Alternate History Dewey Defeats Truman (for real)

Buba

A total creep
So there is a chance that Dugout Doug might become the All Volunteer Force champion?
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Not likely, but not impossible either. It'd probably require Mac to buy into the same argument behind the 'New Look' policy which his rival Eisenhower pursued in his capacity as Dewey's SoD (and as president IOTL) - basically the idea that you shouldn't need a huge and hugely expensive conventional force, including hundreds of thousands of conscripts, if you're going to be relying more on throwing around nukes (or the threat thereof) & special forces to get things done. Which of course would mean a smaller and better-trained volunteer military in general going forward.
 
Year two of the Halleck presidency: 1958

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
1958

This year began with two advances for the United States in the Space Race: firstly Sputnik fell and burned up just three days after New Year’s, having spent three months in space, and so its presence could no longer taunt President Halleck. Secondly the National Aeronautics and Space Act cleared Congress in February, replacing the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which had existed since 1915. Since the Soviets had gotten a satellite into space first, the Americans were determined to beat them to the logical next step: putting a man in space. To that end the newly commissioned scientists and engineers of NASA got to work on Project Mercury, in which they’d spend the next few years working on a rocket that could safely get an astronaut into orbit and then back down to Earth.

Compared to the NAS Act, Halleck had much more difficulty getting Senator Lodge Jr.’s ‘New Force Bill’ through the legislature. The recession was still ongoing, biting America’s economy and the wallets of its people viciously, and (moral considerations aside) the president and his allies badly needed an advantage going into this year’s midterm elections. Though Halleck was loath to spend any money after having finally pushed through the first serious budget cuts in post-New Deal history the year before, political necessity forced him to compromise with the liberal Democratic senators to overcome the committee powers and filibuster wielded by the Dixiecrats. In spring the Republicans agreed to provide financial support to state governments to fight the recession and to increase unemployment benefits, in exchange for Democratic support in passing Lodge’s bill. Thus did Halleck finally secure ramped-up federal oversight of elections in the South and the presence of US Marshals to protect black voters from intimidation or worse.

And just in time, because the Klan and other paramilitary white supremacist outfits which were sprouting up south of the Mason-Dixon Line like hooded mushrooms were in a hurry to preserve Jim Crow by bomb and bullet. Aside from the usual targeting of activists, vote-organizers and teachers at integrated schools throughout the summer, a dramatic confrontation erupted in North Carolina earlier in the year between the local Klan chapter and the Lumbee Tribe. Grand Dragon James ‘Catfish’ Cole had been horribly embarrassed when the local black veterans organized to defend a doctor who financed the NAACP and fought off an attempt by his men to raid said doctor’s residence; he was looking for a way to restore his esteem, and decided picking a fight with the Lumbee (who he had denounced as primitive mongrels) would be just how to do it. After a harassment campaign that included several cross burnings, Cole was rudely shocked when 500 Lumbee men showed up to one of his hostile nighttime rallies outside the town of Maxton and interrupted his vitriol with bricks, crowbars and bullets. The Klan, outnumbered almost five to one, was routed and Cole himself fell into a swamp. Nobody died, but several Klansmen – and crucially the Grand Dragon’s pride – were wounded. Cole was maddened beyond reason by this humiliation and reached out to neighboring Klan chapters for help in ‘teaching those God damn Indians a hard lesson’.

In less intensely charged circumstances, the rest of the North Carolina Klan may have been too weak to strike at the Lumbee, and Cole would have faded into history’s pages as just a thug who should’ve considered himself lucky not to get any worse[1]. But the Klan had grown stronger and at a rapid pace since the Little Rock riot last fall, and its North Carolina chapters were no exception to this trend. The other county chiefs agreed that an example had to be made in order to remind everyone why they should fear the KKK like their fathers and grandfathers did, and in the days that followed they descended on Maxton with vengeance on their minds. The first ‘night riders’ to reach the town started by beating a homeless black man to death and emptying their firearms into the first Lumbee they saw, two teenage revelers and the older sister of one of the pair; by the week’s end they had killed eight others and sent ten more people to the hospital. Two Klansmen were killed when they got caught trying to burn a black veteran’s house down while he was having his neighbors over and decided to try shooting their way out, but the townsfolk found the perpetually hooded night-riders’ hit-and-run strategy of springing calculated ambushes on isolated targets of opportunity (chosen mostly because they were darker than the Klan found acceptable) before melting away into the countryside difficult to counter.

That the Maxton police proved to be useless in catching the perpetrators, and may have included Klan sympathizers or been some of those very night-riders themselves, further complicated the situation and fed into the growing climate of fearful distrust in the town. In the end, it took the FBI stepping in a few days later to arrest Grand Dragon Cole and other known Klan ringleaders in Robeson and Scotland counties (as well as bribing or otherwise coercing several of their associates into testifying against them) to put a stop to the violence, by which point the night-riders had committed three more murders. A Lumbee shopkeeper shot and killed one Klansman who’d tried to rob his store at gunpoint, but three days later killed another white man who’d been snooping around said store at night and who he thought was another Klansman (for which he was promptly arrested & roughed up by the Maxton cops). The crisis grabbed headlines well above the local level and even gained the attention of President Halleck, who publicly denounced ‘those murdering hooded cowards’ and pledged to redouble his administration’s efforts against such domestic terrorists.

Although the Maxton clashes were hardly the only violent racial incident in 1958, it grabbed headlines due to the amount of violence perpetrated by the Klan in such a short period of time and the polarized reaction: while most Americans outside of the South (regardless of race) deplored so much blood being shed over a petty bigot’s pride, many within thought it was long-overdue pushback against a North that had been pushing integration without their consent for years and local minorities who had seized the chance to get ‘uppity’ toward their obvious superiors. “Like any right-thinking citizen I denounce all forms of political and racial violence, including the murders of a dozen innocent Americans in Maxton this past week. North Carolina isn’t Germany, being black or Indian isn’t grounds for murder and I have nothing but scorn for the thugs who decided it is.” North Carolinian Senator Sam Ervin had said, in so doing expressing the official or unofficial response of his fellow Dixiecrats – and not a few Southerners on the ground – to the matter. “But this never would’ve happened if the Lumbee had known to respect Catfish Cole’s right to express himself. Man just wants to give a speech and five hundred Injuns attack him, what could he and his own friends possibly be expected to do? Just sit back and let ‘em walk all over him?”

It was in this tense environment that Americans went to the polls in November. The recession, attacks on unions and those New Deal cuts passed just before it struck added up to an extremely unflattering picture for the Republicans going in, despite their passage of relief measures to go along with the new Lodge Act, and the president had already privately written off all four of the Republican-held seats in the Midwest as a lost cause. In that, at least, he was not disappointed: Midwestern farmers, blue-collar union men and bourgeois progressives all united to bury the Grand Old Party across the region, voting in a wave of left-Democrat luminaries that included Philip Hart (D-MI) and Eugene McCarthy (D-MN). What did come as a nasty surprise to Halleck was how poorly the Republicans did outside of the Midwest: in Maine, one of the most reliably Republican states under even Franklin Roosevelt, Edmund Muskie ousted incumbent Frederick Payne, and New York County District Attorney Frank Hogan narrowly defeated Kenneth Keating in the Empire State despite ex-President Dewey’s efforts to help the latter on the campaign trail[2].

In the South, despite another record-breaking amount of black voters and several dramatic ballot-booth confrontations between white supremacists on one hand & the black voters and Deputy Marshals on the other, superior Democratic party organization, redoubled campaigns of violent voter intimidation and suppression, and equally high turnout among infuriated Southern whites prevented the ‘red wave’ Halleck had been hoping for from materializing (at least to the extent that he and the Republicans needed), and left the GOP almost entirely without compensation for their defeats up north. The president could only take small comfort in the extremely narrow victory of Richard Clarke Jr. in North Carolina and a much less narrow one for James Beall in Maryland, both emerging victorious on the back of an overwhelming outpour of black votes – and in Clarke’s case, Native American votes as well, motivated by the disaster that befell the Lumbee of Maxton earlier – in an alliance with the Republicans’ traditional liberal middle-class voters in these states[3]. Now that his party lacked a majority in either House of Congress, Halleck found his agenda to be entirely at the mercy of the liberal Democrats, who he was quite certain would at best strongly disapprove of anything he wanted to do in regards to the economy or unions (at minimum) for the foreseeable future.

Abroad, this was a good year for those who dreamed of further European integration. The European Economic Community, previously established with the Rome Treaty last March, came into effect on New Year’s Day this year. The organization, intended to facilitate a customs union before going any deeper, bound NATO’s non-autocratic continental members in Western Europe – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – more closely.

To the south, while French PM Guy Mollet assuaged hard-line elements of the military and the pied-noir settlers of Algeria that he would remain committed to defending that African extension of the metropole[4], an actual coup happened on the eastern side of the continent. Abdallah Khalil, the Prime Minister of Sudan, arranged for the military to depose his own democratically-elected government and impose General Ibrahim Abboud as the young country’s military dictator, officially to promote efficiency in the brewing civil war between the Muslim Arab elite (to which both he and Abboud belonged) and black Christian & animist insurgents in the south of the country. Both Khalil and Abboud were Islamists, and sought to deepen ties with Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt, which of course the latter’s leader Al-Hudaybi welcomed. By the year’s end rumors abounded that a full union between Egypt and Sudan, predicated on their shared Islamic faith overriding preexisting British colonial arrangements for the region and the abrogation of Egyptian control over Sudan by the Free Officers in 1953 (as well as Egyptian help in combating the South Sudanese), was imminent.

Even further east, the Arab monarchies were hammering out the terms for their own union. Though Nasser was dead and Arab nationalism seemingly went into the grave with him, Nayef of Jordan and his young cousin Faisal of Iraq were both concerned that their thrones were not yet fully secured from anti-British plotters in their armies, and came to believe that uniting their kingdoms would relieve such nationalistic pressures by bringing them closer to a true pan-Arab state (ironically much like Nasser himself wanted) and lessening their dependence on Britain. Thus was the ‘Arab Federation’, in actually an Iraqi-Jordanian confederate dual monarchy, declared on February 14. As the year passed with no coup in sight, defying both monarchs’ worst expectations[5], Nayef and Faisal breathed a sigh of relief and began turning their gaze to neighboring Saudi Arabia. They had not forgotten that Ibn Saud drove their great-grandfather from their ancestral seat in the Hejaz immediately following the First World War, and entertained hopes of restoring the Hashemite kingdom there under their older cousin ‘Abd al-Ilah – the sole male representative of the Hashemite dynasty’s senior line, and Prime Minister & true power in Iraq. Of course, that Saudi Arabia was a staunch friend to the Western powers and deeply in bed with both American and British companies presented an obvious complication to these ambitions…

More directly involving the Americans’ interests, this year opened in East Asia with a Chinese attack on the KMT foothold in Yunnan. While the offensive was not entirely unexpected – Li Mi had been busy building up his defenses for years, the CIA had informed the Halleck administration of PLA troop buildups in their half of Yunnan and the president himself had guessed the Soviets wanted revenge for their past embarrassments at American hands – the sheer amount of fire- and manpower involved in the attack still proved too much for Li’s men and their CIA advisors to handle. Most distressingly, the high involvement of Soviet advisors and especially pilots on the PRC’s side played a key role in breaching Li’s defensive lines as quickly as they did. Within less than a month Li and the Yunnan Anti-Communist National Salvation Army were in full retreat, racing back to the Burmese border while Soviet bombers and PLA advance elements harried them all the way. The only thing that had saved them once they crossed Burma’s border was the official neutrality of U Nu’s government: Lin Biao had wanted to finish them off, but the Soviets – satisfied that they’d drawn blood by crushing this American and KMT thorn in their pawn’s side, and unwilling to risk India’s post-Korea and Suez drift into ever friendlier relations with the Kremlin by invading its neutral neighbor – held him back.

Back in Washington, Halleck debated what to do with the Dulleses and the Joint Chiefs; a direct military response was ruled out, as Halleck agreed with the former that Li Mi wasn’t worth sending in US Army troops to rescue and it would be difficult to counter Chinese claims that they were just restoring their territorial integrity on the international stage. Instead, he went with Allen Dulles’ suggestion that Li join his remaining forces fully to the anti-Burmese government minorities who were in the tenth year of their war against Rangoon’s authority, with the aim of deposing said government (despite its neutral stance having been what kept Li Mi active in the first place) and installing a federative one which would also conveniently invite an American troop presence. The president was also loath to spend too much money on keeping the defeated Yunnanese KMT afloat, because as it turned out…

Well east of Burma, a US military advisor to South Vietnam was killed in a Communist insurgent raid on an ARVN base outside of Bien Hoa in April; the first combat casualty incurred by the Americans in Vietnam. President Halleck was naturally infuriated by this development and increased the number of American advisors in Vietnam from 102 to 258 at the request of South Vietnamese leader Ngo DInh Diem, though Diem himself sought to place the reinforcements as far away from the front line as he could – officially to keep them safe, but unofficially, he was paranoid that the Americans could take control of ARVN out from under his nose if not carefully managed & observed. Financial aid to the Diem regime was also increased with the objective of further outfitting and training the ARVN to an American standard, although as was becoming usual, an awful lot of it disappeared into the pockets of the dictator, his brothers and the other higher-ups within his government.

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[1] This was how the ‘Battle of Hayes Pond’ ended IOTL.

[2] Historically, Keating narrowly defeated Hogan for NY’s Senate seat this year.

[3] IOTL B. Everett Jordan easily defeated Clarke in NC’s special Senate election, though that was with 15% turnout, the Battle of Hayes Pond not escalating to scandalous proportions and lax enforcement of the already-weak civil rights legislation that historically existed at this time.

[4] Historically, Mollet didn’t retain the post for long after the Suez Crisis ended in defeat for the tripartite powers and his eventual successor, Pierre Pfimlin, was perceived as being receptive to negotiating French withdrawal from Algeria. This led to a coup by said hard-liners against the increasingly unstable Fourth French Republic in 1958, toppling it and paving the way for Charles de Gaulle to assume power.

[5] Emboldened by Nasser’s apparent success in the Suez Crisis, Iraqi Arab nationalists actually did launch a coup against the Iraqi monarchy in OTL’s August of 1958 when the government moved its troops to counter the United Arab Republic’s maneuvers to the west, assassinating both King Faisal and ‘Abd al-Ilah.
 

Buba

A total creep
Going back to my favourite subject :) - All Volunteer Force - if the Army is being used to Assist the Civil Power (to use a British phrase) then volunteers are better than conscripts - they should be more uniform ideologically. If I understand US Legislation - the Selective Service Act needs extensions - hence all that is need is not extending it. I.e. no legislation needed to end it.

Now, as Indians have made an appearance - another of my pet projects - Indian casinos. Maybe the landmark Court rulings are sped up a decade or two and Indian Nations are allowed to organise gambling (semi)independently of State Legislation?
Dewey could think of this as it'd IMO be an anti-Mob move - with gambling (and maybe prostitution) legal on Reservations this would cut into their money making activities. The reasoning - I imagine that quite a few otherwise upstanding Citizens with a weakness for gambling would prefer to spend their money on legal gambling than on back alley agents.
And if those legal agents are a commuter train ride away ... e.g. there is a Reservation on Long Island and another half way between Boston and New York - think of what booming business these would do ...
‘red wave’
ITTL there would be no misleading red=not Democrat colour code emerging. As everywhere else blue will be used for the more right wing and red for the more left wing party.

BTW - good slogans for 1960 and 1964 elections in reaching out to black voters could be - "Party of Lincoln" and "100 Years - Let's Finish the Job!".

Good point that with no Nasser the Iraqi monarchy is likely to survive.
Didn't the US intervene in Lebanon in ... '58? Also butterflied away?

I'm hopeful to see a US backed South Sudan emerging ...
Is 1960 and the resulting decolonisation mess and associated genocides still on the books?
 
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Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Going back to my favourite subject :) - All Volunteer Force - is the army is being used to assist the Civil Power (to use a British phrase) then volunteers are better than conscripts - they should be more uniform ideologically. If I understand US Legislation - the Selective Service Act needs extensions - hence all that is need is not extending it. I.e. no legislation needed to end it.
Now, as Indians have made an appearance - another of my pet projects - Indian casinos. Maybe the landmark Court rulings are sped up a decade or two and Indian Nations are allowed to organise gambling (semi)independently of State Legislation?
Dewey could think of this as it'd IMO be an anti-Mob move - with gambling (and maybe prostitution) legal on Reservations this would cut into their money making activities. The reasoning - I imagine that quite a few otherwise upstanding Citizens with a weakness for gambling would prefer to spend their money on legal gambling than on back alley agents.
And if those legal agents are a commuter train ride away ... e.g. there is a Reservation on Long Island and another half way between Boston and New York - think of what booming business these would do ...

ITTL there would be no misleading red=not Democrat colour code emerging. As everywhere else blue will be used for the more right wing and red for the more left wing party.
BTW - good slogans for 1960 and 1964 elections in reaching out to black voters - "Party of Lincoln" and "100 Years - Let's Finish the Job!".

Good point that with no Nasser the Iraqi monarchy is likely to survive.
Didn't the US intervene in Lebanon in ... '58? Also butterflied away?

I'm hopeful to see US backed South Sudan emerging ...
Is 1960 and the resulting decolonisation mess and associated genocides still on the books?
Yes indeed, the Selective Service Act kept being extended every two and then four years; as of the Halleck presidency, much like OTL it's up for renewal in 1959 (having been extended for 4 years for the first time in 1955), so I'll be bringing it up in the next update.

Good call on the Indian casinos, BTW. The Lumbee from this update are unlikely to have any - they're actually among the Indians who never got a reservation. But for the ones who do, accelerated legislation & rulings allowing for casinos does seem within the realm of possibility. Thanks to Batista falling a little earlier and Cuba promptly driving the Mob out in a 'moral purification' campaign with Dewey's blessing, American gamblers are going to need another outlet for their vices, and it's entirely possible that the federal government will decide to provide one that they can actually make money off of & keep out of mafia control. That said it probably wouldn't come as early as the '50s, what with the Halleck administration's conservatism and J. Edgar Hoover being Chief Justice - sometime in the '60s, since to my understanding the ball on native gambling got rolling in the '70s and '80s - and if it did it's exceedingly unlikely Halleck would go as far as legalizing prostitution.

IIRC the red-blue color associations with the GOP/Dems hadn't fully set in yet as of the '50s, yes, and neither had even committed to an official party color. Both parties still used the colors interchangeably and so did the press when referring to them, personally I just called it a 'red' wave for simplicity - I've got to admit I have gotten too used to the present-day color scheme myself. The Republicans have certainly earned for themselves a strong and longstanding attachment to the 'Party of Lincoln' label in most Americans' minds ITL, and will be beating that drum for all it's worth going forward: between Dewey, Halleck and the Dixiecrat opponents they've faced in the past two elections, they are now unquestionably the party of civil rights, and the perception isn't likely to go away even if the Democrats finally regroup under a non-Dixiecrat and start trying to play catchup.

Yep, much like the Iraqi monarchy's survival, no Nasser -> no United Arab Republic -> gravely weakened Arab nationalist agitation throughout the region, including Lebanon. To my understanding the Nasserist al-Murabitoun played a major role in organizing the unrest in Lebanon which got America to intervene historically, but they didn't even form until 1957, by which point Nasser is already dead and Arab nationalism crushed ITL. The sectarian tensions between Lebanon's dominant Maronite Christians and the Sunnis, Shias, other Christians, etc. are still there (and if/when they do explode the earlier ascent of Islamism as a major political force ITL is unlikely to mean any good things for the conflict), but without Nasser & the UAR to light the match the incumbent president Chamoun can keep a lid on the more slowly-boiling situation for this time being.

Thanks to the Suez Crisis going favorably for the tripartite powers, France & Britain are both more inclined to put off decolonization a bit longer. It'll still happen - averting decolonization altogether would IMO need a pre-WW2 POD - and it's extremely unlikely that anyone can avert all of the messy post-colonial conflicts and genocides, but the British, at least, can manage the process more steadily and reduce the amount of senseless violence that will follow their exit from Africa. They had some pretty big plans for the post-colonial transition, like the East African Federation, which will have a considerably bigger chance of seeing the light of day thanks to their continued presence and there being no Macmillan ministry to issue a 'Winds of Change' speech. France meanwhile can and will be hanging in Algeria for longer, they've already got the upper hand militarily over the FLN and now the latter can't expect any help from Nasser either.
 

Buba

A total creep
With accelerated Civil Rights - and the Black Vote come early to US politics - there might be some impact on foreign policy. Considering how nasty the British were in Kenya there could be some anti-British sentiment.
In Africa the French could be nasty too, of course - but US journalists no speak ze francaise so they'd not visit French colonies for fact finding ...

Good point about Hoover being on the SCOTUS - that and other-than-OTL appointments to the Supreme Court are a great POD in itself - something I overlooked :)
 
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stevep

Well-known member
Circle of Willis

Some interesting updated. [Been off-line for a week due to access problems so only now catching up.]. Hope Halleck can keep MacArthur in line else things could get very nasty very early.

Sounds like the battle for black rights in the south is occurring earlier but as a result facing even more violent resistance. Is there in problems outside the old south as racism, although generally not as deeply embedded was an issue elsewhere in the US.

I am/was fearing that with a more conservative line by Eden Britain would seek to stay too long in terms of colonies and at some point more and more people will realise their a huge waste of money in most/all cases. Will be issues in terms of where there are prominent white settler minorities of course, especially with the level of violence on both sides.

On post #43 is there something missing from the penultimate paragraph or are you giving a sense of foreboding? Where it ends "The president was also loath to spend too much money on keeping the defeated Yunnanese KMT afloat, because as it turned out… " Or was this a reference to the death of the 1st American advisor in Vietnam.

Steve
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
With accelerated Civil Rights - and the Black Vote come early to US politics - there might be some impact on foreign policy. Considering how nasty the British were in Kenya there could be some anti-British sentiment.
In Africa the French could be nasty too, of course - but US journalists no speak ze francaise so they'd not visit French colonies for fact finding ...

Good point about Hoover being on the SCOTUS - that and other-than-OTL appointments to the Supreme Court are a great POD in itself - something I overlooked :)
Ah yes, British and American interests in the not-yet-former colonies will not necessarily always be aligned. Even now, after an American-assisted victory at Suez and a more openly pro-British/French president than Dewey at the helm, there's already a few cracks emerging: America being quite chummy with Muslim Brotherhood Egypt because of the latter's extreme anti-Communism, for example, despite the MB also despising Britain (though to be fair, at this point that'd probably be true of any Egyptian regime that isn't a blatant British puppet). Or Britain's Hashemite proxies in the Mashriq and their plans to retake their Arabian homeland from the Saudis - can't imagine Aramco, and by extension the US, wouldn't have some very angry objections to that if they ever actually try.

As time marches on and Halleck is inevitably replaced by a president whose outlook may not be so pro-Anglo-French, either after 1960 or 1964, it's a good bet that Anglo/Franco-American policy in the Mideast & Africa will increasingly diverge and possibly even come into conflict with each other.
Circle of Willis

Some interesting updated. [Been off-line for a week due to access problems so only now catching up.]. Hope Halleck can keep MacArthur in line else things could get very nasty very early.

Sounds like the battle for black rights in the south is occurring earlier but as a result facing even more violent resistance. Is there in problems outside the old south as racism, although generally not as deeply embedded was an issue elsewhere in the US.

I am/was fearing that with a more conservative line by Eden Britain would seek to stay too long in terms of colonies and at some point more and more people will realise their a huge waste of money in most/all cases. Will be issues in terms of where there are prominent white settler minorities of course, especially with the level of violence on both sides.

On post #43 is there something missing from the penultimate paragraph or are you giving a sense of foreboding? Where it ends "The president was also loath to spend too much money on keeping the defeated Yunnanese KMT afloat, because as it turned out… " Or was this a reference to the death of the 1st American advisor in Vietnam.

Steve
No problem, welcome back! Yes indeed, there's quite a bit of racism north of the Mason-Dixon Line too - but (outside of the '20s when the Midwest in general and Indiana in particular was the redoubt of the KKK until their Grand Dragon, D. C. Stephenson, was outed as a psychotic rapist & murderer targeting white women) it was usually a less violent, all-pervasive and in-your-face breed of racism compared to the sort common south of said line. Schools outside of the South were for the most part already either integrated by law or had no legislation requiring them to be segregated before Brown v. Board of Education, for example.

But you certainly did have things like sundown towns and redlining to keep blacks out of the 'proper' neighborhoods in the North. That sort of subtler, more insidious racism wasn't really the focus of the civil rights struggle in the '50s however (IOTL or here), simply because the Southern variety was so much more blatant and brutal that it grabbed everyone's attention. And the measures used to challenge the former (such as busing and mandating all private businesses to not discriminate) got a lot more pushback because they were perceived as being so much less justified and more genuinely invasive of people's private lives & property rights when Northern governors weren't using the National Guard to lock minorities out of high schools.

Britain's long game here is definitely a dangerous one, perhaps as much or more as the hasty decolonization post-Suez defeat we saw IOTL. The way I see it, the two most likely outcomes are polarized extremes with very little in-between: either they actually deliver (despite the strain on their finances and limited resources) on their stated aim of building up native civil administrations and economies to the point that they're able to leave smoothly functioning states in place when they do pull out, or their continued rule racks up so much opprobrium that it's an even bigger disaster than OTL when they leave. It's also entirely possible that they get different outcomes in different colonies, managing a successful transition to majority rule in some and horribly failing in others.

Also yes, it's the latter - that last bit was indeed supposed to lead into the next paragraph.
 

Earl

Well-known member
Cool TL you have here! Liked the story abunch with how Dewy is turning out (even though Personally I am actually a big Harry Truman Man) and now the Halleck Presidency. On Civil Rights and the Parties I got a question (And my apologies if this has been answered before and I missed it) How do African Americans outside the South vote ITTL? Ive seen this done badly before with a Conservative Alt Hist, where they all start turning Republican for Civil Rights when really the change up north started due to economic concerns and dates back to FDR and the New Deal Coalition and with similar economic Concerns still in play:

Black_Vote_Pres.jpg
Now I dont expect the Republican Push for Civil Rights to be totally Unanswered, especially in the South and the Northern Black people probably are weary now that the Democrats nominated a Outright Segerationist but I dont think it be a total turn over. At least not right away, if the Democrats continue going Segrationist than yeah but those economic concerns will always be around.
 

Buba

A total creep
1 - As black voters are not a hive mind, maybe those in the South vote GOP and those in the North vote Dem?
2 - Question re the quoted graph - what % of Southern blacks voted pre Civil Rights?
Are the pre-1960 figures chiefly for North&West voters?
 

Earl

Well-known member
1 - As black voters are not a hive mind, maybe those in the South vote GOP and those in the North vote Dem?
2 - Question re the quoted graph - what % of Southern blacks voted pre Civil Rights?
Are the pre-1960 figures chiefly for North&West voters?
Yeah, the differing regional votes would make the most sense I feel and for the Graph, I think its a total accounting of black voters during that time and due to the South being well...Not at all good, it have to be North and West blacks. That being said, Id expect Southerners to also vote Democrat. Not out of a special love of the party, but because thats the only option in town due to the Republican Party there basically being complete shells (often controlled by Democratic Bosses) when they werent controlled by conservative whites who were as a rule, ex dixecrats. The Republican Party in the south would have to do alot more development to get effective Southern Republican Reps out of there.
 

Earl

Well-known member
Also my Only Real Big Criticism of the TL so far: How Is Mac still a thing? By all Rights that circumvention of the chain of command and Nuclear Level strikes should get him in front of a Court martial, if only to say to the rest of the world, "Look were not homocidal Cow Boys guys..." and not to mention the domestic effects (mainly that we dont want to have this establish the same precadent that happend with the Japanese of the military doing basically whatever the fuck it wanted). Especially as news of the sheer scale of human devestation he just unleashed got out (And I have no doubt the Reds would be all too happy to let in all the American and Europeon Press come into confirm it for themselves, this is something too precious for Pravda to make up) I have no doubt that theird be large scale domestic and international demands for his extradition to the hague. Granted I imagine that he'd have a large die hard core of supporters to make the process extremely messy domestically but not enough to save his ass.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Cool TL you have here! Liked the story abunch with how Dewy is turning out (even though Personally I am actually a big Harry Truman Man) and now the Halleck Presidency. On Civil Rights and the Parties I got a question (And my apologies if this has been answered before and I missed it) How do African Americans outside the South vote ITTL? Ive seen this done badly before with a Conservative Alt Hist, where they all start turning Republican for Civil Rights when really the change up north started due to economic concerns and dates back to FDR and the New Deal Coalition and with similar economic Concerns still in play:

Black_Vote_Pres.jpg
Now I dont expect the Republican Push for Civil Rights to be totally Unanswered, especially in the South and the Northern Black people probably are weary now that the Democrats nominated a Outright Segerationist but I dont think it be a total turn over. At least not right away, if the Democrats continue going Segrationist than yeah but those economic concerns will always be around.
Hey, thanks for reading! :) You're correct, most Northern blacks were voting Democratic since FDR due to a mix of economic considerations and the Republicans having essentially given up on civil rights under Hoover (who was an ally of the Lily-White faction within the party), and there's several black Democratic congressmen such as Harlem's Adam Powell who I mentioned in the 1954 update. That's changing ITL between Dewey/Halleck taking a much harder stance on civil rights than Eisenhower & the GOP of our timeline did on one hand, and the Democrats nominating Dixiecrats twice in a row on the other, but not so much that a majority of them are voting GOP now. For the 1956 presidential election, I wrote that a lot of Northern blacks repulsed by not only John Sparkman's candidacy but also Halleck's economic proposals went to Hubert Humphrey's Progressive vehicle, or else just stayed home.

As Humphrey proved, the Democrats can easily regain the black voters lost in 1952 and '56 if they just nominate someone who isn't a fire-eating segregationist. Conversely the Republicans' best bet to keep their gains among that demographic meanwhile would be to remain committed to civil rights and also lift as many blacks into the middle & upper-middle class (who are friendlier to Republican economics than the blue-collar working class) as they can, which is what Dewey and Halleck have been trying to do with their policies. Moreso Dewey, who being a coastal liberal Republican, was less averse to economic interventionism than Halleck.

You're also correct on the weakness of Republican party infrastructure in the South, which I highlighted in the midterms of the 1958 update. Try as they might - and Halleck & company certainly tried valiantly - they just can't set up equivalents to the longstanding Democratic political machines down there overnight. Neither he nor Dewey before him have managed to crack into the Deep South as Eisenhower did historically, and this was also one of the reasons for why the Republican wave across the South which Halleck hoped to counter the Democratic gains in the Midwest & Northeast simply did not materialize in those midterms: of the 6 Southern states where Senate seats (VA, TN, NC, MS, FL, TX) were up for election that year, I only gave the GOP North Carolina, which was the closest of the races (relatively speaking) IOTL and also the site of a much bloodier and nationally controversial Battle of Hayes Pond ITL.

As for MacArthur, the Republican leadership have put themselves in a bind with him. Dewey made the choice to capitalize on him going nuclear, after all; turning around and then prosecuting him for apparently doing the right thing (for if it wasn't right, Dewey wouldn't have pressed the advantages Mac created, no?) would be a tough sell at best, especially considering that 1) Mac could simply be honest and reveal to the world that Dewey gave him instructions so vague that they amounted to an order & authorization to end the war before Christmas and 2) as you say, he has a legion of fans, including some very prominent Senators & Representatives who already disliked Dewey and thought the latter to be a borderline pinko for trying to veto the McCarran Internal Security Act; if he pisses them off even more, they could easily ally with the Democrats to derail every bit of his agenda going forward. This was simply not a fight Dewey could afford or wanted to fight, doubly so since going along with the flow (as he basically did) apparently brought him no short-term disadvantage and a host of positives, though it certainly didn't set good long-term precedents either re: the chain of command or international relations (particularly with the Third World).

The Soviets will certainly portray MacArthur as a genocidal madman and Dewey as either the same or at 'best' a weak leader who let him go that far, but they won't find much of a domestic audience in the '50s States with the Red Scare at its fever pitch, and Dewey himself obviously wouldn't endorse anything they say. As the last bits of the 1950 update suggest, his way of dealing with Mac's actions politically is to try to move past Korea as fast as he can & never bring it back up once it stops being the #1 thing the public talks about, and though there are even historians and pundits who claim he was actually a 40D chess grandmaster who planned the whole thing with the general, he won't personally correct them for the rest of his life.
 
Year three of the Halleck presidency: 1959

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
1959

America welcomed two new states into the Union this year: Alaska on January 3, and Hawaii on August 21. Both had few opponents in Congress and had been further aided in their quest for statehood by Vice President Knowland, who (having long chafed at the vice presidency’s lack of responsibilities) had essentially made promoting the two territories’ drive for statehood into his pet cause. The new 49th and 50th states were expected to balance each other out politically: Alaska was perceived to be a Democratic outpost (and indeed it had a Democratic governor in William Egan and sent two Democrats, Bob Bartlett and Ernest Gruening, to Washington as its first Senators), while Hawaii (with its Republican governor William Quinn and two Republican Senators, Hiram Fong and Wilfred Tsukiyama, who were also the country’s first Asian Senators[1]) was expected to remain a Republican one.

The congressmen from these new states would soon have something quite big dropped into their lap. The Halleck administration had, as part of their unending efforts to balance the budget, proposed ending the draft by not renewing the Selective Service Act: the president’s argument was that a sleeker, more professional military comprised solely of volunteers would be better suited to the challenges America was facing abroad, as the Suez Crisis had made him completely confident in the power of America’s nuclear arsenal scaring the Soviets away from any sort of direct military confrontation with the West. He’d watched the fighting in Korea alongside Dewey, after all, and far from sharing the latter’s regrets Halleck counted them both lucky that the now-Secretary of Defense had used the nuclear option when he did: had it gone on much longer, the draft would have surely put much strain on a US treasury and public already worn out after the Second World War, and God knows how that’d work out for his and Dewey’s reelection campaign. And surely a smaller military – even one equipped with top-of-the-line armament and always on standby to deploy to wherever America needed them to be, whether it was an ally’s colony or an independent country like South Vietnam or Burma – would be cheaper to maintain on top of being more efficient, wouldn’t it?

Alas, no small number of congressmen disagreed, and the aforementioned Secretary of Defense led the charge with backup from Interior Secretary McCarthy. MacArthur advanced the argument that to abolish the draft would be to leave America without the manpower needed to counter the Soviet threat in a hot war, all but guaranteeing it would have to initiate a nuclear exchange – and, while acknowledging that he was hardly the sort of man to shy away from that, he also pointed out that using the nukes in Korea wasn’t his first option, only the one he turned to after the PLA stormed over the border to try to defend the aggressor in the war. Other Senators and Representatives from both parties claimed the draft instilled civic virtue in the hearts of American youths and gave even (nay, especially) the unwilling who needed it most a chance to serve their country; MacArthur not only also agreed with that position, but advocated scrapping the student deferments introduced at the dawn of the Korean War, allowing only an exemption for medical students at the most. “Nothing wrong with the son of a rich man having to rub shoulders with a plumber’s boy on the front line. The first can learn some humility, and the second can pick up some manners,” the old general had joked.

Halleck asserted that, as long as America had an absolute superiority in both nuclear weapons and delivery systems, maintaining a huge and expensive conventional military would amount to an anchor chained to the national budget’s feet with no real necessity. MacArthur and the defense hawks countered that America can and should maintain both a powerful conventional force and a massive nuclear arsenal – the money they saved from the 1957 cuts to the welfare state could be reinvested in defense, after all. An exasperated Halleck snapped at MacArthur and his cabinet, “That would defeat the point of making those cuts in the first place. I’m trying to save the American people some money here, not shuffle around the furniture and change the window dressing on our budget!” The president also ruled out cooperating with the liberal Democrats to end the draft in exchange for reinstating the cut New Deal funds for much the same reason: “Haven’t I already given Johnson and his friends enough already?” He had grumbled, referring to the concessions he'd made on government aid to fight the recession to get Lodge’s voting security act through the Senate.

In the end, MacArthur’s opposition and the lack of a Republican majority in either house of Congress, with the Republicans still present after the bloodbath that was 1958’s midterms being further divided between budget hawks and defense hawks (including the two new Republican Senators from Hawaii, Tsukiyama being a supporter of the president’s initiative while Fong backed the draft), spelled doom for Halleck’s efforts to kill the draft. Instead Congress wound up sending him a veto-proof extension to the Selective Service Act, which he reluctantly signed in hopes of preserving what political capital he still had for a more winnable fight in the future. The president was determined not to use the draft unless confronted with a full-on Soviet invasion of Europe, anyway, and privately wrote notes explaining his position and recommending giving it another look which he intended to pass on to his successor, whether that man succeeded him in January of 1961 or 1965.

Overseas, a rebellion flared up in Tibet when Lin Biao’s regime threatened to arrest the 14th Dalai Lama for turning up at a religious festival that hadn’t been cleared with them yet. Peaceful protests in the capital of Lhasa were met with brute force from the authorities, and consequently quickly escalated into riots and then a rebellion across the Himalayan nation. The numerous but poorly-armed rebels temporarily liberated Lhasa from the Chinese, only to be rapidly defeated in less than two weeks once the PLA came at them in force – too little time for the CIA, or anyone else, to assist them. What they could assist with was getting the Dalai Lama a top-secret flight to Thailand[2], having had to rule India out as a possible destination due to Delhi’s lingering post-Korea hostility to the United States. Moreover Tibetan resistance lingered outside the cities and towns, and these rebel groups (of which the best organized was the Chushi Gangdruk, or ‘Four Rivers Six Ranges’) received discreet CIA airlifts of materiel and advisors over the Himalayas; at times their members were also temporarily smuggled out of the country to receive combat training on Saipan. As far as Halleck was concerned, though he was skeptical of these rebels actually prevailing in the long run, any avenue to cheaply distract and tie down Soviet proxy forces (of which he considered the Chinese to be the most dangerous) was a welcome one.

The Indians were given even more reason to distrust America when Halleck and the CIA sprang their plan for Burma. With the grudging support of Chiang Kai-shek, who saw with the rapidity of last year’s defeat in Yunnan that the Southwestern KMT could not realistically defeat the PRC, Li Mi officially made common cause with a number of rebel groups in the country, of which the Karen National Union in Kayin State and the Noom Suk Harn among the Shan were the largest and best-organized. Some, like the Karen, sought full independence from the construct of the Burmese state; others simply sought autonomy under a federal system; but all were united in violent opposition to Rangoon, and the weary but battle-hardened thousands of KMT troops who had crossed the border & their CIA handlers proved a potent addition to the once poorly-armed and disorganized insurgents. Said insurgents began to formally fight as one under the banner of the ‘United Nationalities Council’: officially, they now sought the overthrow of the Burmese regime followed by a grand conference to determine the future of Burma’s peoples. By the year’s end Li Mi and the Shan had worked together to score the rebel alliance’s first major conventional victory over the Burmese army outside Kengtung and secured the city as their primary base, while the Karen were laying siege to their own state capital of Pa-an with CIA-supplied mortars and American & Pakistani intelligence (operating out of East Pakistan) were breathing new life into the previously-nearly-defeated Rohingya Mujahideen of Rakhine State.

While Burma turned to the Soviet Union for military aid and the Kremlin was always happy to sell more weapons, the Stalinist troika had their eyes set on a much bigger fish than Burma could ever be. Delhi had initiated secret negotiations with them, fearing encirclement by American proxies (of which Pakistan was the largest and surely the most hated in India) and the possibility of American nukes being used to back any aggression they might mount in the future. As the war in Burma ramped up, the only thing left standing in the way of a Moscow-Delhi accord was China’s insistent claim on the mountainous border region of Aksai Chin, where the PRC had built a road without informing India. But the Soviets were confident they could arm-twist Lin Biao into giving that claim up eventually, and/or that Burma falling to the American-backed rebels would force India to align with the Eastern Bloc without them even having to do that.

Out east, Communist North Vietnam launched the first blow of what would become the Second Indochina War. As a prelude to their efforts to topple the South Vietnamese government from within or at least weaken it gravely, they invaded the neighboring Kingdom of Laos. North Vietnamese regulars spearheaded attacks against Royal Laotian Army positions along the latter’s southeastern border, easily overwhelming their badly outnumbered and (on account of all that Soviet equipment they’d been stockpiling for years) outgunned enemy before suddenly retreating to allow their Pathet Lao proxies to hold the ground they’d taken. Hanoi did not intend to march on Vientiane – not yet, anyway – but rather to create an overland connection to South Vietnam which allowed them to circumvent the official border and supply the growing Communist insurgency through Laos.

Meanwhile in South Vietnam, until this ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ was forcibly opened, Ngo Dinh Diem’s government (corrupt and ineffective at land reform as it was) had actually been experiencing considerable success against said Communist insurgents on their soil. He had crushed the gangsters of the Binh Xuyen and the militia of the Cao Dai religious sect, which left only the Communists as the last major threat to his rule, and he’d been dealing with them as thoroughly and efficiently as he had his other foes until they started getting significant reinforcements and Soviet war supplies seemingly out of thin air. As usual, Halleck was happy to respond to Diem’s call for increased aid against the Communists as long as he could do so on the cheap, which meant ramping up arms shipments to South Vietnam and having the CIA & Military Assistance Advisory Group (as the American advisors already in Vietnam were called) work more closely with their ARVN counterparts to iron out a counterinsurgency strategy.

Over in Africa, pro-independence riots broke out across the Congolese colonial capital of Leopoldville when the Belgian government refused to grant independence to the colony immediately; instead, they were divided between supporters of holding on to Congo indefinitely (mostly the actual settlers on the ground and their representatives) and adherents of a plan written by prominent academic and WWII resistance fighter A. A. van Bilsen. This plan called for them to maintain colonial rule for the next 30 years and use that time to build up an educated civil service capable of administering Congo, something which the Congolese who learned of it were extremely skeptical of to put it mildly (perhaps not wrongly, considering Belgium’s past track record in managing the colony).

While the debates raged around King Baudouin I, himself a supporter of the idea of an equal Belgo-Congolese union, the ferocity with which the Force Publique had put down the riots – followed by an aggressive campaign to arrest their known and suspected ringleaders – incensed young nationalist leader Antoine Gizenga, who spurned his boss Patrice Lumumba’s appeal for calm and went underground with like-minded radical members of the independentist Congolese National Movement. (Lumumba’s efforts to maintain a peaceful & legalistic course to gaining independence were promptly rewarded when Emile Janssens, the hardline commander of the Force Publique, had him arrested for sedition, further discrediting the legal-minded nationalists and driving more Congolese to follow in Gizenga’s footsteps) Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov found in Gizenga a suitable new proxy with which to engage NATO in Africa, and both men had the KGB draw up plans to contact him and start figuring out how to get supplies to his base in the eastern Congolese jungle. Even as one African bush war ended with the defeat of the last Mau Mau holdouts in Kenya, another was beginning to flare up on the opposite end of the continent.

In the Space Race, American sent and then recovered the first two living beings to enter space. On May 28 a rocket with two monkeys on board, ‘Baker’ and ‘Able’, was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral, and after sixteen minutes it was successfully recovered off the coast of Puerto Rico by the tugboat USS Kiowa. Both monkeys survived, unlike a predecessor who had been sent in a similar mission the year before.

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

[1] Historically, the Republican Tsukiyama was narrowly defeated by Democrat Oren Long in the contest for Hawaii’s second Senate seat in its first congressional elections as a US state.

[2] IOTL, the Dalai Lama fled to India instead.
 

stevep

Well-known member
Well some heated confrontations there, both inside the US government and the wider world.

I like the irony that when they 1st became states Alaska was a Democrat stronghold and Hawaii a Republican one. :)

If I understand it correctly, the US has ended the draft, relying on only professional forces once current draftees have done their time but retains the right to draft new men if/when a crisis develops? Which has the advantage of satisfying both sides to a degree but does have some problems.
a) The advantage of continued conscription, as well as being cheaper per man is that it allows a larger force to be supported in peace or war. Using a draft in a crisis means that either you have large amounts of expensive equipment stockpiled that may never get used or your got nothing to equip the new recruits with.
b) The advantage of a professional army is that while smaller its probably better equipped and motivated as well as trained. Especially since a lot of those professionals aren't busy a lot of the time training continued waves of conscripts. However of course it can be stretched by a large or continued crisis.
c) Drafts only in crisis are cheaper but still have the problem of a) plus there's no pool of at least partially trained former conscripts to call on quickly so that crisis needs to be long enough to train them effectively. Also as the US found with Vietnam OTL and might find again here such recruits could be less than motivated for their service, to put it mildly.
Always a complex issue for any great power.

I'm a bit surprised that the Dalai Lama could reach Thailand and wondering how CIA aid to the rebels is being flown in without going through India? Unless it is being secretly smuggled in that way which could cause a hell of a storm if/when that's revealed. Other than Nepal and Bhutan which also require passage through India to get anywhere I don't like Tibet has any border than with India?

The operation in Burma is a big risk, even apart from the potential impact on India. If it works how are the bulk of the Burmese population going to be mollified by a revolution largely driven by minority groups and foreigners [Chinese refugees from China and the CIA?] Plus if it looked like it might succeed is there a danger of China sending 'assistance' to the regime? I could see China finding that attractive as a revenge for what happened during the Korean war. [Nearly put Mao there then remembered he had been replaced!] Although that's likely to have other butterflies with Russia - possibly still a split between Moscow and Beijing - and India.

Sounds like Vietnam is shaping up to develop as OTL, which could be nasty. Did the communists start their offensive actions this early OTL.

Anyway another interesting chapter. Please keep up the good work.

Steve
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Well some heated confrontations there, both inside the US government and the wider world.

I like the irony that when they 1st became states Alaska was a Democrat stronghold and Hawaii a Republican one. :)

If I understand it correctly, the US has ended the draft, relying on only professional forces once current draftees have done their time but retains the right to draft new men if/when a crisis develops? Which has the advantage of satisfying both sides to a degree but does have some problems.
a) The advantage of continued conscription, as well as being cheaper per man is that it allows a larger force to be supported in peace or war. Using a draft in a crisis means that either you have large amounts of expensive equipment stockpiled that may never get used or your got nothing to equip the new recruits with.
b) The advantage of a professional army is that while smaller its probably better equipped and motivated as well as trained. Especially since a lot of those professionals aren't busy a lot of the time training continued waves of conscripts. However of course it can be stretched by a large or continued crisis.
c) Drafts only in crisis are cheaper but still have the problem of a) plus there's no pool of at least partially trained former conscripts to call on quickly so that crisis needs to be long enough to train them effectively. Also as the US found with Vietnam OTL and might find again here such recruits could be less than motivated for their service, to put it mildly.
Always a complex issue for any great power.

I'm a bit surprised that the Dalai Lama could reach Thailand and wondering how CIA aid to the rebels is being flown in without going through India? Unless it is being secretly smuggled in that way which could cause a hell of a storm if/when that's revealed. Other than Nepal and Bhutan which also require passage through India to get anywhere I don't like Tibet has any border than with India?

The operation in Burma is a big risk, even apart from the potential impact on India. If it works how are the bulk of the Burmese population going to be mollified by a revolution largely driven by minority groups and foreigners [Chinese refugees from China and the CIA?] Plus if it looked like it might succeed is there a danger of China sending 'assistance' to the regime? I could see China finding that attractive as a revenge for what happened during the Korean war. [Nearly put Mao there then remembered he had been replaced!] Although that's likely to have other butterflies with Russia - possibly still a split between Moscow and Beijing - and India.

Sounds like Vietnam is shaping up to develop as OTL, which could be nasty. Did the communists start their offensive actions this early OTL.

Anyway another interesting chapter. Please keep up the good work.

Steve
Thanks for reading all this way! Re: the Dalai Lama's escape and aid to the Tibetans, I agree that it would indeed have required flying through Indian airspace or smuggling overland through NE India before they can reach East Pakistan/Bangladesh (and in the DL's case, head out for Thailand from Dhaka). One (admittedly extremely rough) alternative route would have been to go through Burma's northwestern Kachin State into friendly territory being held by the KMT and Burmese rebels, but at this time the Kachin were still one of the ethnic groups loyal to Rangoon, ruling that out until and unless the regime falls. The Indians will definitely not be happy if they find out, it'd at best be yet another straw precariously perched on a stack of other things the US has done to push them away to date.

It's possible that China would intervene on behalf of the Burmese gov't, though the memory of what happened when they tried something similar in Korea is just as likely to scare them away from the prospect as it is to motivate them into getting revenge; it'd probably depend on whether they can count on the Soviet nuclear umbrella being strong enough to deter Halleck from so much as blustering when and if Rangoon should call for their help. However from where the Soviets are sitting, no matter what happens in Burma, they're in a win-win situation: if America's proxies prevail they will drive India further into the Soviet camp, and if they lose, well that likely means Rangoon will have little choice but to turn to Moscow to guarantee long-term survival anyway. A Sino-Soviet split at the same time it occurred IRL isn't too likely given Lin Biao's dependence on Soviet reconstruction aid ITL, but it's certainly a possibility further down the line if the Soviets further mistreat the PRC by putting their foot down over Aksai Chin to win over India or compromising Chinese interests elsewhere.

On another note (and addressed more generally to the fine readers of this thread), I've decided that I will be ending this timeline in 1960, making last night's update the penultimate one; I've said as much before but my initial outline didn't even extend past 1956, and the end of the decade (including another presidential election) seems to me like a good place to end this TL. I think I've definitely gotten back into the writer's groove now and have got some different projects that I'd like to start soon. That said, I've learned more than a few things that surprised me while researching for this TL, got motivated enough to push past my original end-date and am definitely interested in writing a sequel to DDT (covering the '60s and early '70s at least) sometime in the future.
 
Year four of the Halleck presidency: 1960

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
1960

Four years had passed since the last presidential election, and as a new decade dawned the American people were due to head to the polls once more. The Republican and Democratic political machines rumbled back to life, the former eager to compensate for the severe bruising it took in the 1958 midterms, the latter equally determined to regain the White House after twelve years on the outside looking in. For the Republicans, incumbent President Halleck had done and said absolutely nothing to make anyone think he wouldn’t be seeking a second term, and indeed seemed to expect a smooth cruise to another four years just as his predecessor had in 1952.

Also like Dewey, Halleck found himself in for a very rude surprise when he faced an unexpectedly strong primary challenger. In his case, it was no maverick general with a highly questionable sense of restraint and proportionality – no, unlike Dewey, he faced a serious challenge from his left. Though Senator Lodge had been sufficiently mollified by his work on civil rights to not fight him for the nomination, the same could not be said of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who loudly opposed the Halleck administration’s fiscally conservative decisions[1]. A staunch promoter of Deweyite economic interventionism and infrastructure projects in particular, Rockefeller criticized Halleck for the slow pace of Interstate highway construction on his watch and his handling of the late ‘50s recession, claiming that he could have accelerated the recession’s end – or at least mitigated the suffering of millions of jobless Americans – if he had been a bit more generous with federal largesse. On March 8, the governor shocked pundits nationwide and established the seriousness of his challenge by scoring an upset victory over Halleck in New Hampshire’s primary.

Halleck and Rockefeller traded barbs as they marched on the campaign trail, where the first-term governor further surprised the fiery president with his own jovial personality and quick wit, with which he kept up with every attack the latter mounted without coming across as overly prickly or shaken himself. He was the very picture of a happy warrior, quickly becoming known nationwide for greeting growing crowds of supporters with a grin and a cheerful “Hiya, fellas!”, which made for a big change from Halleck’s volcanic temperament and the aloof, stern Dewey before them both. That Halleck was an austere WWI veteran from a modest household while Rockefeller, as his surname suggested, was born into the lap of luxury and rumored to be quite the womanizer further enhanced the contrast between the two men. For his part, Dewey remained neutral in the contest, believing he’d repaid his debts to Halleck by campaigning for him in 1956 and personally inclined to support Rockefeller but also reluctant to antagonize his Vice President turned successor.

The liberal Republicans soon gravitated overwhelmingly to ‘Rocky’, for as many of them asked, why not? Rockefeller represented not just their economic views but their social ones as well; building on Dewey’s previous achievements, he had for years been fighting to outlaw housing discrimination along racial lines as well as age- and sex-based hiring discrimination, and nearly doubled the number of minorities in the New York state bureaucracy and its organs. Halleck meanwhile rallied the conservatives to his standard, acquiring Senator Goldwater of Arizona as his fiercest and highest-profile advocate on the campaign trail. While Rockefeller declared that the new decade required a new face and mindset to tackle its inevitable challenges and that for all the good he’d done, Halleck was the ‘man of yesterday’ compared to himself, Halleck insisted that he had done what was necessary to keep the US economically solvent; that the recession had already mostly blown over; and that the nation needed a fighter like him in charge to navigate both domestic and international challenges than a ‘man who’s all smiles and fancy suits and little else’ like Rockefeller.

By July, when the Republican National Convention was due to begin, Halleck and Rockefeller were almost evenly tied in the primaries. The liberal governor had secured most of the coastal primary states, snapping up New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Oregon in addition to his initial triumph in New Hampshire; Halleck meanwhile continued to dominate with hinterland voters, taking Wisconsin, Illinois, his native Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska, West Virginia and South Dakota. Halleck also won Florida and, thanks to the aggressive campaigning of Vice President Knowland and support from Senator Nixon, California, which boded well as the two headed into Chicago for the Convention. There, although Rockefeller had done an impressive job in coming so far, he was ultimately unable to overcome Halleck’s initial lead in delegates and admitted defeat on the third ballot with 317 votes (having been whittled down from 595 on the first ballot and 472 on the second by the scheming of Halleck’s supporters) to Halleck’s 1,014. Whether motivated by party loyalty or a desire to stay in the Republican bigwigs’ good graces in anticipation of running again in 1964 (or both), he nevertheless gracefully conceded and called for all Republicans to unite behind the renewed Halleck/Knowland ticket.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, the lessons of 1952 and ’56 had finally fully sink in for the party leadership. The bosses were determined not to nominate another segregationist, though they still preferred a Southerner of more liberal (or at least genuinely moderate) leanings on the top half of the ballot to keep the Dixiecrats in their tent. Several big or growing names were thrown into the ring: Senators Humphrey (D-MN, recently returned from the ranks of the Progressives), Symington (D-MO) and Johnson (D-TX), Representative John F. Kennedy (D-MA)[2] and Governors Ross Barnett (D-MS) and Orval Faubus (D-AK). But none were to the Democratic leadership’s liking – the Southern liberals were so outspoken and had such a staunchly progressive voting record that they’d drive the Dixiecrats away if nominated, the Dixiecrats were equally unacceptable to most voters outside of the Deep South, the party bosses were no more willing to give Humphrey the nomination after his stunt last election than Strom Thurmond after 1948, and Kennedy was deemed an unknown lightweight whose Catholic faith made him unnecessarily controversial compared to the other choices.

Enter George Smathers, Senator from Florida. A signatory of the Southern Manifesto, he had nonetheless voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1954 and voiced support for federal intervention to guarantee black voting rights. In any other campaign he would probably have been dismissed as a walking contradiction, with a record as oxymoronic as a six-legged quadruped, and been little more than a favorite son candidate for his home state to fawn over. But in 1960, the Democrats thought they’d found in him the mythical ‘Southern moderate’ who could credibly unite the party; unlike 1956’s Sparkman he actually had a record, not just hollow rhetoric and the verbal support of Richard Russell, to suggest he wasn’t mortally opposed to civil rights, but unlike Johnson and Symington he wasn’t so liberal as to aggressively drive away the Dixiecrats with his mere presence, and indeed first gained his seat by toppling the staunchly progressive and even socialist-friendly Claude Pepper in 1950.

When the Democratic National Convention opened on July 11, Smathers had already taken the lead in delegates, thanks in no small part to his self-declared aim to be a unifying figure and the overt support of the Democratic establishment. The union vote had allowed him to make significant breakthroughs in the Midwest, particularly Pennsylvania and Illinois, while keeping Kennedy restricted to New England and Humphrey to the Western farming states. That Smathers was still able to win his home state of Florida while appeasing Northern Democrats with strident denunciations of the recent violent behavior of segregationist forces was taken as another good sign. Though the delegates from Dixiecrat-dominated states other than Florida tried to rally to Faubus and throw the nomination to anyone other than Smathers, their efforts were undone when Smathers struck an alliance with Kennedy and Humphrey on the convention floor, and after four days of finagling the Floridian Senator did indeed stand triumphant as the Democratic standard-bearer going into November.

In his acceptance speech, Smathers set the tone for the Democrats’ new outlook on Jim Crow thusly: “Now I’ve said many times on the road here, I don’t consider violence and law-breaking to be acceptable means of challenging laws you don’t agree with. Being another Southerner won’t exempt you from the laws of the United States. But I’m also a firm believer that words have no meaning without action. So, I pledge to y’all: if and when I am elected, I will enforce the law to its fullest extent as would be my duty as the chief executive, and I will not waste time and money on fighting to overturn decisions settled by the Supreme Court.” For his running mate Smathers chose the young, charming and well-spoken Kennedy, with whom he quickly got along splendidly[3] – to the further umbrage of Dixiecrats who were now looking at a Catholic Yankee in addition to a ‘traitor’ on the ballot. Still, with ‘Gorgeous George’ on the top of the ticket and Massachusetts’ boy-wonder Representative beneath, the Democrats would assuredly be fielding a charismatic duo that’d dominate headlines and dazzle both crowds & the press, if nothing else.

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The contrasting 1960 candidates: aged, battle-hardened President Halleck and young, telegenic 'Gorgeous' George Smathers

From late July onward, both tickets had been formally nominated and started coming to blows with one another. Halleck and Knowland came swinging out the gate, as usual: the duo relentlessly bashed Smathers for having signed the Southern Manifesto and featuring economic policies they deemed irresponsibly generous on the Democratic platform, while taking shots at Kennedy for his relative inexperience and playing up Knowland’s strong foreign policy credentials (particularly his history as a China-hawk) in contrast. Smathers and Kennedy, meanwhile, attacked the Republicans for pursuing a foreign policy they claimed was overly reckless and for their handling of the 1958 recession – as expected – while painting their proposals to accelerate economic growth by loosening the tight fiscal controls favored by the Halleck administration, cease the Republican attacks on unions and engage in tax reform as ‘fighting for the working man’ against the Republicans who represented the interests of capital. They also made an attempt at turning their youth and supposed inexperience into an advantage, casting themselves (much as Rockefeller had) as the heralds of a younger and more dynamic generation better-suited to facing the challenges of the new decade than the older Halleck and Knowland, in the process capitalizing on the public’s natural fatigue with the Republicans who’d been in power since 1948.

Further, Smathers worked hard to tour lower-class neighborhoods across the North, regardless of the majority race living there, and to make inroads with Northern blacks who’d been feeling abandoned by the Democratic embrace of segregationism in the past two elections. Most famously, he made an appearance at a Harlem event with Kennedy and Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. where he declared, “And to my negro friends, I assure y’all that you have a home in the Democratic tent and that I promise to represent your interests just as well as any white lineman or meatpacker’s, no matter what some of my esteemed compatriots might say or do.” He also spoke in favor of black boycotts and sit-ins aimed at segregated facilities, asserting “I can’t rightly say I’m in favor when whites do it – as the Citizens’ Councils often do – but not when negroes are doing it. Let nobody ever say Mama Smathers raised a hypocrite.” And when a Southern Baptist pastor by the name of Martin Luther King was arrested for spearheading such a sit-in in Atlanta, he sent his condolences to the reverend’s wife and personally appealed to Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver to release the man. While this proved unnecessary when Halleck issued a pardon to King[4], it (and King publicly thanking him for his concern in addition to the president for actually pardoning him) won him much badly-needed goodwill among blacks nationwide.

As the race entered September, both parties brought a novel treat before the American public: presidential debates which would be broadcast not only over radio, but on television. In these Smathers, nicknamed ‘Gorgeous George’ for his easy charm and friendly, amicable aura, had an important advantage over the notoriously foul-tempered Halleck. Nevertheless, Halleck had defeated the more conventionally charismatic and similarly friendlier Rockefeller in the Republican primaries, and believed that between that victory and his triumph over the Dixiecrat Sparkman four years prior, he had the experience to do the same to Smathers. In that he proved to be mistaken as early as the first question of the first debate, which dealt with voting rights and which Smathers did not run away from as Sparkman would have: “It’s unthinkable to myself that any American citizen in good standing should be prevented from exercising their fundamental freedom to vote for their own leaders. I voted for my colleague Henry Lodge’s act to ensure negroes can vote in peace – you can check the Senate records if you don’t believe me – and I’d do it again.”

Again and again the president and his challenger traded blows on live television, and time and again the latter held his ground much to the former’s frustration. Unlike with Sparkman, this time it was Halleck – having made the inconvenient decision to campaign on the day before the debate, and thus leaving himself more worn out than the fresher and better-prepared Smathers – whose already volatile temper grew increasingly frayed as the minutes wore on, and unlike the radio-only 1956 debate, this time 70 million Americans could actually watch the sweat dripping down his face, his fists clenching until his knuckles became noticeably white, and finally a vein start pulsing in his neck. Worst of all, he raised his voice to a shout when pressed by Smathers over his confrontational and pro-colonial foreign policy, loudly snapping back, “The British Prime Minister was right about Nasser, you know?! He was all beefsteak – an Arab Mussolini on the outside as my good friend Anthony Eden called him, and a Communist stooge on the inside! You bet I’m proud of helping our allies bring a thug like that down!”

That Smathers remained calm as he retorted, “Would you still be so proud if you took a minute to think about how the rest of Africa saw your decision, Mr. President? I’ve got to say, it’s funny that you want to break Jim Crow’s bindings here at home but help Britain and France tighten the chains they’ve got over Africa…” led much of the audience to decisively side with the latter. As did Halleck’s overly blunt response, perceived as both crass and hypocritical:

“You’re comparing apples to A-bombs, Senator Smathers. Me seeking to extend to the blacks here at home the liberties and protections which they’re due by right, has got nothing to do with supporting our strongest and most faithful allies in their struggle against Soviet-backed terrorists – brutes who delight in violence and rapine against not just Europeans but also their own people, who they claim to want to liberate! They deserve nothing but the peace of the grave. And you, you can’t seriously sit there and tell me you’re on the side of bandits like the Algerian National Liberation Front or the Mau Mau in Kenya or – “

“Or Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo?” Came Smathers’ rhetorical question of an answer. “Who, I’ll remind you and the audience both Mr. President, have been committed to entirely legal and peaceable methods to struggle for the independence of their countries, much as the negroes here in America have been peacefully protesting for their civil rights. I make no apology for the ones who choose the road of violence and worse still, ally with Communists to fight our allies, but those same allies have been ignoring and locking up anyone who tries choosing the peaceful way out of their empires before and after you and President Dewey gave ‘em a hand at Suez. I’m sure the terrorists you’re so concerned about would be less of a concern if that weren’t the case.” Fortunately for Halleck, the moderator chose to move the conversation along once Smathers was done talking, preventing him from further straining both his vocal chords and heart with another angry answer.

In November, the election came down to the success (or lack thereof) Smathers had had in rebuilding the Democratic coalition. The unions and white progressives living outside of the South were sufficiently satisfied by his conduct and record to cast their votes for him; it was the question of whether he’d won back Northern blacks without driving too many Dixiecrats away that was on everyone’s mind, his own included. As the votes came in, it became clear that Smathers had successfully threaded the needle: enough blacks, particularly north of the Mason-Dixon Line, had believed the Floridian Senator had turned over a new leaf to vote for him. Meanwhile white Southern Democrats decided that – as he had conveniently never said anything about signing additional civil rights legislation, only enforcing those already in place and not reversing them – he was still the lesser evil compared to Halleck, who they despised as a particularly oppressive Yankee interloper. Hard-line segregationists tried to draft Senator Harry Byrd (D-VA) to split the vote, but Byrd himself shut down such talk with his insistence that “Smathers is a slippery sonuvabitch, but he’s one we can still push around if we try hard enough. The same isn’t true of Halleck.”

At the end of it all, Halleck had fought fiercely, but it simply wasn’t enough to overcome the negative impression he’d created during the recession; growing public weariness with Republican governance throughout the entirety of the ‘50s; and the success Smathers’ stance on civil rights & popular economic proposals had had in patching up the Democratic coalition, with many Northern blacks, moderates and progressives alike flocking back to the Democrats' embrace. Fear of a Catholic being one heartbeat away from the presidency and the continued growth of the Southern black vote had even narrowly delivered the president Texas, which he considered nothing short of miraculous, but it was more than outweighed by the loss of almost the entire Midwest and many of the Western rural states thanks to farmers livid at his cuts to their subsidies and industrial workers outraged at his anti-union offensive. The Democratic ticket won this election with narrow leads in the popular and electoral votes, ensuring the Republicans’ hold on the White House would end with the decade.

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PartyCandidatesPopular VoteElectoral Votes
DemocraticGeorge A. Smathers (D-FL)/John F. Kennedy (D-MA)34,622,735 (50.3%)285
RepublicanCharles A. Halleck (R-IN)/William F. Knowland (R-CA)34,072,095 (49.5%)252

Overseas, Africa saw its first major post-colonial map revision when Egypt and Sudan completed their unification process in August. With the unanimous approval of the Egyptian National Assembly and the Sudanese military junta, the two countries merged to become the ‘Islamic Republic of Egypt and Sudan’. The post-1952 Egyptian constitution was formally abrogated and the National Assembly dissolved, to be respectively replaced by one with sharia built into its foundations and a unicameral 500-man assembly called the ‘Shura Council’. Egypt’s Hassan al-Hudaybi would retain the presidency while Sudan’s Abdallah Khalil was awarded with the office of Prime Minister, with the next Egypto-Sudanese election still scheduled for spring of 1961 as it had been in Egypt before unification. Al-Hudaybi had personally insisted on allowing other parties to run, so as to maintain at least a pretense of democracy, but nobody within or outside the new country doubted that the Muslim Brotherhood (now in full control of both Egypt’s and Sudan’s state apparatuses) would dominate the coming election.

As Egyptian troops marched south to help their new Sudanese comrades put down the brewing rebellion in South Sudan, those rebels turned to Britain (who, ironically, they had opposed before Sudanese independence, for the Colonial Office didn’t want to partition Sudan) for help. As the Muslim Brotherhood remained interminably hostile to British interests, the British were happy to help, starting by opening a supply route into South Sudan through Uganda and offering the rebels bases where they could take shelter & train on the Ugandan side of the border. Aggrey Jaden, previously a low-level administrator in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan who refused to lower the Union Jack and hoist the Sudanese tricolor in its place when the country gained its scheduled independence, emerged as the highest-profile of the increasingly organized and well-armed insurgency, whose fighters were now calling themselves the ‘Anyanya’ or ‘snake-venom’[5].

Meanwhile to the west, the Algerian War continued its slow burn. The French had already militarily defeated the rebels of the FLN (or National Liberation Front), but the Algerians refused to give up despite their heavy losses; lack of any significant battlefield victory in years; and the installation of what was effectively a ruthless police state across French Algeria, which most assuredly wasn’t above using torture & taking hostages to defeat the rebellion. The government of Guy Mollet back in the Metropole was (probably rightly) concerned that the war dragging on, with all its expenses, would further destabilize the Fourth Republic once the post-victory high of the Suez Crisis wore off fully: so they were quite happy to sign off when Jacques Massu, the general in command of French efforts in Algeria, proposed building internment camps in the middle of the Sahara to permanently break rebellious populations. Massu couldn’t care less about safety and sanitary conditions in these camps, only that they could be used to hold anyone who helped the insurgents (said insurgents were by this point just shot out of hand more often than not), and their known associates and relatives (as well as those of deceased rebels) for the duration of the conflict or, more likely, they died of thirst and lack of medicine under the Saharan sun.

Far from condemning the new French strategy, Halleck had set the CIA and military intelligence to work with and learn from Massu just as they were doing with the British ‘new villages’ in Malaya, hoping to glean useful lessons for the counterinsurgency operations in South Vietnam. That France also set off its first nuclear bomb (devised with Israeli cooperation) in the very same desert that they were looking to build these internment camps in did not bother the Halleck administration at all, as the president offered the French his congratulations for ‘making Europe ever safer from the Communist threat’[6]. The Soviets, for their part, were naturally unamused at yet another Western capitalist power going nuclear and ramped up their own bomb tests throughout the year, including the so-called ‘Tsar Bomba’: with its 50-megaton yield it was the single most powerful nuclear weapon to be tested up to this point in time, making it quite the menacing Christmas gift from Moscow to the rest of the world[7].

To the southeast, Ethiopia experienced a major shakeup when the Imperial Guard launched a coup against the emperor it served. While Haile Selassie was traveling to Brazil, generals Mengistu and Germame Neway secured key positions in the capital of Addis Ababa, took several imperial ministers and Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen hostage, and received further support from students of the growing Haile Selassie University. They declared the Crown Prince to be Emperor Amha Selassie, replacing his father who (WWII-era heroics aside) was viewed by these reformist forces as insufficiently committed to modernizing Ethiopia and had further lost popular support after failing to respond to a famine in 1958, in which 100,000 Ethiopians starved to death. Within the next 24 hours, the plotters succeeded in winning over several leaders of the regular army and isolating those they couldn’t convert[8].

To avoid senseless bloodshed, Haile Selassie agreed to abdicate in fact and allow his son to assume power early. Now emperor but still effectively a hostage of the Imperial Guard, the newly enthroned Amha Selassie appointed his father’s cousin and childhood friend Imru Selassie Prime Minister at their insistence: a deeply religious man who nevertheless held views on land reform that could almost be classified as agrarian-socialist, Ras (prince) Imru had gone so far as to distribute his own land to his peasants and was now prepared to do the same on a national scale. This was a development to the great consternation of the colonial powers who absolutely did not need a new socialist and still stridently anticolonial power arising in Africa at a time when they were busy battling growing rebellions.

Even further south, Antoine Gizenga's Congolese rebels scored their first high-profile victory over the colonial authorities on October 31 when they stormed into Rutshuru, a large town in the eastern Kivu province, under cover of night and wiped out the Force Publique garrison defending it. General Janssens sent a large column of FP troops to retake it, which the rebels ambushed on the road from the larger provincial capital of Bukavu; although they failed to repel the Belgian counterattack, they did succeed in inflicting heavy losses (relatively speaking) on the colonial force – eliminating two out of their ten tankettes and further killing 18 men at the cost of nearly 100 of their own – before retreating from Rutshuru, leaving the corpses of the garrison and every single Congolese collaborator they could get their hands on staked out in the town’s ruins. Encouraged by these events, Luba chieftain Albert Kalonji declared the independence of the ‘Republic of South Kasai’ and organized his own militia, opening a new front against the Belgians.

The deceased rebels were noted to be wielding not just weapons raided from Belgian armories but also Eastern Bloc equipment, chiefly Mosin-Nagants and their Hungarian license-built counterparts as well as PPSh-41s and even a pair of PTRS-41 anti-tank rifles. Moreover, a journalist attached to the Belgian commander’s staff caught on his camera a definitely-not-black man in a beret directing the Congolese ambush the very second it had begun; said journalist was nearly killed in the rebels’ first volley, but was saved by a Force Publique sergeant named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who pulled him to safety and had his leg and hand wounds patched up. Analysis of his photograph identified the man as a certain Ernesto Guevara: evidently, after Cuba’s Batista was overthrown before he could fight the latter man, the Argentinean had traveled abroad in search of more revolutions to fight in, and the Soviets thought him a much more expendable advisor than any of their own agents[9].

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Ernesto 'Che' Guevara planning an ambush with Congolese rebels, photographed by Pravda

Speaking of Argentina, an ocean away the country finally held its first free election since the downfall and death of Juan Peron, the military having lost public support for sustaining their dictatorship after the latter grew convinced that they’d completely purged Peronism from the country. Since even publicly referring to the late Peron or owning any Peronist merchandise was outlawed, the election was rather unsurprisingly won by the staunchly anti-Peronist Ricardo Balbin. Though he supported the coup against Peron and the destruction of the man’s political legacy, Balbin was also a liberal who disdained the violent excesses of the Aramburu junta, and hoped to avoid another military takeover. Unfortunately for him, Peronism was not quite as dead as he and Aramburu had been led to believe: left-wing Peronist terrorists attempted to bomb his inauguration ceremony, ensuring a rocky start to his administration.

Finally in Asia, as Halleck was deploying additional military advisors to South Vietnam at Diem’s request, the Burmese rebels he was backing were also making more steady progress. From Kengtung Li Mi and his Shan allies marched on the Shan State capital of Taunggyi; taking the defenders by surprise in a night attack much as the Congolese had done in Rutshuru, they seized the city after three hours of combat and (unlike said Congolese and Guevara) held it against a large but disorganized Tatmadaw counterattack near the year’s end. At the same time, the Karen National Union brought their siege of Pa-an to a successful conclusion, liberating their own home state from the Burmese government’s control.

Before the rebels could push much deeper into the center of the country, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu sued for peace and sought to start negotiations over Christmas, in which the federalization of Burma would be on the table in hopes of averting further bloodshed and, more probably, a full-blown defeat. The rebels themselves and their US backers were divided on how to proceed; some groups, such as the Shan, were content with a federal solution, while others like the Karen would not be satisfied with anything short of independence. The Americans and Li Mi too were divided on whether a weak, federal Burma that could not possibly expel the Southwestern KMT from their lands would be enough (it certainly was for the KMT) or if American interests would be better served by smaller, openly US-aligned independent countries in this corner of Asia. Meanwhile, socialist-minded hard-liners within the Tatmadaw were outraged that U Nu was negotiating at all. Led by General Ne Win, they began talking with the Soviets to secure aid in derailing the talks, taking the civilian government out of the picture altogether and then crushing the rebels militarily.

In the Space Race, the US achieved the first successful space dive (and set a new record for high-altitude dives) when Joseph Kittinger jumped from 102,800 ft up in the stratosphere, from where he also saw the Earth in all its glory before jumping. The Soviets were less fortunate: a launch pad accident at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where they had been testing the R-16 missile, killed 92.

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Blue - USA
Red - USSR
Pale blue - Official American allies (NATO, METO, SEATO, etc.)
Pink - Eastern Bloc states

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

[1] Rockefeller did briefly challenge Nixon in the OTL 1960 Republican primaries, but bowed out quickly.

[2] As he failed to dislodge Henry Cabot Lodge back in 1952, Kennedy remained a member of the House of Representatives ITL instead.

[3] Smathers and Kennedy were actually good friends IRL. With Kennedy not having been a Senator, they likely wouldn’t have met until this point ITL, but will have plenty of time to hit it off on the campaign trail regardless.

[4] Historically Nixon asked Eisenhower to pardon King, but Eisenhower declined. Halleck, of course, is the president and doesn’t need to ask anyone to issue a pardon he can give out himself.

[5] Aggrey Jaden historically didn’t organize the previously fractious and disordered South Sudanese resistance to the North into the Anyanya until 1962-63.

[6] Historically France accelerated its nuclear program to get a testable bomb by 1960 in response to the US intervention against them at Suez, not because the US was totally approving and willing to help them.

[7] The USSR field-tested Tsar Bomba in October of 1961 IOTL, eight months later than they did ITL with Halleck’s pressure on their backs.

[8] The Imperial Guard plotters failed to win over the rest of the military IOTL, resulting in their defeat once the Orthodox Church denounced them and Haile Selassie’s loyalists finished reorganizing.

[9] Che Guevara actually did fight in the Congo Crisis historically. He was, to put it mildly, not impressed with his experience there.

And that’s a wrap! Big thanks to everyone who read & commented on this TL. Personally I’m pretty happy at just being able to write a timeline all the way to its conclusion. Writing this has been a learning experience for myself, after going so long without writing a timeline – among other things, I’ll have to be on the lookout for run-on sentences and overly long paragraphs that I can break down into smaller sentences and paragraphs; avoid repetitive descriptors and paragraph/sentence starters; and break up the text with images on occasion, especially in longer posts like the 1956 update, just to refresh my own and the readers’ eyes. Also, proper narrative sections in-between or as part of the ‘timeline-format’ entries might serve me better instead of the occasional injections of dialogue in DDT, both to further break up monotony and to practice my narrative writing skills. All lessons I’ll be taking to my next timelines.

As I said in my last post, I’m happy to continue this TL with a sequel sometime in the future. Most likely it’ll span another 12 years, covering the entirety of the ‘60s and reaching into the early ‘70s. For now however, I think I'm done with modernity for a while and will instead get cracking on something set in the Middle Ages or Late Antiquity, both of which I’ve begun drawing up outlines for. If you enjoyed my work, stay tuned! I should be able to start this new timeline in a few weeks or a month, and unlike DDT I’m aiming for a longer-term project next.
 
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Buba

A total creep
Thank you for entertaining us!
I loved Haile Sellasie being kicked out - Imperial Ethiopia was a slave owning hellhole which would had fitted nicely in the XVIIIth century if not earlier.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Thank you for entertaining us!
I loved Haile Sellasie being kicked out - Imperial Ethiopia was a slave owning hellhole which would had fitted nicely in the XVIIIth century if not earlier.
You're very welcome! The reverence Haile Selassie enjoys to this day, especially among black Americans & Canadians, was something that confused me ever since I started researching him for a high school project years ago - he came across as less of a living saint and much more like an African Nicholas II, IMO, and arguably worse. Of course he had his heroic moments before and during WW2, and the Derg murdering an 83-year-old man they've already deposed and imprisoned was one of the most cowardly and dishonorable things they did in an already long litany of horrible atrocities. But he was also an autocrat who compromised only to the minimal extent he could get away with and only when absolutely forced to, most notoriously over slavery as you say (hell, the Italian Fascists abolished it in Ethiopia before he did in mid-WW2), and failed to respond to Ethiopia's chronic famines under his rule even when he had the means to, resulting in hundreds of thousands of his subjects dying several times over. Also less seriously, as he told a pan-Africanist who thought he should lead their charge, he didn't even consider himself one of them.
 

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