation and who had formed connections to the Liberals to suppress socialist activity in post-war Japan. Purging corruption, laying the foundations for a welfare state, and stringently adhering to their new constitutionally-mandated pacifism were publicly declared the three great goals of the Kawakami government, and it would pursue these aims zealously.

Finally, in-between Europe and Asia, the aged General Secretary Stalin was descending deeper and deeper into seething paranoia, and resolved to take additional steps to reinforce his already-absolute authority. To chastise and intimidate his own security chief Lavrentiy Beria, he instigated the ‘Mingrelian Affair’ – a purge of Georgians who shared Beria’s Mingrelian (West Georgian) heritage, though not Beria himself. Further highlighting the Soviet break with the increasingly Western-friendly Israel, Stalin also had thirteen prominent Jewish writers with ties to the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (including Leon Talmy, a former American Communist) executed on trumped-up charges and arrested more Jewish purported-‘killer-doctors’ than he did the previous year.

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[1] At first glance it might seem strange that Bob Taft, Mr. Republican himself and an arch-isolationist even among the Old Right, would team up with a strident warhawk like MacArthur. However Taft was no stranger to making strange alliances against East Coast liberals, having already tried to ally with Harold Stassen (who was only slightly less liberal than Dewey himself and had personally pissed Taft off by fighting extremely hard for the latter’s home state of Ohio) in 1948.

[2] IOTL, the conservative Taft was expected to win NH but was upset by Eisenhower’s entry into the race on behalf of the liberal Republicans. Here, Taft and MacArthur are on the same page and together they win an upset victory over Dewey for the latter instead.

[3] Historically Dirksen was a staunch opponent of Dewey at the 1952 Republican National Convention, though his opposition was mostly based on Dewey’s two-time record of electoral defeats – which obviously isn’t the case ITL.

[4] Russell was indeed one of the Democratic contenders in 1952, as well as an established fixture among the Senate Democrats (with whom he’d served for almost 20 years by that point). He wasn’t as blatantly thuggish and prone to race-baiting as some of his Dixiecrat contemporaries, such as Mississippi Senators Theodore Bilbo and James Eastland, but was an ardent and unapologetic segregationist regardless, and considered unpalatable in the general election by party bosses for that reason IOTL.

[5] The Korean War going nuclear, coupled with worsened economic conditions due to more American aid being diverted to Korea, produced unrest in Japan last year; that unrest has since evolved into this year's big overseas divergence from the OTL 1952, the election of socialists to lead Japan’s first post-occupation government. Washington is lucky that these are the more cautious Right-Socialists (mildly anti-American social democratic types) for now, but at minimum they can probably count out any active help from Japan in any regard anytime soon, especially as the Japanese left is far less willing to engage in even limited rearmament than the Japanese right.

On another note, I've also gone back and added threadmarks to the earlier entries. A big thank you to everyone who's been reading & helping out up till now!

 

[Eparkhos]

Very nice/

 

[stevep]

Well the Democrats fouled up big time. By selecting such a bigot they secured the white south - which as you point out was pretty much the only section allowed to vote here - but lost everywhere else. Hopefully they will regroup and take a more responsible stance as every viable democratic nation needs a strong opposition to keep it honest.

You were giving me palpitations with those early successes by MacArthur! Bloody glad he didn't get in. However it does mean that Dewey is going to face pressure to take a stronger stance against communism. Which could be awkward if the E German uprising occurs as OTL next year or possibly even more crucial Hungary in 56 as that would be an election year. It could also mean he plays a bigger role in opposing communist supporting operations in the 3rd world. This could mean supporting Batista more against Castro or ending up supporting or at least not opposing Britain and France if the Suez crisis develops as OTL.