Alternate History Dewey Defeats Truman (for real)

[Circle of Willis]

1949

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Circle of Willis]

1950

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5] This also happened to Truman IOTL.

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

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

 

[Circle of Willis]

1951

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[4] Much thanks to stevep for the idea.

[5] Thanks to Buba for raising this possibility.

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

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

 

[Circle of Willis]

1952

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoiler: 1952 election map & stats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Circle of Willis]

1953

President Dewey hit the ground running immediately after his second inauguration, knowing full well that he had to make maximal use of the Republican trifecta he had while it lasted. First and foremost came a major cabinet shakeup: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander – Europe or SACEUR for short, was offered the position of Secretary of Defense, replacing Robert Lovett. Dewey had been shaken by MacArthur’s successes early in last year’s primaries and remained worried about the influence of his allies within the Republican Party, so he believed Eisenhower (as the great American hero of WW2’s European theater and a man whose liberal & internationalist inclinations were much more like Dewey’s own) would be a valuable counterbalance to the titan of the Pacific War. Eisenhower accepted after giving the matter much thought, and brought with him an innovative new approach to defense policy: to keep the USSR at bay he favored a rapid buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal at the expense of the conventional armed forces, the opposite of what Lovett had advocated before him[1].

Next, in the realm of general domestic policy, Dewey and his Congressional allies continued to pursue orthodox Republican policy; which is to say, modest rollbacks of the New Deal coupled with efforts to incentivize and strengthen private enterprise. The Agricultural Act of 1953 provided the Commodity Credit Corporation with reserve funds for domestic relief when deemed necessary, but also cut back on farm subsidies without eliminating them altogether – something which predictably annoyed, but did not enrage, farmers across the country, particularly in the Midwest and West. Further funds for education were disbursed to the states, and the earlier public housing program continued at a slower pace. Dewey strove to keep the budget as balanced as he could, which meant raising taxes when he spent more federal largesse and coupling tax cuts with cuts to social programs.

Dewey’s greatest and most groundbreaking push at home came in the realm of civil rights. The president took his comfortable victory over the arch-segregationist Russell as a sign that the nation, outside of the Southern diehards, was prepared to take larger steps forward on this issue, and acted accordingly. The thorough desegregation of the military was followed by an equally complete dismantlement of segregation in the federal bureaucracy, both in hiring procedures and in their physical facilities. Dewey also dictated an end to segregation within Washington D.C. itself, hammering another nail into the civil rights legacy left by Woodrow Wilson forty years before.

All this said, the president did not consider any of these achievements to be the most important milestones he’d reached on civil rights in 1953. That honor went to the passage of what was popularly known as the ‘Case Act’: the first federal anti-lynching law. Representative Clifford Case of New Jersey, one of the most vigorously pro-civil rights Republicans in the House, had revived the old Dyer anti-lynching bill from 1918. His own bill, almost an exact copy of Dyer’s, made lynching into a federal felony punishable by a minimum of 5 years in prison and opened law enforcement to prosecution if they failed to intervene during a lynching.

Like Leonidas Dyer’s original bill it passed through the House but was confronted with a filibuster in the Senate, in this case done by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina – oddly without the support of all but the most extreme of his Dixiecrat fellows, such as James Eastland of Mississippi. Despite Thurmond’s 20-hour filibuster speech however, the Case anti-lynching bill passed late this year unlike its predecessor, the Senate Republicans having found unexpected allies in freshman Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson, Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey and other liberal-minded Democrats[2]. Now it was obvious why Russell and the senior Dixiecrats did not join Thurmond: they must have resolved that the progressives in their own party would help the Republicans get this bill through come hell or high water, and that any public effort to block it was doomed as a result. Secretly Russell had attempted to get help from conservative Republican Senators such as Joe McCarthy and Patrick Hurley (R-NM) to block the bill, but they had unanimously spurned him, and after that effort fell through he seemed to have given up on doing anything but voting against it altogether.

While the Case Act was lauded by liberals in general and organizations such as the NAACP & Civil Rights Congress in particular, it predictably provoked outrage across the South. “What’s brought this on?” Eastland had been caught complaining in private, “We haven’t had to lynch anybody in two years! Now the damnyankee Republicans and their friends, the pinkos I have to put up with day after day, decide to outlaw it? Mark my words, those two years of peace and quiet we just had are gonna come to an end the instant the negroes hear they can act up without having to worry about a little discipline.” When these remarks were leaked to the public, the senior Senator from Mississippi defiantly stood by them, and no doubt many other Southern racists shared his sentiment in much cruder terms on the street level.

Dewey was not unaware that by signing the Case Act into law, he had won only half the battle. Actually making it stick on the ground would be as difficult or even more-so, given the longstanding tradition too many Southern courts and police departments had of ignoring or outright assisting lynch mobs and ‘night riders’ with bloodshed in mind. To that end, he must have confused many of the Case Act’s supporters when in the wake of Chief Justice Fred Vinson’s death in September, he decided to nominate – of all people – Attorney General Hoover to the bench, followed by replacing Hoover himself with FBI Director Tolson and in turn bumping Tolson’s deputy (and yet another Hoover loyalist) Lou Nichols up to the director’s seat. Hoover was not exactly known for having progressive or non-authoritarian views, after all.

In truth, while it is probable that this was the logical conclusion of whatever deals Dewey might’ve cut with Hoover back in 1948 and then again to appease him after passing him up for SCOTUS in 1949, Dewey also felt he absolutely had to have the FBI in his corner if he was to enforce the new anti-lynching law, and that meant appeasing Hoover and company despite his personal dislike of the man. Furthermore the president’s allies already preparing for an even bigger fight over voting rights next year, the bill for which was being prepared in the Senate, and Dewey himself was keenly aware that too was going to require zealous FBI enforcement to have any teeth. (All that and no doubt the president was also betting on his, Truman’s and Roosevelt’s more liberal appointees to contain Hoover)

Outside of Congress and the White House, the Rosenbergs were executed by electric chair in the summer, having been denied any chance at clemency by Dewey once more. And on a less violent note, Jonas Salk also announced his polio vaccine to the public this year, proving its viability by administering it first to 43 crippled and/or feeble-minded children in the previous year and now to his own children. It would still be some time before it was officially declared safe by the Food & Drug Administration, but the vaccine represented a huge step in combating the disease which had infamously plagued the second President Roosevelt and still afflicted thousands upon thousands of Americans annually.

In foreign policy, Dewey got two major breaks from the home front this year. First Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-IA), a prominent isolationist on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of Bob Taft’s most important allies, attempted to introduce a constitutional amendment to impose hard limits on the executive branch’s ability to make agreements with foreign powers, in particular by requiring that Congress pass separate legislation before any newly-signed treaty could come into force[3]. The president rallied his own allies to counter Hickenlooper’s proposal, which he denounced as crippling his ability to fight Communism abroad, and found some unexpected reinforcements. The resulting intraparty battle saw the isolationists beaten once more not just by internationalist liberals like Dewey himself but also the younger, MacArthur-influenced generation of much more militantly anti-Communist Republican conservatives such as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater and their counterparts among the freshman Democrat Senators, in particular Lyndon Johnson and his cohort. Hickenlooper and Taft had fought hard to advance the amendment, but it was for naught, and indeed it would prove to be the last hurrah of the Old Right as a whole…

For Taft himself discovered that he had cancer at the beginning of summer – and that said cancer, having been caught too late, had already rapidly spread from his pancreas to the rest of his body. On June 10 he abdicated his duties as Senate Majority Leader to the next most senior Republican Senator, the fiercely hawkish Bill Knowland, and died a month later. Though Dewey publicly and privately mourned the loss of such a respected rival and faithful party man, he also expected that the passing of ‘Mr. Republican’ also meant the collapse of the isolationist faction of the GOP, and thus the unstoppable final ascendancy of international interventionism; his second big break, completely freeing him up to pursue a foreign policy without having to worry about the Taftites trying to stop or even just water his ideas down. In this he was soon proven right: the Republican Old Right, already long in decline, could not recover from the combination of the Hickenlooper Amendment’s failure and the death of its foremost statesman, and faded into total irrelevance not long after.

Overseas, the Communist bloc experienced its own seismic political shakeup – certainly one far more earth-shaking than Dewey’s re-election and Taft’s death combined were – when Josef Stalin himself dropped dead in March. On March 2 the longtime General Secretary of the Soviet Union (who had already suffered several massive heart attacks and general poor health in the past few years) had a stroke and was found comatose in his dacha by bodyguards who ironically could have gotten him medical aid sooner, if only he hadn’t ordered them to not wake him for any reason and they weren’t so deathly afraid of his rage that they obeyed his command to the letter. Three days later, the Man of Steel had rusted completely and was declared dead. Various cliques within the Communist Party, military and bureaucracy promptly sharpened their knives even as they publicly mourned Stalin together and planned a lavish funeral procession for him, for the ever-paranoid General Secretary had never anointed an heir and his immediate legal successor, Deputy Premier Georgy Malenkov, was not strong enough to immediately and indisputably consolidate power.

At first a troika of Malenkov, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and Internal Affairs chief Lavrentiy Beria. Of the three, Beria seemed the most likely to secure the reins: he was more ambitious than Molotov and assuredly much more feared than Malenkov. Despite being known as a thoroughly detestable man – a legendarily brutal secret policeman first and foremost, but also serial predator of young girls who Stalin himself had described as ‘my Himmler’ to his allies and who the latter also warned his own daughter to stay away from – Beria had also unexpectedly pushed for the pardon of a million (non-political) gulag inmates, made some positive noises about the need for liberalization and even pitched a proposal to reunite the two Germanies into one neutral entity, so Dewey and the State Department dared look to his seemingly imminent assumption of power with guarded optimism.

That optimism was dashed when Malenkov and Molotov showed more spine than Beria himself expected and had him purged. The Mingrelian left hand of Stalin had made countless enemies over his long and bloody career, and immediately proving the truth of Machiavelli’s maxim that ‘nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated’, said enemies seized the chance to descend upon him and tear him to pieces. Betrayed by his partners and arrested by Marshal Georgy Zhukov before he could defend himself, Beria was quickly tried for treason, found guilty and executed before the year was over, experiencing for himself the most merciful fate any past political prisoner in his custody could expect.

Following Beria’s downfall, Ukrainian party secretary Nikita Khrushchev – who had been one of the masterminds behind the anti-Beria coup and helped turn Beria’s deputies, Ivan Serov and Sergei Kruglov, against him – seemed to be the most likely to seize power away from Molotov and Malenkov. Such a development too would have been regarded with a degree of measured optimism on the part of the West, for he had seemed more liberal-minded than Stalin (not that that was hard to achieve) and didn’t have the odious reputation Beria did. But it was not to be: the remaining parts of the troika instead brought in Labor Minister Lazar Kaganovich, another ruthless enforcer of Stalin’s and engineer of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, to replace Beria. To sideline Khrushchev’s military ally Zhukov, the new troika further selected Rodion Malinovsky to be Minister of Defense and tasked him with controlling Zhukov.

Kaganovich, whose volcanic temperament made for a dramatic contrast to the stern but unambitious Molotov and charming but weak Malenkov, took the lead in closing ranks and consolidating the troika’s power against all comers[4]. By the year’s end Khrushchev joined Beria in the grave and ‘Iron Lazar’ himself was back to doing what he did best: murderously purging Ukrainians (in this case, specifically the Ukrainian elements of the Communist Party, regardless of how many or few ties they might have to Khrushchev). Molotov was left to his element – foreign affairs – and in addition to announcing the Soviets’ possession of a hydrogen bomb he promised no change to the Stalinist policy of interminable hostility to the capitalist powers, while Malenkov remained both his and Kaganovich’s nominal superior as Premier of the Soviet Union; but there was no questioning whether Kaganovich was running the show within the Union itself now and that, being a zealous Stalinist himself, he would definitely not be changing anything for the better; “Business as usual,” was how the Dulles brothers described the situation to President Dewey. The most Malenkov could do was attempt to shift production efforts toward consumer goods and light industry at the expense of heavy industry, and even that already put him on thin ice with both the military and the Stalinist two-thirds of the troika.

The Western powers were not sitting idle while the Soviets were distracted by internal feuding. While Egypt’s monarchy formally came to an end with the proclamation of a republic by last year’s victorious putschists, the Anglo-Americans took advantage of the disorder in the Kremlin to save the Iranian one unhindered, and in so doing cast down the nationalist and increasingly authoritarian Mosaddegh. As British economic pressure didn’t work, the CIA and SIS plotted with General Fazlollah Zahedi, spearhead of the military’s anti-Mosaddegh factions, to topple him with more direct means and strongarmed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into supporting the planned coup, which was sprung after Mosaddegh tried to dissolve the Majlis (Iranian parliament) and give himself legislative authority.

After four days of chaos, in which the Shah himself temporarily fled to Baghdad, the plotters pulled off an elaborate scheme involving false-flag Communist actors (both to send the population into a panic about a Communist takeover and to bait actual Tudeh Party activists into the streets), the recruitment of gangsters (for additional manpower) and the reassertion of General Zahedi’s authority over the Iranian army. Mosaddegh was unable to withstand the pressure and surrendered to Zahedi’s forces. The Shah returned in triumph, Zahedi was made Prime Minister and Mosaddegh was initially sentenced to death, but had his punishment commuted to house arrest to build positive PR for the new royal dictatorship. For their part, Britain got the AIOC restored and shored up the position of their monarchic allies in the region, while the US got the former’s monopoly on Iranian oil revoked – conveniently allowing American oil companies to move in on the market.

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[1] Much like the ‘New Look’ of the Eisenhower presidency IOTL.

[2] Overall Dewey’s domestic policy, particularly his economics, doesn’t differ much from Eisenhower’s. The only real difference is that Dewey is slightly more willing to lower taxes and cut programs, and significantly more willing to aggressively fight for civil rights.

[3] The ITL equivalent to the Bricker Amendment, which Bricker himself is unable to come up with due to being Dewey’s Secretary of Commerce.

[4] Almost needless to say, Khrushchev failing to gain power represents the next big divergence from IOTL’s foreign developments. The Malenkov-Molotov-Kaganovich troika, being 2/3rds composed of staunch Stalin disciples and 1/3rd weak-willed opportunist, champions a continuation of the Stalinist status quo both at home and abroad; no domestic thaw or even limited détente with America can be reasonably expected out of this bunch.

 

[Circle of Willis]

1954

Dewey and the Republicans kicked this spring off with increased efforts to advance civil rights. Last year’s passage of the Case Act had been cause for celebration and would hopefully save many black lives if – or when – violence in the South should increase, but now they were moving on to tackle an issue that could affect a seismic change in American politics: voting rights. Besides considering it the right thing to do, its Republican supporters were also interested in the prospect of decisively cracking the Solid South by enfranchising the long-repressed black vote there: Northern blacks who had moved to the industrial cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line had steadily trended Democratic after the implementation of the New Deal, placing economic concerns ahead of social ones, but it was hoped that their Southern cousins might form a reliable voting block for the Party of Lincoln and leave the Democrats without any electoral strongholds.

So began the battle over the proposed Voting Rights Act of 1954, which the GOP hoped to make into the crowning achievement of their governing trifecta while it lasted. In the House, the bill enjoyed bipartisan support from both Republicans and most Northern Democrats, in particular the few actual black Congressmen such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-NY) of Harlem for obvious reasons, and thus sailed fairly smoothly through the lower chamber. But the Senate was a different story. The Senate Democrats were almost completely unified in opposition to the bill, and unlike the Case Act last year, Russell and the other senior members of that cohort were hellbent on fighting it every step of the way. They battled it frantically in the Judiciary Committee, where none other than Mississippi’s James Eastland led the Democratic contingent, and did their utmost to kill it there. Complicating the president’s hopes was the fact that the Judiciary Committee was chaired by William Langer (R-ND), a Taftite ‘Old Right’ Republican who was supportive of civil rights but not zealously so, and had developed a years-long grudge with the Dewey Administration over their sidelining of his and Taft’s foreign policy concerns.

While Dewey and his allies in the Senate, chiefly Irving Ives (R-NY) and Robert Hendrickson (R-NJ), struggled to placate and arm-twist Langer into clamping down on Eastland’s attempts to derail the civil rights bill and get it to the floor, another development exploded onto the scene to further complicate their fight over civil rights. A certain class-action lawsuit filed against segregation in schools in 1951, Brown v. Board of Education, had first made its way all the way from the Kansas courts to the Supreme one in 1953, and this was the year in which they’d issue their fateful decision over it.

Though Chief Justice J. Edgar Hoover did not necessarily share Justice Stanley F. Reed’s direct support of segregation, he was inclined to side with Felix Frankfurter’s and Robert Jackson’s view that while segregation was not a positive thing, the Supreme Court also should not dabble in judicial activism and enforcing a ruling striking it down might be too much for law enforcement to handle. Conversely Justices Earl Warren and Harold Stassen joined William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Harold Burton in trying to rule in the plaintiffs’ favor; Warren was especially adamant, having integrated Californian schools as that state’s governor after the Mendez v. Westminster case in 1947. He made an impassioned appeal to the other Justices at one meeting, asserting that ‘separate but equal’ had was an inherently unequal and detrimental concept to begin with, and that the only reason to sustain the policy was a sincere belief in the Negro being born unequal to any white man.

When it seemed Hoover would remain unmoved, the Dewey administration broke out all the tools they had at their disposal to pressure him to go along with Warren and Stassen. The Justice Department was already in support of the black plaintiffs, and Attorney General Tolson – an extremely close personal friend of Hoover’s and, some dare say, perhaps even more than that – was directed by the president to say or do anything he could think of to get Hoover to budge. The State Department, by way of Secretary John Foster Dulles, made the argument that every day segregation endured was one more day that the Soviets could claim the moral high ground over the United States and denounce America as a land of hypocrites, with baleful consequences for American foreign policy as Africans agitated for their own freedom across the Atlantic. Dewey himself invited Hoover to dinner at the White House, where he asked the latter: “Would you rather be remembered as another Marshall or another Taney?” At another point in the meeting, when Hoover pointed out that most of the white Southerners who wanted educational segregation upheld just didn’t want to run the risk of their children being seated next to ‘hooting negro hooligans twice their size’, Dewey reminded him that the Brown case was about an eight-year-old girl.[1]

In the end, what Hoover cracked under was not the pressure from the White House (although that certainly helped), but Justices Frankfurter and Jackson being swayed by Warren’s arguments. Realizing he was potentially staring down a 7-2 decision against himself and Justice Reed, he relented in the hopes that his legacy would be a positive one and to present a united front, hoping that a unanimous decision in the Brown family’s favor (or as close to it as humanly possible) would weaken the South’s resolve to inevitably resist the ruling and thus make his buddy Tolson’s life easier when he had to enforce it[2]. Justice Reed followed soon after, and so on May 17 the Supreme Court did rule 9-0 that racially segregated educational facilities are inherently unequal and unconstitutional.

The reaction from the Solid South was immediate. While blacks and liberals across the nation rejoiced, white Southerners were mostly opposed and vigorously so, with some newspapers going so far as to compare the ruling to the bombing of Pearl Harbor thirteen years prior. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. (D-VA) instigated a campaign of ‘massive resistance’, compelling officials from those in positions of local authority all the way up to Senators and Representatives in Congress to do everything they could to thwart desegregation efforts. Said congressmen would set an example by signing the ‘Southern Manifesto’, a document authored by Strom Thurmond which – fueled by Thurmond’s own outrage at the passage of the Case Act over his filibuster – accused the Hoover Court of abusing its power and pledged to use any and all means, including the theoretical state’s right of interposition (a position dangerously close to nullification), to fight the Brown ruling and any other attempt to advance civil rights for Southern blacks[3]. On the ground level, this meant state and local authorities across the South fought to deny funding to integrated schools, to fire black teachers and principals who worked at all-black schools and then avoid replacing or rehiring them, and even to outright close down schools altogether rather than allow them to be integrated.

Although the White House welcomed the Brown decision, they initially decided to prioritize passing the Voting Rights Act first instead of folding it into a larger general civil rights bill, which would be in the works and set to emerge as soon as the VRA-54 had passed through. However the Dixiecrat Senators had been so successful in delaying the voting rights bill in committee that in the end, the Dewey administration and its congressional allies decided to go ahead with introducing the future Civil Rights Act of 1954 on July 1 before the former had passed anyway, knowing that they were racing against the clock set by the midterm elections this year to get both through.

In the end, both bills made it through the House and out of committee by the start of September but were further held up by a coordinated Dixiecrat filibuster. Said filibuster, orchestrated by Senators Russell and Byrd, persisted for two months and did not crack even after the midterms came and went, resulting in the Republicans losing the House even as they hung onto the Senate majority by their – specifically Homer Ferguson’s (R-MI) – fingertips. Democratic Senators Johnson of Texas and Humphrey of Minnesota proved indispensable in helping Senate Majority Leader Knowland finally achieve a breakthrough, rounding up enough votes to achieve a two-thirds majority with which to finally get cloture and end the filibusters with underhanded strongarm tactics and vigorous appeals to the virtues of progress and human rights respectively. Both bills only cleared the Senate in November by 67-33 votes, with moderate Dixiecrat George Smathers (D-FL) unexpectedly breaking ranks (and enraging his fellows) to provide the final decisive vote on both after being hounded by Johnson for two weeks. Contrary to Dewey's and the GOP machine's hopes of flipping or at least threatening the many Southern Senate seats up for election this year, those Southern black voters bold enough to try registering now would still have to wait another two years to exercise their newly asserted right.

While not perfect – some of the bills’ most radically progressive clauses had to be watered down to get Smathers and company on board – the VRA and CRA of 1954 jointly represented a significant step forward toward racial equality and integration, and not just by virtue of being the first major federal civil rights legislation in many decades.

The VRA:

1. Imposed stiff fines and up to a year in prison for interfering with people’s right to vote
2. Defined said right as the entire process of registering and casting the ballot in addition to having said ballot counted (without exceptions for things like poll taxes and literacy tests)
3. Mandated the preservation of all voting records by election officials also under pain of a fine and/or one year’s imprisonment, and gave the Attorney General the right to access these records
4. Empowered the Attorney General and federal courts to crack down on attempts to suppress the vote even without getting a jury involved
5. And allowed the federal courts to appoint ‘referees’ to report cases of violation of voting rights, as well as to register voters in areas of known systemic discrimination

And the CRA:

1. Created a 3-year bipartisan Civil Rights Commission under the auspices of the federal government to investigate and make recommendations on how to address civil rights issues
2. Outlawed obstruction of court orders, namely those to integrate schools and other public spaces
3. Punished interstate transportation of weapons and explosives with the intent of causing property damage and fleeing across state lines to avoid prosecution
4. Freed federal jury selection from state selection rules, allowing for black and female jurors in federal courts; and provided financial aid to and for integrated or integrating schools[4]

Southern resistance to the passage of Dewey’s civil rights reforms and the Brown decision took both nonviolent and violent forms. Outside of the Southern Manifesto, White Citizens’ Councils rapidly sprang up across the South to become the most obvious public opposition towards school desegregation and voter registration efforts: these Councils organized boycotts of black businesses and integrated facilities, the firing and eviction of blacks and their sympathizers on any grounds they could find, and spreading racist propaganda. Many important Council members were also local or state politicians and officials, and mounted their own initiatives to complicate and delay the process of integration for as long as they could; indefinitely, where possible. And of course, much less peacefully, the Ku Klux Klan began to re-emerge as the spearhead of violent resistance to racial integration, targeting blacks who dared try to register to vote or send their children to previously all-white schools and local politicians or activists who helped them for intimidation, assault or murder – often with the connivance of local law enforcement, who were prone to at best putting in minimal efforts to stop & prosecute them, and racist communities, who allowed them to blend in and avoid detection. For their part, the federal government retaliated by beginning to withhold financial support to states and educational departments that refused to integrate, as well as ramping up the involvement of the FBI and federal courts wherever they could.

While the struggle over segregation continued to heat up in the States, the rest of the world continued to experience their own set of troubles and changes. With the Soviet Union remaining staunchly Stalinist, Yugoslavia’s Tito opted to listen to his liberal-minded lieutenant Milovan Dilas and introduce further democratic reform to bring their country in line with the West. Censorship and party discipline were both relaxed, the secularist and state-atheist religious policies rolled back, certain political prisoners released (most famously Aloysius Stepinac, a Cardinal and Archbishop of Zagreb who had been sentenced to 16 years in prison for treason immediately after World War II) or at least having their sentences reduced, and even the planned worker self-management increasingly scrapped in favor of conventional economic liberalization and the invitation of Western private companies to set up shop in Yugoslavia. Most tellingly, Tito increasingly referred to himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ rather than a Communist, and the State Department secretly reported on an increasing willingness among the Yugoslav leadership to transition to a multi-party democracy in time[5].

Further south, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser outmaneuvered his nominal superior Muhammad Naguib and seized the helm of the Egyptian government, then went on to heavily crack down on internal dissent – most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Supreme Guide Hassan al-Hudaybi and chief propagandist Sayyid Qutb were arrested after a failed assassination attempt on Nasser himself by a Brotherhood agent; al-Hudaybi was sentenced to death but had it commuted to life imprisonment, while Qutb was sentenced to imprisonment for 15 years. Ferociously committed to Arab nationalism, Nasser immediately set Egypt on a collision course with Britain over the Suez Canal Zone. Rather than rise to meet Nasser’s increasingly hostile and violent provocations, the Labour government agreed to withdraw its troop presence from the canal this year, with an eye on completing the withdrawal and dismantling their base within a year. In exchange for allowing the Suez Canal Corporation to continue operating, the UK was to provide Egypt with financing for a new Aswan Dam, something which Nasser was extremely interested in (unlike King Farouk). The US would also split the cost with Britain, covering a good part of the $270 million loan for the Dam[6].

But to Nasser’s surprise, the British withdrawal from Suez did not mean London was done playing games in the Middle East. They sponsored the creation of the Middle East Treaty Organization, or METO: a loosely NATO-inspired regional alliance including the United States, which joined over objections from Tel Aviv, and the Western-friendly nations of Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Iran and Pakistan. No doubt this project, colloquially dubbed the Baghdad Pact, was intended as a counterweight to Nasser’s hopes of placing Egypt at the head of the Arab World and a preserve of British influence in the region.[7]

Far to the east, trouble was stirring in Indochina, where the French had for years been combating a powerful Communist insurgency called the Vietminh. The situation had become more desperate for the colonial government than anyone could have expected by 1954, with much of France’s military strength in Indochina now dispersed among aerially-supplied ‘hedgehog’ bases built in remote areas to interdict Vietminh supply routes, while the Vietminh enjoyed greater Soviet support through China and had developed in many ways into a surprisingly professional, and even more shockingly heavily armed modern army rather than a ragtag militia. Starting in March, they besieged the prominent network of hedgehog-forts in the swampy valley of Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam, engaging the French with Soviet-provided artillery and anti-air from the hills around the valley – which respectively made quick work of the weakest French outposts and crippled French ability to resupply & reinforce the forts by air. Making things worse, the French had committed more troops to Dien Bien Phu than they could afford to lose, but not enough to defeat the Vietminh army amassed outside of it; approximately 15,000 men, including the latest batches of reinforcements flown in shortly before the Vietminh set up their AA guns.

The French government approached President Dewey, asking for help. Dewey was happy to have the CIA fly in supplies to the beleaguered defenders of Dien Bien Phu, but balked at the prospect of sending American troops into another land war in Asia so soon after Korea, and to maintain European colonial rule rather than defend a free & capitalist Asian country at that – especially when Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway expressed his belief that Indochina was of no strategic importance to the United States and overt American involvement there would be a needless distraction from other, more important theaters. Further, he reacted with uncharacteristic anger when Joint Chiefs Chairman Arthur Radford and Air Force General Nathan Twining suggested the deployment of tactical nukes against the Vietminh, categorically refusing to even consider the option with the argument that nuking a third Asian country in less than 10 years (and explicitly to uphold European colonial rule at that, a far worse reason than any justification for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Korean War he could think of) would destroy whatever support America might still have in that part of the world[8]. In the end, under pressure from his Vice President and Secretary of State Dulles, Dewey agreed to a plan to bomb the hills around Dien Bien Phu and deploy eight divisions to Indochina on the condition that the British back him up; when the Attlee ministry refused to go along with the plan, the president took his opportunity to dive down the off-ramp and leave French Indochina to its fate.

With no help forthcoming, the Dien Bien Phu garrison’s position became obviously hopeless and they surrendered to Vo Nguyen Giap’s army in May. The resulting Geneva Conference saw France agreeing to leave Indochina under the pressure of a united Anglo-American front, where both the Dewey administration and the Attlee ministry agreed that some sort of negotiated end to French colonial rule was the optimal outcome. Indochina itself was to be partitioned; Laos and Cambodia went their own ways under indigenous monarchies, but Vietnam was to be divided between a Communist North, patronized by Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, while French troops regrouped in the south and prepared to hand over power to the non-Communist Vietnamese elite there.

Privately, Dewey sought to balance his administration’s concerns regarding the Communist victory with the need to dissociate American foreign policy from European colonialism (so as to not needlessly provoke the peoples of Asia and Africa) by backing a free, republican and non-Communist South Vietnam, much as he thought he had done well with South Korea. No doubt this line of thinking and the formation of the METO inspired him to organize the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO, this year to coordinate the Southeast Asian anti-Communist states; besides the US itself, the other founding members were France, the UK, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan and Australia.

Dewey had far less problems intervening closer to home. President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala had implemented a sweeping land reform program which, by 1954, had taken 1,400,000 acres away from the country’s big landowners and the United Fruit Company and parceled them out to 500,000 poor farmers. Unfortunately for him, the Dulles brothers were significant shareholders of the UFC and harbored close ties to the company leadership. While they were busy whispering in President Dewey’s ear about how critical it was that he prevent Guatemala from becoming a Communist foothold in the Western Hemisphere, the UFC was also aggressively lobbying for intervention and had hired professional propagandists, including Edward Bernays, to make Guatemala appear to be a Communist hellhole. Not helping matters was Arbenz himself: although he stridently insisted that he was no Communist and was actually trying to move Guatemala away from effective feudalism and toward a capitalist economy, with a lower and middle class that could afford modern consumer goods, his wife was accused of being a Communist sympathizer who was influencing his judgment, and his government did include several Communists.

As a consequence, Dewey bought into the Dulleses’ arguments and agreed to greenlight a coup attempt, confident that they could repeat their magic in Iran. Operation PBSuccess kicked off in June, spearheaded by the exiled hard-right Guatemalan commander Carlos Castillo Armas, and despite fielding only a few hundred mercenaries and Guatemalan exiles for its army they made maximum usage of the bombers and propaganda channels the CIA had outfitted them with, confounding the Guatemalan leadership and populace both into thinking they were a much more intimidating threat than they actually were. Several of Arbenz’s generals lost their nerve and turned on him, hoping to be spared when Castillo Armas seemingly inevitably won; Arbenz himself lost heart when he could find no other Latin American state willing to help him, and believing the situation to be hopeless, surrendered after nine days of skirmishes. He resigned the presidency and fled to Mexico, allowing Castillo Armas to seize power and later ‘legitimize’ himself with elections (in which his was the only name on the ballot) in October.

While the coup was internationally condemned, even by British Prime Minister Attlee and the most pro-American newspapers of West Germany, their sentiments were not shared within America itself, where these criticisms rolled off the US like water off a duck’s back. The Dulles brothers and the United Fruit Company’s board were ecstatic, few Americans on Main Street paid the coup much mind at all and fewer still thought America did anything wrong – as far as popular opinion went, Arbenz was at minimum a pinko who would’ve paved the way for a Communist takeover even if he wasn’t one himself, and had his deposition coming. This was even the opinion of Dewey himself: the president gave the matter much less thought than he did the idea of nuking Indochina, and spent the rest of his life genuinely believing that he’d just headed off a Communist takeover south of Mexico.

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

[1] Pretty much a complete inversion of Eisenhower’s OTL dinner with Warren, where the former was the one making the ‘nobody wants their little girl sitting next to overgrown negroes’ argument to the latter.

[2] This was actually an argument Earl Warren made in the Supreme Court’s deliberations IRL.

[3] This is closer to Thurmond’s draft of the OTL Southern Manifesto, as opposed to the final version edited by J. William Fulbright which was more moderate in tone, did not support using interposition and explicitly argued that the ‘massive resistance’ should be done in law-abiding ways.

[4] These acts are based on both the RL Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and ’60.

[5] Historically, Khrushchev’s ascension and the ensuing de-Stalinization encouraged Tito to reconcile with the Soviets somewhat, keeping Yugoslavia an officially Communist and Non-Aligned state. With no such thaw possible ITL, Tito has committed to liberalizing as Dilas proposed IOTL and aligning more closely with the West instead.

[6] Historically, this agreement was reached in 1955.

[7] Historically, the Baghdad Pact also came about a year later, but Labour – which prefers to maintain British influence diplomatically and indirectly where possible – brings it in earlier to balance out the results of their negotiations with Nasser. Moreover, the United States did not join it from the get-go due to the opposition of the pro-Israeli lobby and their congressional allies, the latter of which is less of an obstacle ITL considering the greater strength of the Republicans’ Senate majority from 1952 to 1954.

[8] Dewey here is mirroring Eisenhower’s RL sentiment when the nuclear option was suggested for Operation Vulture – “"You boys must be crazy, we can't use those awful things against Asians for a second time in less than ten years. My God!” – with even less willingness to actually use tactical A-bombs against the Vietminh.

 

[Circle of Willis]

1955

Dewey found his administration’s civil rights legislation sorely tested this summer. Three high-profile murders shook the nation and the president himself in those months: the first was that of George W. Lee, a pastor from Belzoni, MS who also happened to be a prominent local NAACP and Regional Council of Negro Leadership chief, and had been at the forefront of voter registration efforts in the Mississippi Delta. Unknown assailants riddled him with buckshot when he went out for a drive in mid-May, and the sheriff sought to close the case as a ‘traffic accident’.

As neither this sheriff nor Governor Hugh L. White of Mississippi were willing to provide anything resembling a minimally competent investigation, Lee’s family and aides, including a then-little known WWII veteran and activist named Medgar Evers, had to count on the feds to deliver any justice for the minister’s assassination. Dewey obliged and directed Attorney General Tolson and FBI Director Nichols to involve themselves with the case, privately expressing his thoughts on the matter: “Once, President Andrew Jackson declared that John Marshall made his decision, so let him enforce it. Well, we have made ours, and so has the Supreme Court; in this we are united, unlike Jackson and Marshall. Now let us rise to the challenge of enforcing it outside the walls of their courthouse.”

Three months later, another activist involved in Mississippian voter registration drives was killed. Lamar Smith of Brookhaven, MS was shot dead in front of a courthouse, and though there were as many as 30 witnesses to the event including the Brookhaven sheriff, not one would step forward. Since there was nobody willing to provide testimony, the three men arrested in connection to the murder were quickly released. By this point Dewey disclosed to his wife and closest associates his growing perception that the murders were more than just the usual racial violence directed at any blacks who got 'uppity', they were intended as personal insults to himself and the North – shows of force from the South to demonstrate that they wouldn't tolerate his (or anyone else's) efforts to 'meddle' in the affairs of their society, which he increasingly viewed in an antagonistic light as something almost as closed-off and hostile to the rest of America as the South of 1855 was, right down to its defense of abhorrent and violently oppressive racism as a traditional way of life.

While the president tried to think of how to best involve the feds in Smith’s case, another, even more viscerally harrowing one would burst onto the scene and derail his train of thought entirely just two weeks later, near the end of August. A black 14-year-old from Mississippi named Emmett Till was kidnapped, brutally murdered and thrown into a river for reportedly whistling and flirting with one of the men’s wives, and the sight of his mutilated and decomposing corpse at a widely publicized open-casket funeral horrified most of the country, including Dewey himself. While he outwardly remained calm and tight-lipped as usual, First Lady Frances Dewey disclosed to her friends that her husband was much more distressed than he was publicly letting on, and when Dewey’s personal diary was publicized many years after his presidency’s end his entry for September 6 (the day of Till’s funeral), written not with his normal immaculate penmanship but in a much messier style that suggested his hand had been shaking with an apoplectic rage, read: “There’s talk that many Nazis found shelter with Peron in Argentina after the war. Maybe, maybe not. But I should like to think, even to pray, that Himmler’s cruelest and most spineless butchers – the ones who are only brave enough to murder unarmed children – took the ratline straight to Mississippi. It would shame me beyond words if this boy Till’s killers turn out to be born-and-raised Americans.”

As the killers – Roy Bryant, whose wife Carolyn was the woman Till allegedly flirted with, and his brother John William Milam – told their county sheriff, George Smith, that they did in fact kidnap Till from his granduncle Mose Wright’s cabin and were promptly arrested, Dewey resolved to make the Till case into the testing grounds for the strength of his recently passed civil rights legislation, chiefly the Case Act, and the two men into examples of how America would no longer tolerate the casual lynching of 'uppity' blacks. Federal charges of lynching was filed against the pair with the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, where Judge Elijah A. Cox had presided since the Coolidge administration, and Tolson’s FBI spearheaded the investigation over the furious objections of the local and state authorities. A mixed-race jury, as selected under the Civil Rights Act of 1954, further lessened the previously-certain likelihood of the pair escaping justice, as did the remarkable willingness of Wright to testify to Bryant and Milam’s guilt: the first time in a very long time, indeed as far as anyone still living could remember, that a black man dared to do so to any white man in the South and still live.

In the end, despite a last-ditch effort by Missisippi’s Senators James Eastland and John Stennis to derail proceedings by revealing Till’s father had been executed for raping two women and murdering a third while serving in Italy, Bryant and Milam were convicted of lynching Till, but only given the absolute minimum sentence for the new federal felony – five years in prison. Milam, the older and more outspoken of the two, lost his temper and bluntly admitted to the killing when he was convicted, snapping (among many other unprintable remarks) “God damn right I made an example of him, what right-thinkin’ white man wouldn’t if he heard what that brat was sayin’ about white women that night?! Now the rest of his kind and the president who loves ‘em so knows where I stand – Leflore County and Mississippi oughta do the same!”[1]

This outcome left both blacks and whites in Mississippi and beyond seething; the former were pleasantly surprised that anyone was being punished for lynching for a change but still thought Till’s murderers had gotten off far too lightly, while the latter were furious because Bryant and Milam had been punished at all. The white crowd gathered outside Cox’s courthouse surged forward when they saw the pair being led out after the guilty verdict, most likely to try to free them in a bout of passionate rage, and had to be beaten back by US Marshals. Dewey, however, actually calmed down somewhat at the news and paraphrased Churchill when discussing it with Tolson and Chief Justice Hoover: “I would have tried much harder for much worse than five years were I the prosecutor down there, gentlemen. But as it is, this is just the end of the beginning. Dixie lynched that poor kid then and they’ll probably lynch someone else tonight just to vent; still, with any luck and seeing how for once we’re starting to deal out something resembling justice, they’ll think twice about lynching someone tomorrow, and the day after that...”

On the flipside, Till’s death and the much-publicized trial that followed electrified black resistance to segregation. As mentioned, although most blacks thought Bryant and Milam got off far too lightly, that they had even been found guilty and sentenced in the first place was a welcome surprise, and one that restored a degree of confidence (vital, however small it might have been) in the notion that they could still rely on the legal system and its mechanisms to attain their rights as American citizens. It was with this understanding that the NAACP took up the case of one Rosa Parks, an Alabaman woman who refused to vacate her bus seat for a white passenger at the driver’s demand and was arrested for it, near the end of the year, and the black community of Montgomery, AL started a boycott of the city’s public transportation system (coordinated through their churches and the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper). Parks’ case was not the first such incident on a bus, though it was certainly the first of its kind to attain a national profile – Claudette Colvin had done the same several months prior, but was ignored by the NAACP because her having become pregnant a few months after being removed from the bus made it less likely that she’d be taken seriously by polite society.

Even as America battled its internal race issues, countries overseas were most definitely not without their own racial troubles. In Europe, the Islamist-friendly government of Adnan Menderes engineered a pogrom against the Greek population of Istanbul by way of a false-flag bomb attack on Mustafa Kemal’s house in Thessaloniki, killing dozens if not hundreds and destroying much property (particularly Orthodox churches and cemeteries) before the police were finally told to act and the military sent in to help restore order. Turkey’s remaining Greeks began fleeing the country in general and Istanbul in particular at greater speed, and relations between Greece and Turkey soured dramatically despite their shared membership in NATO – doubly so when the Thessaloniki bomber fled to Turkey and Menderes refused Athens’ request to extradite him.

In South Africa, the National Party government (which, as its name might suggest, was dominated by and a vehicle for Boer nationalist interests) continued to tighten the Apartheid restrictions it had been imposing since 1948, and this was a sort of repression the blacks of America could understand much more easily and viscerally. Most notably, the government of Johannes G. Strijdom expanded and packed both the South African Supreme Court’s Appellate Division and the Senate to force through a removal of Coloured (mixed-race) voters from the electoral rolls. Strijdom also ordered the clearance of Sofiatown, Johannesburg’s only black suburb, and the forced removal of its 60,000 residents to a new planned town called Soweto. Similar removals followed in the years to come, and would not just be limited to blacks: Coloureds, Indians and even Chinese were targeted for deportation into their own segregated towns.

Elsewhere, less color-tinged changes in government rocked American allies. In Britain Clement Attlee called a snap election in May, hoping to increase the razor-thin margin of seats separating his Labour Party from the Conservatives since 1951. This turned out to be a mistake on the Prime Minister’s part, for the British public was ready for a change after ten years of Labour governance and in particular resented both the Attlee ministry’s seeming weakness abroad (an impression borne of the speed with which they demilitarized Suez) and increasing willingness to continue nationalizing the economy at home. The Tories swept into power with a majority of both parliamentary seats and votes, making their leader Anthony Eden – previously Churchill’s faithful deputy and natural heir – Prime Minister[2].

In the Americas, Argentina’s radical populist leader Juan Peron faced a military coup. Peron’s regime was at its core quite the jumble of contradictions, built on the support of blocs and institutions that would normally be at loggerheads with one another. He courted both socialist and fascist tendencies with a platform of nationalization, support for unions (particularly the General Confederation of Labor or CGT), and massive expansion of social programs; strove to maintain a non-aligned ‘Third Way’ approach to foreign policy while pulling in US help to modernize the Argentine military; and established positive relations with Israel while denouncing the Nuremburg Trials and actively harboring numerous Nazi fugitives from post-war Europe, including SS special operations commander Otto Skorzeny who even served as his late wife Evita’s bodyguard.

Perhaps it was inevitable that such a house of cards would eventually fall – and fall it did this year, when Peron alienated the Catholic Church in Argentina by legalizing divorce and prostitution, then expelling priests who spoke out against him. He also found himself mired in personal scandal when the tabloids began printing stories about his underage mistress, Nelly Rivas, with whom he’d engaged in an affair starting when she was just 13 and himself, 58. While addressing a rally of thousands upon thousands of supporters in the Plaza de Mayo on June 16, Peron found himself being bombed by his own navy and air force, having disregarded the warnings of his War Minister Franklin Lucero beforehand in the belief that anti-Peronists within the military’s junior ranks couldn’t possibly be so foolhardy as to make a public attempt on his life[3]. Obviously, they were and they did, resulting in his death along with over 300 of his supporters.

Overnight Peronist mobs (mostly, but hardly limited to, CGT workers) and loyalist soldiers clashed with the rebel forces moving to seize the Casa Rosada, in the process ransacking and burning multiple churches in Buenos Aires, but Peron’s death had left them demoralized and without a clear leader (despite the efforts of Vice President Alberto Teisaire to be that leader). The initial coup plotters were soon joined by reinforcements under Generals Eduardo Lonardi and Pedro Aramburu, while Admiral Isaac Rojas brought the cruisers General Belgrano and Nueve de Julio to shell the Peronists' own reinforcements as they assembled in Mar del Plata’s harbor. In the face of such firepower, Teisaire acknowledged defeat, resigned and fled to Cuba. Lonardi seized the presidency, but was himself removed in a coup for being too reconciliatory to the Peronists two months later, and the hardliner Aramburu instead ascended with the intent of purging Peronism from Argentina.

Finally, in Asia Ngo Dinh Diem, America’s newest ally in Indochina, was rapidly strengthening his grip over South Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese, particularly Catholics and more generally elements of the upper and middle classes who were now being targeted by the ascendant Communist government there, raced south of the partition line with the support of both the French and American navies in Operation Passage to Freedom. This represented both a propaganda boost and a major material benefit to Diem, himself a Catholic, for it greatly expanded and enriched his support base. Diem further engaged his biggest internal rival, the French-backed Binh Xuyen criminal syndicate, in open hostilities through April after removing Saigon’s Binh Xuyen-controlled police chief: discreetly aided by the CIA, Diem’s ARVN regulars crushed the Binh Xuyen (and with them France’s last significant proxy in Cochinchina) in an urban battle that left 1,000 dead and 20,000 homeless.

With his domestic opponents subdued or on the run, Diem felt confident in moving against his nominal liege, Emperor Bao Dai. He scheduled a referendum to remove the latter altogether and declare South Vietnam a republic in October, then banned the imperialists from campaigning while his own Can Lao Party ran a highly acidic campaign against Bao Dai. Diem’s younger brothers Nhu and Can further ran voter intimidation and electoral rigging operations of their own. Thus it was little surprise to even the most credulous observer when South Vietnam was proclaimed a republic and Diem its president with 108% voter turnout, 98.9% of which went to Diem.

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

[1] IOTL, Till’s killers were acquitted within just a little over an hour by their all-white jury – "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long”, one said – and being protected under double jeopardy, blithely admitted to murdering Till in an interview a year later. Milam’s outburst ITL is based on some of his words in that very same interview.

[2] Thanks to Stevep again for helping me navigate the major British personalities of this decade & their likelihood of gaining power.

[3] Peron historically took his War Minister’s advice and hid in a bunker that day, resulting in his survival and the defeat of the summer coup. He was deposed anyway in autumn of 1955, but lived to return to power later, which is clearly not going to be the case ITL.

On a side note, I've cleaned up the previous entry somewhat and corrected an error. Sayyid Qutb is not the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood (and never was IRL), instead that has been corrected to Hassan al-Hudaybi. Though that said, Qutb is an important figure in their upper ranks regardless and both he, al-Hudaybi and the Brotherhood as a whole will play an important role in Mideastern affairs soon enough...

 

[Circle of Willis]

1956

Another four years, another presidential election. As Dewey upheld his promise not to seek a third term despite the 22nd Amendment’s grandfather clause allowing him to, the Republican frontrunner was Vice President Charles Halleck instead. The latter had made no secret of his ambition to succeed his boss once Dewey’s eight years were up, so him announcing his candidacy surprised nobody; what did come as a surprise to many political observers, however, was Dewey publicly endorsing and campaigning for him. In truth, though Halleck belonged to the Republicans’ conservative wing, the liberal Dewey owed him much for pushing him to campaign more aggressively all the way back in 1948 (securing his victory over Truman) and constantly negotiating with said conservatives to bring them on board with (or at least getting them to stop seriously opposing) his agenda behind the scenes, and as both a staunch party man and someone who had come to respect Halleck’s fiery fervor, he followed through on paying his debts.

With Dewey came the support of much of the Eastern Establishment, who believed that if the president was backing his #2 man for the job, that clearly meant Halleck was going to moderate his positions and pick a liberal Republican for his running mate. This was not actually the case and Halleck never promised any such thing, although he certainly did very little to dissuade the liberal wing from believing it. As even Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York refused to step up against the VP after seeing Dewey working on the campaign trail for him, no doubt believing his was one name being considered for Halleck’s running mate, the only serious opposition came from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA)[1]. Lodge however was perceived as being too liberal to ever get the conservatives on his side, and backed solely by the most progressive Republicans, only ever had minuscule chances against Halleck’s overwhelming array of advantages.

In the end, Lodge bowed out of the race when it became obvious that his tiny chance of defeating Halleck had melted like a snowball in an inferno. Nevertheless, Halleck humored the elder statesman’s insistence on a public concession and, though surprised when Lodge asked that he consider appointing a black man to his cabinet if he should be elected, readily agreed to the proposition if he could find a qualified candidate[2]. The promise energized civil progressives & civil rights activists across the nation and went a long way to persuade them that despite his avowed conservatism in general, he wouldn’t be a bad choice – and just in time too, because when he formally accepted the Republican nomination unopposed at the National Convention in August, he shocked the liberal Republicans by not nominating any of their number to be his running mate. Instead, his choice was Bill Knowland of California: well known to be one of the most hawkish Senate conservatives, who Halleck had personally talked out of running for his state’s gubernatorial chair to take the Vice Presidency instead[3].

While the Republicans had a smooth primary and convention, the Democrats enjoyed no such luxury this year. The civil rights debate had only escalated with time and was damaging party unity much as slavery had done a hundred years prior, with Dixiecrats and Northern progressives ferociously tearing at one another as well as the dwindling center between them. On one hand, Richard Russell and his cohorts were even more adamant about opposing civil rights reforms than usual, inflamed first by the Dewey administration’s advances on that front and then doubly so by Halleck’s agreement with Lodge over nominating a black man to his cabinet. On the other, Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) fought to get the progressive voice heard at the Democratic table after years in the wilderness, and to impress upon the party bosses that the 1952 election had proven the party cannot win on a segregationist platform.

This acrimonious struggle only deepened when said party bosses, fearful not just a repeat of 1952 but also 1948, decided to try to avoid making a statement on the civil rights issue altogether and to instead paper over the ever-growing cracks in their party. At first they sought merely to nominate a centrist who they hoped wouldn’t offend either side too greatly, and thought they found their man in Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson: a man who was milder on civil rights than their failed 1952 choice, Estes Kefauver. But Stevenson’s candidacy was assailed from both sides: the Dixiecrats for not being a hard-line segregationist, and the progressives for not being, well, progressive enough.

In the end, Russell cut a deal with the party leadership toward the end of spring. He would not run for the nomination again, but instead push the candidacy of another Dixiecrat who, it was hoped, would be able to rein in their worst impulses. In other words, someone who wouldn’t come across as a frothing racist to the public and be amenable to picking a moderate running mate.

That man turned out to be Senator John Sparkman (D-AL)[4], a signatory of Thurmond’s Southern Manifesto whose ‘moderation’ mostly just consisted of vague public pledges to ‘respect the law’ and ‘accommodate everyone’s interests’. That said it did seem, at first, as though the Alabaman’s new course was more than just skin-deep when – after defeating Humphrey on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in mid-August – his acceptance speech contained no references to segregation and he chose Frank Lausche, the popular and decidedly non-controversial Democratic Governor of Ohio, to be his running mate. Humphrey agreed to wait and see if Sparkman was really going to be what Russell promised, and the party chiefs let out a big sigh of relief.

In hindsight, nominating a staunch segregationist after first getting him to promise he wouldn’t talk about segregation in such a racially-charged election was a decidedly poor idea. But at the time, it seemed like it might have worked: Halleck was not doing as well in the polls as might have been guessed from Dewey’s generally strong record on the economy, foreign policy and domestic reforms. The Vice President’s platform of uncompromising conservatism, business-friendly policies, a hard line on Communism and the continuation of Dewey’s efforts to break down segregation, coupled with his actions on the campaign trail to date, seemed contradictory and alienating to nearly all Republican voters. His radical support of civil rights and willingness to nominate a black cabinet member dismayed conservatives and even some moderates who thought he was moving too quickly and over-boldly, while his staunch conservatism in all other regards and choice of Knowland for running-mate worried the liberal wing which feared deep and lasting cuts to the New Deal under his administration. Sparkman, for his part, ran a populist campaign much as Russell before him had, focusing on expanded public assistance programs, the school lunch program begun under Truman and workers’ protections together with a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act while studiously avoiding all mention of the black elephant in the room.

But the first polls to show he was ahead made Sparkman cocky. Halleck regained ground with a dynamic campaign across the country, in which he openly and animatedly discussed his platform with anyone who wanted to ask him questions, and within weeks the public grew tired of Sparkman’s attempts to deflect or change the subject every single time anyone asked him about his stance on segregation, which stood in contrast to Halleck’s brutally honest one. Matters came to a head when the Vice President challenged him to a debate early in September, to be broadcast on radio to any American who wants to listen, and the Alabaman Senator agreed to try to break the stalemate in the polls – seen as a foolhardy move even by contemporary observers.

Halleck, a fiery personality with many years of debating experience, proceeded to needle Sparkman into outing his real thoughts on the struggle for civil rights over the course of an hour. Though being a capable debater himself, he initially deflected Halleck’s attempts to bait him over Brown v. Board of Education (“Mr. Vice President, I am firmly of the belief that upset citizens have the right to protest a Supreme Court decision they disagree with…”) and Emmett Till (“Of course, I deplore the murder of an unarmed child by two misguided thugs who were acting solely on their own prejudices and have no connection whatsoever to myself or any other Democrat…”) and even momentarily turned the tables on the Vice President when the question of what to do with the New Deal came up, Sparkman was eventually sufficiently worn down and provoked to lash out. The fatal exchange began when Halleck asked him, “You have committed to ‘lawfully’ opposing the Supreme Court’s rulings in Brown v. Board of Education, have you not, Senator?”

“Where did I say that?” Was Sparkman’s reply.

“It is the most charitable interpretation of that so-called ‘Southern Manifesto’ you and your cohorts among the Senate Democratic caucus signed two years ago, which explicitly commits its signatories to resist desegregation by ‘any means necessary’…” Halleck had answered, sounding nonplussed at Sparkman’s denial. That said, though none could have seen it outside the recording studio, he had begun to smirk.

In response the Southern Senator attempted to deflect, “Well as a matter of fact, and as I have told you many times already, I support the right of American citizens to lawfully protest anything they disagree with, even federal law or a Supreme Court decision. To stand in their way would be nothing short of tyrannical conduct.”

“Do you feel the same way when it’s black American citizens protesting state laws and court rulings they deem unjust in a law-abiding manner, I wonder?” There had been no answer to that, and those in the studio could tell Halleck had to restrain himself from laughing – including the weary Sparkman, who grew more incensed at the sight and the realization that he’d gotten so sloppy as to walk into that trap. “No need to wonder, hmm? Your silence tells me all I need to know, Senator. If – and this is a mighty big if – you were to become president, would you use your power to stop using federal instruments to enforce those laws and decisions you deem unjust and, if Congress permits, to change the laws on the books to reinforce segregation?”

“I believe we have spent enough time discussing this topic,” Sparkman had irritably shot back, but the moderator (who, while nominally an independent, incidentally had voted for Dewey three times in a row starting with 1944) disagreed and deemed it a legitimate question, indeed even claiming he was going to ask it next if Halleck hadn’t gotten ahead of him. Frustrated, he had to instead retort, “What would be the point to answering, Mr. Vice President? You seem to already know what I would say.”

“I do. But the American people don’t. Aren’t we both here to tell them what we’re thinking, what our plans for the country are? I’ve already spoken at length about what I would do about segregation, Senator. Why won’t you do the same?”

The insinuation that he might be too cowardly to speak his mind certainly raised Sparkman’s hackles, tired and annoyed as he already was. “Are you suggesting I’m a coward, Yank – Mr. Vice President?”

“Us Hoosiers aren’t Yankees, Senator.” Such was the beginning to Halleck’s riposte – he had remained unfazed through Sparkman’s barely restrained outburst, and had been calculating his final provocation even as Sparkman was rising to match his previous one. “And I never called you a coward. But you know, if you can’t even answer this one question honestly, I would have to question your – “

“Never let it be said that John Sparkman is a coward or a liar! To answer your question, Mr. Vice President, yes, if the American people put me in the White House I would exercise my lawful prerogatives as President to enact my agenda, as much as I am able within the confines of the law. Does that satisfy your curiosity?” If Sparkman thought he had successfully weaseled out of Halleck’s trap with this remark, the coming days and weeks proved him horribly wrong. Halleck had peeled off his mask, and the Senator had confirmed – despite his efforts to keep his words as vague as possible even in this hour – that he was everything the liberals and blacks feared he was. Back on the campaign trail, Halleck and his spokesmen vigorously assailed what they described as Sparkman’s ‘hidden agenda’, describing him as ‘another Russell who’ll twist his own tongue into knots to not tell you what you already know’.

To Northern Democrats, there could be no more pretending that Sparkman's true colors and how he intended to deal with the question of race if elected. That did not mean they could just rush to Halleck’s side, however; unlike Dewey, Halleck had been quite vocal about rolling back the New Deal to a much greater degree than had been attempted in the past eight years and had said much about ‘cutting entitlements’ and ‘incentivizing businesses’, which they took to be code for deep welfare and tax cuts. The answer to their conundrum was provided by Senator Humphrey, who decided that he could no longer support Sparkman's candidacy in good conscience. Instead he resolved to teach the Democratic leadership that the progressive wing was just as capable of forcing a 1948-style disaster as the Dixiecrats, and that such would be the price of sidelining them for two elections in a row. With that in mind he took up the mantle of Henry A. Wallace’s moribund Progressive Party[5], easily securing their nomination and choosing Wayne Morse – the formerly Republican Senator from Washington who defected because he thought Dewey’s civil rights acts didn’t go far enough – as his running mate.

Humphrey made the wise choice of forsaking the Progressives’ overt friendliness to Communism, which had completely destroyed Wallace’s chances in 1948: he went so far as to insist that a statement denouncing Stalin and Communism be added to the 1956 Progressive platform as a precondition of his taking up their banner, which the remaining Progressive leadership (knowing they’d descend into total obscurity without such a high-profile candidate) agreed to. The Humphrey/Morse ticket, running on a platform that was both socially highly liberal and promised even more generous expansions to the New Deal than Sparkman had, proceeded to attract significant support from Midwestern & Western farmers fearful that the Vice President would cut their subsidies if victorious; urban bourgeois progressives who couldn’t stand either segregation or Halleck’s conservatism; and numerous black Northern Democrats. Between the flight of more moderate Northern Democrats and the rest of the black Democratic voters north of the Mason-Dixon Line to the Republicans, this effectively crippled Sparkman’s ability to win the election.

The months leading up to Election Day only further highlighted the battle over civil rights with firstly the Browder v. Gayle case, which involved Claudette Colvin and some other black women’s challenge to the segregation of public transportation, and secondly efforts by the segregationist forces to stop Southern blacks from voting. They pulled out all the stops to do so, further undermining Sparkman’s claim that they were just citizens lawfully exercising their rights to protest against judicial overreach; voter harassment & intimidation, unfair literacy tests, increased poll taxes, and outright assassination of organizers & voter-registration activists from the NAACP & other civil rights organizations as well as especially outspoken would-be voters were deployed across the Solid South.

To counter them, Dewey further relied on the FBI and the 1954 Case and Civil Rights Acts, with Justice Department attorneys fighting to get as many night-riders and other intimidators of black voters in prison as quickly as possible even as Tolson’s agents twisted the arms of local and state police to get them to cooperate or infiltrated and subverted the White Citizens’ Councils and the rest of their associations. Halleck himself (never one to shy away from a good fight, it seems) dared to campaign south of the Mason-Dixon Line, meeting with and helping to organize local ‘black-and-tan’ Republicans[6] as part of his broader attempt to revive the long-dead Radical Republican constituencies of the South.

In the end, the Progressive break coupled with several more major mistakes on the campaign trail (most infamously, calling for the police to roughly escort away a black demonstrator who was trying to ask him questions at a campaign stop in New York City while a gaggle of reporters and cameramen stood nearby) had sealed Sparkman’s fate. On Election Day Halleck got below 50% of the popular vote and theoretically may have lost if there had been no Democratic split, which would have been enough to deliver the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Massachusetts and New York into Sparkman’s hands. As it was, Humphrey took away enough votes in all of these key states to either win them outright (in the Midwest and Northwest) or allow Halleck to swim up the middle (everywhere else). Halleck’s fortunes were further boosted by the Northern black vote breaking toward him at a high rate or otherwise staying home – Sparkman did not improve his share of that voting bloc compared to Russell four years earlier – and the emerging Southern black vote, which had increased by 13% since 1954 and overwhelmingly went his way[7]; thus did he win Oklahoma, Virginia and North Carolina, the first time any Republican had won those states since Hoover in 1928.

Spoiler: 1956 election map & stats

Party	Candidates	Popular Vote	Electoral Votes (266 to win)
Republican	Charles A. Halleck (R-IN)/William F. Knowland (R-CA)	29,708,216 (47.9%)	405
Democratic	John J. Sparkman (D-AL)/Frank J. Lausche (D-OH)	27,165,342 (43.8%)	91
Progressive	Hubert H. Humphrey (P-MN)/Wayne L. Morse (P-OR)	5,147,770 (8.3%)	35

The split further enabled the Republicans to hang on to the Senate and reduce the gap between themselves and the Democrats in the House; George H. Bender (R-OH) retained his seat in the absence of a strong Democratic challenger, black defectors to the GOP and Progressives put James Duff (R-PA) over the top in an extremely close fight, and Dan Thornton (R-CO) rode Halleck’s coattails to victory in a similarly close election. Civil rights advocates were further heartened by the Supreme Court’s decision on Browder v. Gayle three days after the election, affirming the lower court’s ruling that segregation on public transportation was indeed unconstitutional.

Unrelated to any electoral development, President Dewey also sought to undertake one last grand project as his term in office approached its close: the creation of the Interstate System, to connect all of America’s cities with a system of federal highways, in which he was supported and advised most closely by Secretary of Defense Eisenhower. Dewey believed the construction of these highways would improve the economy by further facilitating transportation across the continent and public safety by accommodating the car’s post-war surge in popularity, and was also the sort of public works project that was of actual practical use and not just the sort of egregious New Deal make-work program that he disapproved of. For his part, Eisenhower had been pleasantly surprised by the Autobahn while fighting in Europe, and believed an American counterpart would be crucial not just as an economic measure but also for national defense on the off-chance that the Soviets invaded the American mainland. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which would construct 40,000 miles of highways using a transportation fund fueled by a gasoline tax, smoothly passed through both chambers of Congress this June, opposed only by the Dixiecrats (who were determined to obstruct Dewey even in things they agreed with him on) and a few Republican fiscal hawks.

The election aside, this was a year of great change abroad, too. In Cuba, the highly respected colonel and Cuban attache to Washington Ramon Barquin was recalled by his boss Batista and promoted to general, as the latter thought he’d make a valuable supporter. But in truth Barquin detested the corruption of the Batista regime, and in April he had set in motion a ‘Conspiracy of the Pure’ – so called because of how its ringleaders, himself included, were untainted by said corruption – to depose the tyrant. The coup, involving hundreds of Cuban Army officers, caught Batista completely by surprise and drove him into exile in Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic[8].

Barquin seized power only to call a snap election, in which he refused to run himself, and opened negotiations with the rebels who’d been fighting Batista for the last three years while hunting down and making examples of the deposed dictator’s most egregiously brutal and/or corrupt lieutenants to shore up the popularity of the new regime. Ramon Grau, a former president who led the democratic opposition to Batista and had unsuccessfully run against him in the rigged election of 1954, emerged as the victor of the election: his center-left Authentic Party also took the most seats in the Cuban Chamber of Representatives, but not a decisive majority, and the solidly left-wing Orthodox Party took the second most. Among the newly seated Orthodox representatives was former guerrilla leader Fidel Castro, who had just returned from Mexico after first being pardoned under an agreement with Barquin in exchange for renouncing his arms – much to the disgust of his far less conciliatory ally Che Guevara, a doctor who’d witnessed the American overthrow of Arbenz two years prior. Even as Castro accepted Barquin’s offer and sailed for Cuba, Guevara disappeared into the Mexican night with weapons still in hand, swearing to fight for revolutionary justice elsewhere.

The ‘Revolution of the Two Ramons’, as Barquin’s coup and Grau’s election came to be called, produced a Cuban leadership that – while not interminably hostile to Washington – did desire, and was openly elected to enact, significant reforms which were sure to raise America’s ire. Grau formed an alliance with the Orthodox Party to solidify his rule and enacted elements of their platform, in particular a land reform program that set a 1200-acre limit on land ownership and expropriated the estates of the biggest landowners for division among the Cuban campesinos (peasants). He also nationalized infrastructure deemed critical to the Cuban state – railroads, power plants and so on – and made plans to further nationalize the remainder of the American companies’ property next.

It was at that point that the Dewey administration approached Grau. Expropriation of their companies’ lawfully-obtained property was unacceptable unless compensated, the State Department and ambassador to Havana Philip Bonsal expressed, and they warned that the compensation for such vast sugar & fruit plantations and oil refineries was not something the Cubans could possibly afford. Instead, they and Grau hammered out a compromise: the companies could retain their assets, but had to pay much higher tax rates which Grau deemed fair (as well as the back-taxes they had dodged under Batista), to accede to significant worker protections and to tolerate state support for smaller Cuban-owned sugar mills.

Furthermore, to Grau’s own surprise, the Americans offered to allow him to nationalize the casinos, hotels and other properties accumulated by the Mafia with Batista’s permission, entirely without compensation: Dewey himself personally approved the proposal because he was still as ardently anti-Mob as he was when he just started out as New York’s top prosecutor, and thought this was a win-win solution that would allow him to financially ruin Meyer Lansky and associates while giving Grau another big bone to throw to the Cuban people. That known and well-publicized Mafia influence in Cuba had indeed been a major reason, perhaps the most important, as to why the crime-busting Dewey had been so much more willing than most of his advisers to accept Batista’s downfall. Of course, Cuba’s continued alignment with American foreign policy would have to continue, despite Batista’s downfall: in this the Americans were very insistent and Grau saw no other choice, anyway.

Grau used most of the seized funds and properties to support a massive social welfare drive, particularly in opening numerous schools and clinics, to improve the living standards of the Cuban populace. That which he didn’t spend on social programs, he saved up with an eye on legitimately buying out the property American companies still had in Cuba later. He billed himself as a clean populist president, waging a moral crusade against the degeneracy Batista had allowed to flourish and the squalorous poverty in which too many Cubans lived, and the first years of his third term in office gave no-one cause to suspect anything to the contrary. For their part, Dewey’s America publicly recognized the election of his government as legitimate on the assurance that he would never work with Communists. Again – so far, so good on that count, for the liberal Grau had learned well from Arbenz’s downfall; he was careful not to appoint any Marxists or even self-described ‘democratic socialists’ to his cabinet despite maintaining his alliance with the leftist Orthodox Party.

As spring turned to summer, the regime change in Cuba found itself rapidly overshadowed by developments in Europe and the Middle East. In the former, two Warsaw Pact republics were shaken not just by any rebellion, but by full-blown anti-Communist revolutions. The death of Polish dictator Boleslaw Bierut in March from pneumonia, coupled with poor working and living conditions, opened the path for large demonstrations in the major city of Poznan involving up to 100,000 protesters. And to the south, Matyas Rakosi’s extremely brutal police state – one of the worst in all of the Pact – finally attracted more hatred than fear, with a crowd of 20,000 students spontaneously protesting the forced disappearance of their more liberal-minded professors & friends rapidly swelling to one of 200,000 in the streets of Budapest.

The Polish and Hungarian government response was of course to send in the tanks and riflemen, egged on by the troika in Moscow. But the crowds had grown to, and were still growing past, the point where even thousands of armed soldiers and policemen couldn’t control them anymore. The order to open fire on the crowds wound up turning them into mobs, while some Polish and Hungarian soldiers (exclusively regulars outside of the specialized state secret police/special suppression units, namely the KBW and AVH respectively) turned on their superiors after failing to find it in them to mow down their countrymen and fatally disrupted the chain of command[9]. As of July 24, Polish government forces had been expelled from Poznan and rioting in support of the anti-Communist revolutionary council proclaimed in Poznan was starting to flare up in nearby cities, while the Rakosi regime had abandoned Budapest altogether and flown to Debrecen. Imre Nagy, the recently fired Interior Minister who sought to govern with a much softer hand than First Secretary Rakosi, was chosen by the revolutionaries to lead the counter-government in Budapest and appeal for Western aid.

While Dewey considered his next move, Kaganovich was howling for Soviet troops to amass for an invasion of the two unstable people’s republics (at the invitation of their beleaguered puppets in Warsaw and Debrecen of course) and Tito was frantically contacting Washington for help in case the Soviets took the chance to drive past the Hungaro-Yugoslav border after dealing with Nagy, America’s European powers were plotting a move of their own that would complicate the geopolitical situation even further. Earlier in the year, just as unrest was bubbling toward boiling point in Poznan and Budapest, Nasser had decided to buy a huge amount of Warsaw Pact weapons through Czechoslovakia, for Dewey (reluctant to further antagonize Israel after signing on to METO over their objections) had refused to allow an American arms sale to Cairo.

In response to this arms sale, the US and UK went back on their deal to fund Nasser’s construction of a larger Aswan Dam; and in response to that, Nasser abrogated his own treaty commitments to nationalize the Suez Canal outright. The Egyptian dictator not only further antagonized Britain by supporting Arab nationalist rioting in Jordan, against which King Nayef had to further rely on his British commander Glubb Pasha and the Arab Legion in addition to making desperate appeals to Britain to get rid of Nasser[10], but also made an enemy out of France by supporting the FLN rebels in Algeria. Coupled with his own blatant and intractable hostility to Israel, which was naturally worried about what he was buying all those Soviet arms and munitions for, and he had created a web of three powerful enemies who would like nothing more than to set his head on a pike. Unfortunately for him, Anthony Eden (despite his reputation as a peacemaker) was not remotely as inclined to peaceful solutions as Attlee had been, and vigorously denounced him as an Arab Mussolini. The so-called ‘tripartite powers’ drew up plans to invade Egypt, and the distraction of Nasser’s new Soviet patron by the recent developments in Europe gave them the perfect window of opportunity.

Starting on July 29[11], the three allies sprang Operations Musketeer and Kadesh: under the former an Anglo-French task force would decimate the Egyptian air force and seize the Canal Zone in an airborne assault, while Israel stormed into the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt’s army, though freshly equipped with their new Warsaw Pact gear, was led by an officer corps promoted on the basis of unquestioning loyalty to Nasser rather than competence, and their top commander Abdel Hakim Amer exemplified this trend – a most un-Islamic alcoholic incompetent who grossly overestimated his own abilities. The field marshal did not order the troops to assume a fully battle-ready posture for an entire day, mistakenly assuming the Israelis were just mounting a raid, and further unwisely ordered all forces on and east of the Canal to stay put and fight even after the British and French were attacking said Canal, thinking they could first defeat Israel and then turn on the Western powers. Amer compounded these errors by pushing Nasser to deploy even more troops into the Sinai while the Canal was being fought over, believing Egypt’s forward forces in the peninsula could use more reinforcements with which to defeat Israel.

As anyone with an elementary understanding of strategy might have guessed, by the first week of August Amer’s decisions left the bulk of the Egyptian military stranded in Sinai without air support thanks to the destruction of the Egyptian air force, hemmed in from two sides after the British and French overran the Canal Zone, and about to be completely crushed between the tripartite armies. At this point however, the Soviets intervened to protect their newest client: Kaganovich pushed Premier Malenkov to spout Molotov’s words, threatening to smite Britain, France and Israel with the expanded and improved Soviet nuclear arsenal if they did not back off. The United States responded by inviting the Soviet leadership to a discreet summit in occupied Vienna at which they’d work out all the problems Europe and the Mideast had been having without starting WWIII. President Dewey himself would represent America, with Vice President Halleck leaving the campaign trail to back him up in person.

That meeting was off to a rocky start: the Soviet troika were not cooperative, and the Americans had initially been divided over what to do. As was the case with Vietnam, Dewey did not particularly care to protect European colonial interests, while Halleck was all for supporting the tripartite powers and toppling Nasser. In the end, Halleck won Dewey over: his arguments were that if Nasser wasn’t completely hostile to the West before Musketeer & Kadesh he certainly would be now, and that they could intimidate the Soviets into backing down. (No doubt it went unspoken that he thought a foreign policy triumph would help him break the then-stalemate in the polls against Sparkman, as well) Dewey agreed to support the tripartite powers on the condition that they did not restore the Egyptian monarchy, which would represent an overt re-imposition of British colonial rule on Egypt; a concession that Eden was more than willing to make just to eliminate Nasser.

When the two superpowers’ leaders convened again, at first the Soviets refused to talk of what happened other than to denounce Halleck as a madman while praising Dewey for his restraint. Years later it was revealed that Halleck had apparently lost his temper (and his mind), suddenly seizing a moment to rise and respond to Molotov’s threat that “If you will not listen to our words, perhaps you will listen to the whistling of our atomic bombs; of which we have more than enough to reduce all Britain, France and Israel to radioactive cinders even as our valiant proletarian soldiers liberate your workers and Negroes from beneath your boot – “ with some explosive threats of his own:

“No, how about you Bolsheviks listen to what I’ve got to say? You think the bombers you reverse-engineered from those of ours that crash-landed in Siberia[12] and your piddly little missiles can get past the US Air Force? Well let me tell you, they can’t! And even if they could, Uncle Sam’s got the nuclear weapons to turn every city from Minsk to Vladivostok into a parking lot, and still have enough left over not just to finish MacArthur’s work in China but to make your ghost glow down in Hell!”

At that point, Dewey physically held him back before the shocked and appalled Soviet leadership and hastily added, “But we won’t do any of that unless we absolutely have to. And we don’t have to, do we, Premier Malenkov? Ministers Molotov and Kaganovich?”

In truth, both sides were playing an extremely high-stakes game of chicken. The Soviets did not, in fact, have the nuclear capabilities Molotov claimed they did; instead they were trying to bluff the Americans and the tripartite countries into backing down, allowing them to preserve a foothold in the Mideast while they dealt with the uprisings in Hungary and Poland. Meanwhile the US Air Force had sent a number of Lockheed U-2 spy planes to determine whether Molotov was telling the truth, but the mission was still ongoing at the time of this August summit and so Dewey and Halleck didn’t actually know the Soviets were bluffing at that table. The president had assumed they were, based on his own experience dealing with Stalin’s anger in the aftermath of MacArthur’s nuclear bombings of Korea and China, and Halleck not only agreed with his assessment but suggested that they turn on a good cop-bad cop routine: Halleck himself would pretend to be a frothing-at-the-mouth maniac of a bad cop to shock and intimidate the troika[13], while Dewey would play the level-headed good cop to deescalate the situation and bring them around to an agreement that would surely sound better compared to the nuclear annihilation his Vice President was promising. Even Dewey himself privately admitted that Halleck’s choice of words had frightened him, however.

Regardless, as Dewey had successfully held firm against Stalin in 1950, so too did he now succeed in getting Stalin’s heirs to back down. An agreement was hashed out soon after Halleck’s outburst: the USSR would abandon Nasser to his fate and tolerate Yugoslavia’s entry into NATO, creating an overland connection between Italy and Greece for the capitalist bloc. In exchange, the US would give them a free hand to ‘restore order’ in Poland and Hungary. Furthermore, Austria (where the summit had taken place) would finally regain its independence as a neutral buffer state between the two superpowers[15]. The agreement favored the United States – they gained an ally in addition to removing an enemy, while the Soviets merely got to keep what they already had – but in hindsight, had Dewey pushed harder he might have saved Poland and Hungary (or at least turned them neutral like Austria), considering just how hollow Molotov’s threats had been: the Soviet Union in 1956 had little over 500 nukes to America’s 3,700, and all of six completely untested Semyorka ICBMs to deliver them[14]. Unfortunately for the Poles and Magyars, Dewey did not know that at the time and (as averse as he was to starting WWIII) decided that he had already pushed the Soviets hard enough in the wake of his Vice President’s fury.

The most immediate consequences of the fall’s Vienna Summit had fully manifested by the end of the year. Poland and Hungary were back under the Soviet boot, with Nagy and thousands of Poles and Hungarians choosing death over renewed subjugation and the Soviet Army promptly obliging them while Washington issued vehement denunciations of ‘the barbarous slave-drivers in the Kremlin who prove, yet again, that they cannot spread their odious ideology by reason and persuasion, only brute force against sovereign peoples who seek to chart their own destiny’ but otherwise did suspiciously little to actually help them. Conversely, Nasser was intercepted and killed by a joint party of British and French paratroopers while attempting to flee Cairo on foot as it fell to the tripartite armies. Israel continued to occupy and settle the Sinai peninsula (in so doing also securing the Straits of Tiran), while the Suez Canal Company’s control over the eponymous canal was restored and said canal patrolled by a garrison entirely made up of British and French troops. Muhammad Naguib was freed from house arrest and placed in control of the Egyptian provisional government, from where he called for a free election by no later than April of 1957 – and the immediate release of all of Nasser’s political prisoners, including all Muslim Brotherhood members who were in prison for anything other than directly committing terroristic acts.

While the Soviets denounced Nasser’s downfall as ‘the reinforcement of ruthless colonial exploitation by the sneering imperialists of Britain and France, aided in no small part by their bourgeois friends in Tel Aviv and Washington who even now have the gall to babble about ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’' they, much like the United States, did not lift a finger to actually help him when they still could have. Nor did the troika act beyond words when Yugoslavia pledged to join NATO within a year, to the cheers of its members, and to hold free and fair elections also by no later than the spring of 1957 (in preparation for which Tito even struck the ‘People’s’ from the country’s name and rebranded his own party the Socialist Workers' Party of Yugoslavia). Austria too was finally pieced back together as a free republic and all foreign troops removed from its soil, with little fanfare – all the events in its neighbors & Egypt had overshadowed its recreation, and few newspapers outside of Austria itself reported the country’s independence for more than a day or two.

In the grander scheme of things, the Soviet troika grew ever more fearful of America: the Vienna summit had convinced them that détente was well and truly off the table for good, and that they had to redouble, no, quadruple the pace at which they were massing arms – particularly nukes and delivery systems for them – if they were to ever achieve parity with the United States, or better still, surpass them. Only then would they be safe, perhaps even find themselves capable of starting and winning the Third World War, and all other considerations (like say, keeping their people fed or improving living standards) were at best secondary. That Halleck was largely hailed as a great hero (Dewey allowed him to claim most of the credit for these foreign policy victories specifically to boost his chances in the American election) and went on to actually win the November election with a running-mate known to be similarly aggressive further hardened their belief, nevermind that the new President-elect was not as unhinged as he had made himself appear and sought to continue the Dewey Doctrine as much as possible – suffice to say, he had left quite an impression on Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich at Vienna, and it was anything but positive.

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

[1] As I’ve mentioned before, Lodge held on to his seat back in the 1952 election in Massachusetts, since him not having to draft & then campaign for Eisenhower gave him time to actually campaign against JFK.

[2] Halleck was a strident advocate for civil rights IOTL, and voted for every civil rights act from 1957 to ’68 in addition to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For his part, Lodge made this promise while running alongside Nixon in 1960, without consulting Nixon himself.

[3] Historically, Knowland actually did run for Governor of California in 1956 and lost to Pat Brown by 19 points.

[4] IOTL, Sparkman was Stevenson’s running mate in 1952.

[5] Historically the Progressives disbanded in 1955. The butterfly effect has allowed them to survive just long enough for Humphrey to take up their banner.

[6] Since the end of Reconstruction (and until 1964 IOTL), the few remaining Southern Republicans had been divided into two factions: the ‘black and tans’, who supported continued biracial cooperation and the civil rights struggle, and the ‘lily whites’ who sought to exclude blacks in favor of courting Southern white voters.

[7] Historically, the weak CRA of 1957 and anemic federal enforcement thereof produced only a 3% increase in the black vote by 1960.

[8] The ‘Conspiracy of the Pure’ was historically foiled because a lieutenant betrayed Barquin & the other conspirators to Batista at the last minute, which did not happen here; the result being that Batista is ousted early by non-Communist forces before Castro even returns from Mexico.

[9] Historically, the Poznan uprising happened in summer rather than autumn and was snuffed out by Konstantin Rokossovsky. Also, while the Polish uprising did happen in the summer IOTL (specifically in June), the Hungarian one did not get fully underway until October.

[10] King Hussein of Jordan fired Glubb Pasha and took measures to Arabize the Legion’s officer corps to appease the rioters IOTL.

[11] IOTL the tripartite powers struck in October, after British tempers at home had cooled somewhat over the canal nationalization. With the anti-Communist European uprisings exploding in summer instead, the opportunity to do so presents itself a couple months earlier, and Eden, Mollet and Ben Gurion are happy to take it.

[12] Halleck is referring to the Tupolev Tu-4, which was indeed reverse-engineered from B-29 Superfortresses (previously used to bomb Japan) that crashed in Soviet territory during WW2 and which the Soviets refused to return to the US afterward. It was still the Soviets' main strategic bomber as of 1956, as the superior Tu-95 was still only just entering service.

[13] Similar to Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ IOTL.

[14] IRL, without a post-nuclear Korea military buildup & extended Stalinist regime the Soviets had around 400 bombs in 1956, while the Semyorka only made its debut in 1957; there were four of them at the beginning of their service.

[15] Austria regained its independence in 1955 IOTL as part of the Khrushchev Thaw. Since Khrushchev is quite dead ITL, the hardline Stalinists who replaced him had to be ‘persuaded’ by Dewey and Halleck to agree to their independence and neutralization a year later instead.

 

[Circle of Willis]

1957

After being inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States, the ever-dynamic Charles Halleck immediately got to work. Much like Dewey before him, his first task was to assemble a cabinet. Said cabinet would turn out to be a combination of change and continuity from Dewey’s own. At his predecessor’s recommendation, the new President tapped Eugene Black, the president of the World Bank, for Secretary of the Treasury: a respected moderate, Black was not aggressively anti-Communist and favored building up the economies of America’s allies as both the best bulwark against Communism (as opposed to military action) and to help those which hadn’t yet matured into democracies reach that point. Furthermore, he made good on the promise he’d made to Senator Lodge ahead of the Republican National Convention by nominating the first-ever black cabinet member: Everett Frederic Morrow, the incumbent Administrative Officer for Special Projects, whose appointment to Commerce Halleck intended to tie in with his & the Republicans’ broader strategy to further economically empower the black community they were liberating from Jim Crow.

Aside from these liberal appointments, Halleck retained three members of Dewey’s cabinet. First he kept Secretary of State Dulles on board, a natural move as the two men agreed strongly on pursuing a strategy of brinkmanship against the Soviet Union. Next he retained Attorney General Tolson, viewed as a crucial intermediary with the FBI whom Halleck would need more than ever to battle Southern segregationist forces. Finally the president also retained the services of Labor Secretary Hartley, whom he considered to be a valuable ally in his other coming battle with the unions. As a patronage appointment of little political relevance Halleck also named his campaign manager, a Murray Chotiner who he'd hired on the recommendation of California's new senior Senator Richard Nixon, Postmaster General.

Finally came the conservative appointments that all of America’s right-wingers were looking forward to and who centrists and leftists feared, and the new president wouldn’t disappoint anyone in that regard. To head Defense Halleck chose none other than Douglas MacArthur, whose fearsome reputation and record Halleck intended to further intimidate the Soviets with. For Secretary of the Interior he chose Wisconsin’s own Joe McCarthy, anti-Communist extraordinaire: truthfully, Halleck intended to just ‘kick McCarthy upstairs’, giving him an ominous-sounding but relatively powerless and low-profile portfolio to get him out of the hair of the Senate Republicans, who had complained of his overzealous recklessness, shameless bravado and lack of respect for even his seniors in the party. McCarthy would certainly be disappointed to find out that his new job had nothing to do with locking up Communists and everything to do with tending to national parks. Lastly, Nebraska Senator Fred Seaton was chosen to be Secretary of Agriculture, by far the least objectionable of Halleck’s hard-right choices. Dewey privately questioned the wisdom of putting MacArthur and McCarthy in the new cabinet, but Halleck cheerfully reassured him, “Don’t worry Tom, I was House Majority Leader – compared to herding the Grand Old Caucus back in the day, keeping the Two Macs on a leash should be child’s play.”

Secretary of State: John Foster Dulles
Secretary of the Treasury: Eugene R. Black Sr.[1]
Secretary of Defense: Douglas MacArthur
Attorney General: Clyde Tolson
Secretary of Commerce: E. Frederic Morrow[2]
Secretary of the Interior: Joseph R. McCarthy
Secretary of Agriculture: Frederick A. Seaton[3]
Secretary of Labor: Fred A. Hartley, Jr.
Postmaster General: Murray Chotiner[4]

With his cabinet installed, Halleck wasted no time in trying to ram his agenda through. On the economic front his allies among the conservative Congressional Republicans, spearheaded by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, drafted a bill to really begin taking an ax to the New Deal. Goldwater’s bill featured deep and comprehensive cuts to virtually every New Deal program, most notably (and deeply) targeting farm subsidies and unemployment insurance, coupled with a similar downsizing of the federal bureaucracy: Goldwater proposed eliminating fully half of the two million bureaucrats still employed as of January 1, 1957 (having fallen to that point from a wartime high of 3.6 million over the Truman and especially Dewey administrations). Separately from the Goldwater bill (although certainly supported by him), the GOP also pursued anti-union legislation up to and including a national right-to-work bill and across-the-board tax cuts for everybody under Halleck’s direction.

Almost needless to say, what Halleck was trying to do aroused the ire of virtually all non-conservatives in and adjacent to American politics. This was not by Goldwater’s design, but it certainly was by Halleck’s: applying his foreign strategy of brinkmanship at home, Halleck sought to push for such outrageous measures at first that he’d be able to make himself and his allies seem magnanimous when they moderated their proposals to compromise, hiding from the Democrats and moderate Republicans that the new ‘moderate’ cuts were what they were after all along. In the end, virtually all of the conservative Republican proposals were considerably watered down to get the necessary non-conservative support to pass; this greatly frustrated the uncompromising Goldwater, but Halleck could live with it as long as he got more cuts done than Dewey did (or frankly, ever wanted to). The greatest cuts still fell on agricultural subsidies and the federal bureaucracy, which the conservatives had fought hardest to preserve as much as they could, and the latter was set to shed 500,000 employees – fully half of what Goldwater and Halleck had initially sought[5] – and in addition, unions were now required to submit to a secret-ballot vote managed by the National Labor Relations Board before they could strike.

Unfortunately for Halleck, he signed off on the passed cuts right before the US officially entered a recession late in the summer, bringing the post-war economic boom to a halt. The natural end of the earlier period of economic expansion was exacerbated by a drop-off in car sales and slowed housing construction, with the result being two million (and growing!) Americans finding themselves out of work. The Midwest was especially hard-hit, with Detroit in particular reporting a 20% unemployment rate by the end of the year, and though the recent Republican cuts to unemployment insurance were much milder than initially proposed, the workers of these states were unlikely to forget how vigorously Halleck had pushed for those cuts and how big he wanted them to be before being blunted by moderate & liberal opposition anytime soon. For his part, the president sought to fight the recession while maintaining as balanced a budget as possible: while he accelerated various infrastructure programs, particularly directing Agriculture Secretary Seaton to hasten pre-existing rural electrification and water programs, and restrictions on no-down-payment mortgages were lifted, he pointedly refused to go back on any of the cuts he’d made or to threaten the balanced budget he’d been working toward by initiating any new federal welfare programs. From his perspective, he and the other conservative Republicans had already waited long enough to get some real attacks on the post-Roosevelt welfare state in, having long been frustrated by the economically mild Dewey.

Outside of economics, this year also featured a dramatic confrontation in the struggle for civil rights. On September 4, the Little Rock White Citizens’ Council organized a protest against the integration of the city’s Central High School, and state governor Orval Faubus sent in the Arkansas National Guard to back up these protesters and lock nine black students out of the school building. While news reports of armed soldiers and angry mobs physically keeping unarmed teenagers out of school polarized the nation, Little Rock mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann appealed to President Halleck to step in before the situation escalated as it was sure to do.

Halleck was happy to step in: his first act was to federalize the Arkansas National Guard, removing them from Faubus’ control, after which he ordered them to stand down and stop blocking the ‘Little Rock Nine’. Immediately following that, he sent in 1,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division into the city to actively escort the students into the Little Rock Central High School. The presence of black troops among the federal contingent infuriated the crowd beyond reason, however[6], and the most reckless and ill-tempered of the segregationist protesters surged forward to physically attack the Little Rock Nine and their protectors. While they were beaten back easily enough by the soldiers, some of their compatriots were known Klansmen who had brought guns to the event and took the chance to open fire, aiming to kill the students; in that they failed, but their bullets struck home regardless – two of the paratroopers were killed, one black private and one white corporal, and three others wounded just as 16-year-old Ernest Green and 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford crossed the school’s threshold. The soldiers fired back at the immediate threat, killing four of the attackers, but the rest had retreated into the crowd which, as feared by 101st commander Edwin Walker, half-fled away in a stampede and half-turned into a seething mob more determined than ever to lynch the teenagers and any paratrooper protecting them.

The chaos that followed left no other American soldiers dead, but 17 more were wounded. In retaliation they struck dead no fewer than 9 rioters with bullets and bayonets, and left as many as 25 others wounded…most unfortunately including one middle-aged woman, shot in the back of the head while fleeing hand-in-hand with her husband, who in turn had tried to take a potshot at the paratroopers with his personal revolver before running away. Most likely she’d been shot by a soldier aiming for said husband instead. While it wasn’t clear who had shot the female protestor, much less what race he was, rumors that it was a black soldier spread much faster than the authorities could possibly contain them.

The notion that a white woman could be killed by federal troops for protesting the thought of her children sitting with blacks was a mortal offense to Southern chivalry (or at least how the notion was conceived in far too many Southerners’ minds in 1957) and its chief defenders, the Klan and other local militant segregationist cells; these in turn experienced a surge in recruits, all swearing revenge. The most immediate consequence had been a riot consuming Little Rock’s streets, though the 101st had done a valiant job protecting blacks and anti-segregationist whites considering how little support they received from the National Guard and local police. A week after the clashes and ensuing riot, the federal tax office in Little Rock was firebombed by unknown assailants; it was the first time, in a very long time, that Southern white supremacists had actively targeted a symbol of federal authority. A similar attack on the Jackson, MS federal post office & courthouse just one week later, leaving its exterior damaged, proved that this new step in Southern ‘massive resistance’ was not going to be limited to Arkansas.

President Halleck, for his part, was not swayed from his course on civil rights by this surge in violence. He sent reinforcements to the 101st in Little Rock, and kept federal soldiers in the city until he was sufficiently assured that he could count on the federalized National Guard to take over and not simply let the Little Rock Nine (and any other black students who joined them) get lynched. Elsewhere across the country, US Marshals and deputy marshals were sent out to protect other colored students who sought to attend previously all-white schools. The Halleck administration’s message had been broadcast nation-wide: they were prepared to trample over any notion of state’s right to sustain Jim Crow, and if a state dared mobilize its National Guard for this purpose, the president would exercise his authority to federalize said NG and send in US Army troops to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings. “All those terrorists throwing bombs at federal courthouses and taking shots at their local postmaster, Marshal, or Screaming Eagle aren’t going to make me or the Supreme Court go back on giving negroes their human rights,” Halleck had defiantly proclaimed. “They’re just making me want to fight even harder, to do everything in my power to banish ‘em to the dustbin of history where they belong with Mussolini and his mistress.”

Halleck also sought to further build on Dewey’s efforts to dismantle the institutional disenfranchisement of black Americans. To that end he found further support from Senator Lodge, who was fast becoming one of his most important allies in the battle with Jim Crow. Late this year, Lodge revived his grandfather and namesake’s Force Bill from 1890[7]. Like its predecessor, the bill introduced federal regulation of elections (not just for the House but also for the Senate in its updated form, as when Lodge Sr. proposed his original bill Senators weren’t popularly elected); expanded the duties of the court-appointed voting ‘referees’ introduced by the Voting Rights Act of 1954; and gave said referees the ability to involve US Marshals to stop attempts to turn away black voters at the polls when force became necessary.

Also similar to its predecessor, due to Dixiecrat filibustering and liberal Democratic anger over Halleck’s New Deal cuts the ‘New Force Bill’ failed to secure support from the likes of Texas’ Johnson and make it through the Senate by December 31, 1957 even though it did get past the House on the back of Democratic defectors there. Lodge and his cohorts publicly appeared unfazed, refusing to give up and swearing to reintroduce it as many times as they had to until and unless it finally passed. Behind closed doors however, the Republicans were concerned that they were headed for a clobbering in the 1958 midterms due to the ongoing recession and the unpopularity of the Halleck cuts in the Midwest, and the pressure to find a compromise with Johnson, Stuart Symington (D-MO) and other progressive Democrats before time ran out mounted accordingly.

Overseas, as the Soviet Union was busy licking its wounds and once more consolidated control over its errant Warsaw Pact clients, 1957 proved to be a much less exciting year than the previous one. Yugoslavia and Egypt held their promised elections on April 30 and June 20, respectively, and the victors were well within observers’ expectations. In Yugoslavia, the newly-christened Socialist Workers’ Party comfortably defeated all comers to secure an easy majority across the Federal Assembly, with Milovan Dilas’ Radical Democratic Party coming in a very distant second, while their chairman Tito retained the presidency. The SWP, as the only legal party in the country before Tito called the election, enjoyed a massive advantage in existing political infrastructure over its rivals, and while they didn’t go to the extreme of posting soldiers and policemen at every booth to ensure the voters ‘voted correctly’ they were definitely not above open bribery of said voters with cash handouts, promises of political appointments or more comfortable jobs, and even sacks of potatoes. Nevertheless, the West hailed the election as free & fair and NATO would welcome the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into its ranks just before Christmas, having fast-tracked its accession due to (quite rightly) distrusting the Soviets’ word that they wouldn’t invade the rebellious ex-Communist country while it remained outside the alliance.

Meanwhile in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood swept to a decisive victory, securing a nearly three-quarters majority in the National Assembly and almost completely shutting out the reliably pro-Western liberals of the Wafd Party, much to Britain’s disappointment. Hassan al-Hudaybi, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, was promptly made Egypt’s Prime Minister: an oddball by Brotherhood standards, al-Hudaybi was both a devout Islamist and a genuine man of peace, who had consistently denounced the violence the Brotherhood’s ‘Secret Apparatus’ had engaged in since 1949 and tried to disband said combat organization without success. His first acts in office were to declare Egypt an Islamic republic, impose sharia law on the public and institute religious courts: however he also refrained from the harshest measures being demanded by Brotherhood propagandist Sayyid Qutb and other hardliners, such as forcing non-Muslim women to wear the hijab or levying the jizya tax on Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.

The Supreme Guide also embarked on an economic policy of infitah, privatizing Egypt’s economy and striving to invite American financial investment – which the Halleck administration was all too happy to provide, seeing in these Islamists a more reliable bulwark against Communism than Nasser had ever been – while shutting out the British, who al-Hudaybi resented for the Suez Crisis and earlier exploitation of Egypt much like most other Egyptians did at this point, as much as possible. Both of these courses of action mortally offended Qutb, who was much more violently inclined than his boss and had visited America only to hate every second of having to deal with its individualism, ‘loose’ women and jazz music among many other things, and the more extreme elements of the Brotherhood’s membership; all of whom began debating whether and how to achieve a ‘change in management’ before their Supreme Guide even finished his first year in office.

Also in Africa, even as the fire went out in one British colony, troubles began to brew in others. In Kenya the Mau Mau were almost completely crushed, the British having finally captured and executed their paramount leader Dedan Kimathi early in the year; emboldened by the victory at Suez, Prime Minister Eden remained committed to stomping out the last of the rebels, and Kenya’s Central or ‘White’ Highlands would soon be deemed safe for continued settlement. Far to the west, the failure of Kwame Nkrumah’s pro-independence, pan-Africanist Convention People’s Party to score an overwhelming majority in the colony’s election allowed Britain to put off granting Ghanaian independence and intrigue with the rival Ashanti-centric National Liberation Movement to undermine the former[8]. And in Nigeria, continuing tensions between the Islamic north and Christian south despite efforts to federalize the colony led the British authorities to increasingly consider partitioning Nigeria in half: a proposal which was opposed by both pan-Nigerian nationalists, who considered (perhaps rightly) such a plan to be a British effort to keep them divided and at the Colonial Office’s mercy, and the Nigerian southerners, who themselves were divided between the Yoruba and Igbo – fierce competitors over the colony’s political machine and most prosperous economic sectors.

The Soviets did also achieve one up over America in October of this year: the launch of the satellite Sputnik into space, a much-needed morale booster for the Stalinist troika and their people after Yugoslavia's escape from their orbit and the downfall of Nasser in the previous year. For his part, Halleck was furious at being outdone by the Communists and had the Congressional Republicans draft a 'National Aeronautics and Space' bill to create a special administration dedicated to matching and surpassing the Soviet Union in the realm of space exploration. The Space Race was on.

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

[1] Black had been the president of the World Bank since 1949.

[2] In addition to being the first black executive officer at the White House ITL as he was IOTL, Morrow was a businessman, WW2 veteran, NAACP activist and previously worked for the Commerce Department.

[3] Seaton owned a ranch & farm in addition to a small Midwestern media empire, and was Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Interior historically.

[4] Chotiner was Nixon’s campaign manager in 1950 and ’52 IOTL.

[5] This brings the bureaucracy down to about 1.5 million employees. For comparison, IRL Washington had about 1.8 million bureaucrats in 1960.

[6] Historically, Eisenhower was careful enough to leave black soldiers out of the 101st Airborne troops he sent to Little Rock.

[7] Lodge’s grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., introduced this exact bill and actually got it through the House, but it was killed in the Senate between the Democrats’ filibustering and the Republican Senate leadership prioritizing getting their economic policies through.

[8] Historically Nkrumah and the CPP won that election decisively enough to force Britain to give them independence in March of 1957. Nkrumah’s efforts to fight tribalism and the power of the hereditary tribal chiefs in favor of a unitary pan-Africanist state also brought him into conflict with the country’s more traditional north IOTL.

 

[Circle of Willis]

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.

 

[Circle of Willis]

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.

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[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.

 

[Circle of Willis]

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.

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.

Spoiler: 1960 election map & stats

Party	Candidates	Popular Vote	Electoral Votes
Democratic	George A. Smathers (D-FL)/John F. Kennedy (D-MA)	34,622,735 (50.3%)	285
Republican	Charles 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].

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.

Spoiler: State of the world in 1960

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.