I cannot say anything else but "I also love Scoop".
Wonderfully written, very impressive. I just wish to see how all this end...
Wonderfully written, very impressive. I just wish to see how all this end...
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Except only to see African-Americans being send to Vietnam as cannon fodder by Scoop.
Will you only send the Army to Vietnam or also the Marines? Just watch out for a place called Khe Sanh.
Will you only send the Army to Vietnam or also the Marines? Just watch out for a place called Khe Sanh.
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That does raise the point that for a 'Vietnam War' edition this has been quite light on 'Nam. Still when the rest is so well done who's complaining?
Well, Scoop seems to be a great man. He is a really awesome President, but sadly I do feel he is going to lose the election. After this update that will make me rather sad. Hopefully he can get the bill threw Congress.
Kurt_Steiner: Given that Scoop was a strong supporter of civil rights when he was in Congress, I imagine that as President he would be more willing to exercise moral leadership on the issue than JFK did. Kennedy dragged his feet when dealing with civil rights, which annoyed LBJ who kept advising him that he take a stronger stand. After Johnson became President and pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it bothered him a lot to see blacks hanging JFK’s picture on their wall instead of his’ considering Kennedy had been “too conservative” (Johnson’s words) about civil rights.
Thank you for the compliment, Kurt. Civil rights will be a major topic in 1963, with several updates dealing with it.
NickFey: Without black cannon fodder in Vietnam, how will a certain white soldier from Alabama learn all about the magical world of shrimp?
It depends on what units the Vietnam Mod gives me.
El Pip: You just watch, El Pip. I’ll do a Presidents AAR based on the Modern Day Scenario next and take twenty story years just to get to the beginning of the mod.
jeeshadow: To be honest, I have never seen Scoop as being a two-term President. I haven’t done a Republican President since Tom Dewey and the Republican in me would like to see my party return to the White House in 1964. With who exactly is yet to be determined.
Once I get past Jackson, the challenge for me as a writer is to figure out how to arrange the post-Jackson Presidents so I can get him into the Oval Office four years earlier.
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The Battle for the Voting Rights Act Begins
The President of the United States had made the moral case for it in a nationwide television speech. Now it was the new 88th Congress’ turn to respond. On February 12th, 1963 (Abraham Lincoln’s 154th birthday), the legislation that would become known as the Voting Rights Act was introduced in the House of Representatives. It was by far the boldest action Congress had ever undertaken in regards to civil rights. The VRA prohibited racial discrimination in voting by eliminating the poll tax, banning literacy tests, and making it a Federal crime to engage in voter intimidation. It contained everything the President had asked for in his 1963 State of the Union Address, making the VRA one of the few times Jackson was able to get House Republicans to follow his lead. For the first time this century, Congress was actively seeking to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ratified in February 1870 during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, the Fifteenth Amendment read:
“Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
(An 1870 print celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment)
Once the VRA was introduced in the House of Representatives, it was submitted to the House Judiciary Committee for approval. The committee chairman, William M. McCulloch of Ohio, generally supported the bill but opposed the poll tax ban because he didn’t believe the Federal Government could ban the poll tax when it was used in state elections. He actually led the opposition in his committee, wanting to remove the ban before allowing the VRA out of the House Judiciary Committee. However, Speaker of the House Charles A. Halleck supported prohibiting the poll tax and threatened to strip McCulloch of his chairmanship should he go through with removing it. As Speaker, Halleck had the power to appoint committee leadership as well as decide which committees would consider legislation. The VRA went to the House Judiciary Committee with Halleck’s expectation that it would be reported favorably with little difficulty besides the expected resistance by the few Southern members. Thus he wasn’t happy when McCulloch attempted to remove a major pillar of the VRA. Faced with the prospect of being removed as committee chairman for daring to defy the Speaker, McCulloch backed down from his opposition to the poll tax prohibition and his committee reported the VRA as favorable on March 4th.
(House Judiciary Committee Chairman William M. McCulloch)
The VRA next went to the House Rules Committee, known as "the traffic cop of Congress" for deciding if and when legislation will get sent to the House floor for debate and how that debate will play out. With the membership of the House Rules Committee disproportionately in favor of the Republicans, the Ranking Democratic Member Howard W. Smith of Virginia could only fight a delaying action against consideration of the bill. On March 11th, the House Rules Committee released the VRA to the floor and the lower chamber began to debate it five days later. For once, the Southern opposition was completely powerless. No amendments were allowed at all, meaning that opponents couldn’t water down the VRA with proposed changes. As a matter of principle as well as a matter of his legacy as Speaker, Halleck wanted the full House to pass the strongest voting rights law possible. The only thing Southern Representatives could do during the debate was give speeches expressing their opposition to the bill and the way it was being forced through. After three days of debate, the final vote was held on the night of March 19th. In a rare move for a Speaker, Halleck was present to cast his vote (Speakers usually don’t participate in debate and rarely vote). When the final vote was tallied, the House of Representatives had passed the Voting Rights Act by a lopsided margin of 349-86. The vote went like this:
(Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland)
With Southern Democrats stonewalling the VRA in the Senate, supporters faced the daunting challenge of how to break through the opposition. After all, Senate rules favored the South. Legislation could be bottled up in committee for however long the chairman wished. Even if the VRA could get past Eastland and onto the Senate floor, one Senator could easily filibuster the legislation to death unless two-thirds of the upper chamber voted to stop him. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed he had the answer to this dilemma: moral persuasion. From his days leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King had always felt that the way to bring about much needed change was to use speeches and non-violent protests to highlight the moral problem and build public pressure to resolve it. If opponents resorted to physical violence, he urged his followers to turn the other cheek and warned that they would lose the high moral ground the moment they responded to violence with violence. On the day the VRA was reported out of the House Judiciary Committee, King telephoned the President at the White House. Already looking ahead to the epic fight in the Senate, the Baptist minister advised Jackson to continue using the power of the bully pulpit “to speak out against opposition [to voting rights] and counsel the nation on the moral aspects of this problem.”
King then conferred with other civil rights leaders, most notably Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League. They decided to organize a series of rallies that would be held throughout the South during the spring and early summer of 1963. The purpose of these rallies would be to highlight the moral problem of voter disenfranchisement and build public pressure for the Senate to pass the House bill and send it to the White House for the President’s signature. The climax of their voting rights campaign would be a massive July 4th rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. As Bayard Rustin, a co-organizer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who would now organize this Independence Day march on the nation’s capital, once predicted:
“If a hundred thousand people come to Washington, the President will meet with its leaders and the Congress will sit in special session.”
(Bayard Rustin, left, conferring with labor organizer Cleveland Robinson during the March on Washington in support of the Voting Rights Act)
The President grew increasingly determined to get the Senate to pass the VRA as 1963 wore on. For him, it wasn’t just a piece of legislation he happened to support; it was his legacy that was on the line. Having failed to become the FDR of the 1960s through his largely unsuccessful Fair Deal, Scoop Jackson shifted gears and now wanted to be remembered by history as the President who ended voter disenfranchisement in the United States. One of the things he tried to put pressure on the Senate at the executive level was to hold face-to-face conversations with several Southern Senators in the Oval Office throughout early 1963. He wanted these men to understand that he was pursuing voting rights not to antagonize their region of the country but because as President he was acting in the best interest of the entire nation. He hoped that by talking to them one-on-one, these Senators would see the righteousness of this cause. White House Chief of Staff John Salter would later admit this strategy “was naive from the get go.”
The President was deeply unpopular in the South, giving these Senators no inclination whatsoever to be swayed by his words. Texas Senator John Connally told Jackson outright that he was a sinking ship and that he had no intention to go down with him. Connally pointed to a Texas poll showing that if Jackson ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964, Goldwater would beat him in the state by eight points “with or without Lyndon on your ticket.”
Other Southern Senators couldn’t hide their contempt for the President. John McClellan of Arkansas, who was Chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee, called the President to his face “a left-wing agitator.”
Then there was Richard Russell of Georgia. As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Russell had worked with Jackson to advance his national defense policies. As such, Russell was one of the few Southern Senators whom Scoop could deal with without hostility. The segregationist Georgia Senator of course opposed the VRA, but there was more to his opposition than simply race. He was deeply worried that Jackson was destroying the Democratic Party by making too strong a push for civil rights. Russell viewed last year’s conservative Republican upset victories in the Alabama Senate and Texas Governor races as warning signs that the Democrats were in danger of losing their traditional political base. Ever since the South rejoined the Union following the Civil War, this region of the country was the Democratic Party’s beating heart. Now here was the leader of said party about to tear that heart out. “Mr. President,” Russell warned in his wise elder tone, “This bill is going to cost us the South and you the election [next year].”
Jackson replied that he took an oath to uphold the Constitution; therefore, he couldn't in good conscience allow his personal political fortunes to get in the way of performing his sworn duty.
“The Constitution says that everyone has the right to vote regardless of their race or anything else. It is my duty as President to see to it that the Constitution is obeyed to the letter. If that means my own defeat, then that is the outcome I have to accept.”
One former Southern Senator though thought the President was doing the right thing and would be rewarded for it with eternal gratitude by the black community. “When this bill passes,” Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson predicted, “Every Negro that walks into the courthouse to register will be thinking of you, Scoop. Your picture will be on every sharecropper’s shack from Macon to Hattiesburg.”
Thank you for the compliment, Kurt. Civil rights will be a major topic in 1963, with several updates dealing with it.
NickFey: Without black cannon fodder in Vietnam, how will a certain white soldier from Alabama learn all about the magical world of shrimp?
It depends on what units the Vietnam Mod gives me.
El Pip: You just watch, El Pip. I’ll do a Presidents AAR based on the Modern Day Scenario next and take twenty story years just to get to the beginning of the mod.
jeeshadow: To be honest, I have never seen Scoop as being a two-term President. I haven’t done a Republican President since Tom Dewey and the Republican in me would like to see my party return to the White House in 1964. With who exactly is yet to be determined.
Once I get past Jackson, the challenge for me as a writer is to figure out how to arrange the post-Jackson Presidents so I can get him into the Oval Office four years earlier.
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The Battle for the Voting Rights Act Begins
The President of the United States had made the moral case for it in a nationwide television speech. Now it was the new 88th Congress’ turn to respond. On February 12th, 1963 (Abraham Lincoln’s 154th birthday), the legislation that would become known as the Voting Rights Act was introduced in the House of Representatives. It was by far the boldest action Congress had ever undertaken in regards to civil rights. The VRA prohibited racial discrimination in voting by eliminating the poll tax, banning literacy tests, and making it a Federal crime to engage in voter intimidation. It contained everything the President had asked for in his 1963 State of the Union Address, making the VRA one of the few times Jackson was able to get House Republicans to follow his lead. For the first time this century, Congress was actively seeking to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ratified in February 1870 during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, the Fifteenth Amendment read:
“Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
(An 1870 print celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment)
Once the VRA was introduced in the House of Representatives, it was submitted to the House Judiciary Committee for approval. The committee chairman, William M. McCulloch of Ohio, generally supported the bill but opposed the poll tax ban because he didn’t believe the Federal Government could ban the poll tax when it was used in state elections. He actually led the opposition in his committee, wanting to remove the ban before allowing the VRA out of the House Judiciary Committee. However, Speaker of the House Charles A. Halleck supported prohibiting the poll tax and threatened to strip McCulloch of his chairmanship should he go through with removing it. As Speaker, Halleck had the power to appoint committee leadership as well as decide which committees would consider legislation. The VRA went to the House Judiciary Committee with Halleck’s expectation that it would be reported favorably with little difficulty besides the expected resistance by the few Southern members. Thus he wasn’t happy when McCulloch attempted to remove a major pillar of the VRA. Faced with the prospect of being removed as committee chairman for daring to defy the Speaker, McCulloch backed down from his opposition to the poll tax prohibition and his committee reported the VRA as favorable on March 4th.
(House Judiciary Committee Chairman William M. McCulloch)
The VRA next went to the House Rules Committee, known as "the traffic cop of Congress" for deciding if and when legislation will get sent to the House floor for debate and how that debate will play out. With the membership of the House Rules Committee disproportionately in favor of the Republicans, the Ranking Democratic Member Howard W. Smith of Virginia could only fight a delaying action against consideration of the bill. On March 11th, the House Rules Committee released the VRA to the floor and the lower chamber began to debate it five days later. For once, the Southern opposition was completely powerless. No amendments were allowed at all, meaning that opponents couldn’t water down the VRA with proposed changes. As a matter of principle as well as a matter of his legacy as Speaker, Halleck wanted the full House to pass the strongest voting rights law possible. The only thing Southern Representatives could do during the debate was give speeches expressing their opposition to the bill and the way it was being forced through. After three days of debate, the final vote was held on the night of March 19th. In a rare move for a Speaker, Halleck was present to cast his vote (Speakers usually don’t participate in debate and rarely vote). When the final vote was tallied, the House of Representatives had passed the Voting Rights Act by a lopsided margin of 349-86. The vote went like this:
- Aye: 222 Republicans and 127 Democrats
- Nay: 24 Republicans, 61 Democrats, and 1 Independent
(Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland)
With Southern Democrats stonewalling the VRA in the Senate, supporters faced the daunting challenge of how to break through the opposition. After all, Senate rules favored the South. Legislation could be bottled up in committee for however long the chairman wished. Even if the VRA could get past Eastland and onto the Senate floor, one Senator could easily filibuster the legislation to death unless two-thirds of the upper chamber voted to stop him. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed he had the answer to this dilemma: moral persuasion. From his days leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King had always felt that the way to bring about much needed change was to use speeches and non-violent protests to highlight the moral problem and build public pressure to resolve it. If opponents resorted to physical violence, he urged his followers to turn the other cheek and warned that they would lose the high moral ground the moment they responded to violence with violence. On the day the VRA was reported out of the House Judiciary Committee, King telephoned the President at the White House. Already looking ahead to the epic fight in the Senate, the Baptist minister advised Jackson to continue using the power of the bully pulpit “to speak out against opposition [to voting rights] and counsel the nation on the moral aspects of this problem.”
King then conferred with other civil rights leaders, most notably Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League. They decided to organize a series of rallies that would be held throughout the South during the spring and early summer of 1963. The purpose of these rallies would be to highlight the moral problem of voter disenfranchisement and build public pressure for the Senate to pass the House bill and send it to the White House for the President’s signature. The climax of their voting rights campaign would be a massive July 4th rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. As Bayard Rustin, a co-organizer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who would now organize this Independence Day march on the nation’s capital, once predicted:
“If a hundred thousand people come to Washington, the President will meet with its leaders and the Congress will sit in special session.”
(Bayard Rustin, left, conferring with labor organizer Cleveland Robinson during the March on Washington in support of the Voting Rights Act)
The President grew increasingly determined to get the Senate to pass the VRA as 1963 wore on. For him, it wasn’t just a piece of legislation he happened to support; it was his legacy that was on the line. Having failed to become the FDR of the 1960s through his largely unsuccessful Fair Deal, Scoop Jackson shifted gears and now wanted to be remembered by history as the President who ended voter disenfranchisement in the United States. One of the things he tried to put pressure on the Senate at the executive level was to hold face-to-face conversations with several Southern Senators in the Oval Office throughout early 1963. He wanted these men to understand that he was pursuing voting rights not to antagonize their region of the country but because as President he was acting in the best interest of the entire nation. He hoped that by talking to them one-on-one, these Senators would see the righteousness of this cause. White House Chief of Staff John Salter would later admit this strategy “was naive from the get go.”
The President was deeply unpopular in the South, giving these Senators no inclination whatsoever to be swayed by his words. Texas Senator John Connally told Jackson outright that he was a sinking ship and that he had no intention to go down with him. Connally pointed to a Texas poll showing that if Jackson ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964, Goldwater would beat him in the state by eight points “with or without Lyndon on your ticket.”
Other Southern Senators couldn’t hide their contempt for the President. John McClellan of Arkansas, who was Chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee, called the President to his face “a left-wing agitator.”
Then there was Richard Russell of Georgia. As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Russell had worked with Jackson to advance his national defense policies. As such, Russell was one of the few Southern Senators whom Scoop could deal with without hostility. The segregationist Georgia Senator of course opposed the VRA, but there was more to his opposition than simply race. He was deeply worried that Jackson was destroying the Democratic Party by making too strong a push for civil rights. Russell viewed last year’s conservative Republican upset victories in the Alabama Senate and Texas Governor races as warning signs that the Democrats were in danger of losing their traditional political base. Ever since the South rejoined the Union following the Civil War, this region of the country was the Democratic Party’s beating heart. Now here was the leader of said party about to tear that heart out. “Mr. President,” Russell warned in his wise elder tone, “This bill is going to cost us the South and you the election [next year].”
Jackson replied that he took an oath to uphold the Constitution; therefore, he couldn't in good conscience allow his personal political fortunes to get in the way of performing his sworn duty.
“The Constitution says that everyone has the right to vote regardless of their race or anything else. It is my duty as President to see to it that the Constitution is obeyed to the letter. If that means my own defeat, then that is the outcome I have to accept.”
One former Southern Senator though thought the President was doing the right thing and would be rewarded for it with eternal gratitude by the black community. “When this bill passes,” Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson predicted, “Every Negro that walks into the courthouse to register will be thinking of you, Scoop. Your picture will be on every sharecropper’s shack from Macon to Hattiesburg.”
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At this pace, Scoop is going to become a foul criminal and a shining heroe at the same time but for different people.
About Goldwater... if he doesn't win this year, his place is going to be taken by Reagan, if he's still up to the task (I must reread the AAR...)
About Goldwater... if he doesn't win this year, his place is going to be taken by Reagan, if he's still up to the task (I must reread the AAR...)
Kurt_Steiner: Then there’s his Attorney General...
I have plans for Reagan, which may or may not include the White House. One of my several ideas is to run Reagan-Bush in 1976, which would naturally set Bush up in 1984. That idea has the advantage of already being developed; then again, I have several other ideas as well so who knows which way I’ll go. Once I get past 1968, the Presidents becomes really uncertain until 1984.
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The Enforcer
“Court orders are precisely that: an order. They are to be obeyed like the word of God. If you believe a court order does not apply to you, you must be disabused of that notion in the strictest manner possible.”
-Attorney General Roger Ledyard
As the United States Attorney General in the early 1960s, Roger Ledyard took his job as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer very seriously. He had a black-and-white view of the world: the law was the law and it had to be enforced with the utmost zeal. Throughout his life, from his childhood in Groton, Connecticut to his submarine service in the Pacific during World War Two to his postwar legal career, Ledyard had a religious zealot-like attitude about following the rules and was willing to confront anyone who thought the rules didn’t apply to them. His unwavering commitment to the rule of law earned him the nickname “The Enforcer”, which Ledyard wore as a badge of honor as he climbed up the legal ladder to the top post at the United States Department of Justice. That he had an icy personality was something Ledyard freely acknowledged:
“I do not expect many people to like me. I do expect them to fear me, and it is my hope that this fear will compel them to do the right thing all the time.”
Serving as Attorney General at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, The Enforcer had no patience for the South. None. He coldly dismissed their arguments about states’ rights as “meaningless words only a stupid person would utter” and prosecuted the South with gusto for their failure to fully adhere to civil rights laws and court orders. By January 1963, the Justice Department had sued seven Southern states for not following court orders in enforcing school integration and had sued seventy-five Southern counties over their excluding blacks from the polls (which was against the law). When the state of Mississippi tried to defy court-mandated school integration in the autumn of 1962, Ledyard decided to make an example out of the state by showing that resistance is futile.
James Meredith could sense that the time was right. Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in June 1933, the African-American escaped the strictly-segregated world of Mississippi by serving in the integrated United States Air Force during the 1950s. He left the Air Force in 1960, the year Vice President Henry M. Jackson was elected the country’s next President. When Jackson signaled in 1961 that he was going to embrace civil rights instead of ignoring it like his two predecessors had, Meredith became inspired to break the color line by applying for admission at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The twenty-eight-year-old felt that it was time for the University of Mississippi to drop her policy of whites only, which was in defiance of the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision ruling segregated public schools to be unconstitutional...and he was going to be the one who brought about that long-overdue change in policy. In his application for admission, Meredith wrote that he wanted to attend Ole Miss – her nickname – for the sake of his country, race, family, and himself. “I am familiar with the probable difficulties involved in such a move as I am undertaking,” he wrote, “And I am fully prepared to pursue it all the way to a degree from the University of Mississippi.”
Ole Miss denied him admission...twice. With support from Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, Meredith filed suit with the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi on May 31st, 1961, alleging that the university had rejected him solely on account of his race. He argued that his academic record was good enough to be accepted. The case went up to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled in Meredith’s favor. Mississippi then appealed to the Supreme Court, which on September 10th, 1962 upheld the ruling of the appeals court. Ole Miss was ordered by the High Bench to end its “calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity” and admit him. In response to losing the court battle, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett (a devoted segregationist) went on statewide television on September 13th to denounce “this flagrant assault on our freedom to choose our way of life.”
Emotionally promising not to “surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny,” Barnett declared “we must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the Federal Government or stand up like men and tell them ‘NEVER’.”
Barnett’s defiant pledge that “no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor” attracted Ledyard’s attention in no time. Calling the Governor’s speech “the ramblings of a stupid man,” the Attorney General reacted the next day by suing the state of Mississippi for refusing to admit Meredith at Ole Miss. He called Barnett and asked him point blank, “Are you out of your mind, Governor?”
Hearing this enraged Barnett:
“How dare you speak to me that way!”
“I am the Attorney General of the United States,” Ledyard retorted with no manner of politeness in his voice, “I will speak to you as I damn well need to!”
He thought it was so stupid for the Governor to go on TV and “act like you can ignore the law just because you don’t like it. I have news for you, Governor. YOU CAN’T!”
The two men angrily went back and forth for several minutes.
Barnett: “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do!”
Ledyard: “As the Attorney General, it’s my job to tell you what you can and can’t do!”
Ledyard had no sympathy for the South, which he made abundantly clear to Barnett. Returning the volley, Barnett called Ledyard “a snow-digging Yankee Republican” who was too ignorant to understand that segregation was perfectly moral because the Bible said so. “The Good Lord was the original segregationist,” he proclaimed, “He put the black man in Africa...”
As he started to preach, Barnett suddenly heard the phone line go dead. After about ten or fifteen minutes of arguing with the Governor, the Attorney General finally got fed up and hung up on him midsentence. “That man really is out of his mind,” he angrily told his deputy who watched the shouting match unfold with his eyes wide open. The fact that Barnett said with all seriousness that Mississippi had the largest percentage of African-Americans in the country because “they love our way of life here, and that way is segregation” made Ledyard want to reach through the phone and strangle him. As he saw it, Barnett had no legitimate reason to argue with him whatsoever. The law was the law. The courts had ordered Ole Miss to register Meredith. Ole Miss had to register Meredith and let him enter the university because that is where he wanted to go. End of story. This “pointless” resistance greatly angered Ledyard since it ran against everything he believed in. Concluding that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Barnett over the phone, Ledyard decided that he would have to personally make the Governor obey the law. After discussing the matter with the President, the Attorney General flew to Mississippi. Meredith would get enrolled, one way or another.
(Ole Miss)
Barnett was fuming at the way he had been spoken to, so you can imagine his reaction when he learned that Ledyard had come to Jackson, Mississippi (the state capital) to see him personally. Not only that, the Attorney General had brought along six U.S. Marshals. “Governor, you chose on your own not to enforce the law,” Ledyard told him sternly in his own office, “So I have no choice but to come here and enforce the law myself.”
An undeterred Barnett informed Ledyard that he wouldn’t submit to Federal authority, having publicly vowed to resist integrating the University of Mississippi. “Like I told you,” The Enforcer snapped, “You do not have the right to ignore court orders!”
He then uttered his now-famous “court orders are precisely that” line, followed by his announcement that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had just held Barnett in contempt of court for defying their order to enroll Meredith. He was to be arrested and fined $10,000 a day for each day he refused to obey their order. To drive home his intention to arrest the Governor, Ledyard signaled to one of the U.S. Marshals to brandish handcuffs in the most menacingly way possible. “While you’re sitting in jail, Governor,” Ledyard added with cold straightforwardness, “Your state will not be receiving another penny.”
When the Governor demanded to know what he was talking about, the Attorney General revealed that the President had issued an executive order that was to go into effect the moment Barnett was arrested. This executive order would withhold all Federal funds from the state of Mississippi for her not demonstrating “compliance with the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
The Jackson Administration, playing political hardball with the South in a way no other Democratic Administration would have dared, knew taking this legal step would hurt Mississippi because the state received $668 million from Federal coffers. If the Governor continued his refusal to comply with the court order, the stroke of Jackson’s pen would completely cut that off. In addition, Mississippi would see all her NASA, defense, and other Federal contracts be held up. Ole Miss would see her accreditation suspended and even her football team would be negatively impacted by being stripped of her postseason eligibility to participate in bowl games. Having forced Barnett into a corner by laying out the steep cost of his opposition to Federal authority, The Enforcer gave him a final ultimatum:
When asked if that meant he would finally give in, the Governor blurted out the rest of his sentence:
“But what am I supposed to tell my people?! I gave them my word that I would never agree to let that boy get into Ole Miss!”
“Tell them the truth,” Ledyard answered, “Tell them that the United States is a nation of laws and not of men. Tell them that every American citizen must abide by the law even if they disagree with it.”
The Governor looked down at the floor, staring intently at the polished tiles. He could sense that he was running out of time. He only had two options and he had to decide quickly. After what felt like an eternity, Barnett lifted his head up and shot an inquisitive look at Ledyard. “Can I tell them you pointed a gun at my head?”
Ledyard stared right back at him.
“You can tell your people that we fired at you and missed for all I care.”
Under pressure, Barnett reluctantly decided that he wasn’t going to try to be a hero in the end. A short discussion followed and a deal was struck: Barnett would agree to allow Meredith to register in exchange for being granted a free hand to come up with a face-saving story about why he was doing what he said he wasn’t going to do just days ago. The Attorney General didn’t really care how the Governor would spin this; all he cared about was living up to his nickname.
On Thursday, September 20th, under the protection of 500 U.S. Marshals, Ledyard escorted Meredith onto the Ole Miss campus in Oxford. Knowing that the media was covering the event for newspapers and the evening news, the Attorney General wanted every American to see that he was personally overseeing the enforcement of the law. In the admissions office, Ledyard stood by and watched as university registrar Robert B. Ellis handed Meredith registration paperwork for him to fill out. In the meantime, the segregationist Governor was painting himself as someone who tried with all his might to prevent this moment from happening but was defeated by superior Federal power. In his victimized account of the meeting in his office, Barnett claimed that a U.S. Marshal had actually held a handgun against his head and had the gun ready to fire. Ledyard, upholding his end of the deal, neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. Although he was just doing his job of enforcing the law, the Attorney General couldn’t completely resist feeling pleased as he watched Meredith fill out the paperwork. This was after all an unprecedented moment: the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. After Meredith had been led to his dorm room, Ledyard called the President at the White House to inform him that “the rule of law has prevailed in the United States of America.”
While that was true, it didn’t mean that whites opposed to Meredith’s enrollment wouldn’t go down without a fight. That evening, the U.S. Marshals assembled on campus became accosted by a crowd of about a thousand people. Most of them were students who felt provoked by the heavy-handed Federal presence on their campus. The mob began to harass the U.S. Marshals at 7:25 PM local time. Over the next few hours, two thousand more agitators made their way onto the Oxford campus and soon the harassment swelled into a full-on riot.
Faced with such a large and violent mob, the 500 U.S. Marshals proved wholly unable to contain the rioters. Those angrily protesting the Marshals’ presence pelted them with rocks, bricks, and small arms fire. The white mob also set cars on fire and damaged university property. The Marshals defended themselves as best they could with tear gas...until they ran out of it. With the rioting growing worse by the hour, President Jackson ordered four thousand motorized infantry troops to head to Oxford and restore order there. Having intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic the previous spring, Scoop was not about to look inept dealing with violence within his own country. When they arrived at Ole Miss in the pre-dawn hours of September 21st, the rioters turned their assault on them. The commanding general barely escaped getting killed when his staff car was surrounded at the university’s gate and set on fire. The general and his other passengers were luckily able to escape the burning car and make the 200 yard dash to safety. Gradually, the arriving soldiers were able to establish control over the campus and force the mob to dissolve. When the rioting ended that Friday morning and an uneasy peace had returned, 166 U.S. Marshals and 40 soldiers were wounded. Grimly, two men had been killed during the rioting:
After spending the weekend at Ole Miss making sure that the U.S. Marshals would be adequately able to protect Meredith while he attended his classes, Ledyard returned to Washington on Monday, September 24th. He regarded Ole Miss as “Mission Accomplished”: he had stared down Barnett and forced him to desegregate the University of Mississippi. In doing so, the Attorney General had demonstrated to the South that resisting Federal court orders was futile. National reaction to The Enforcer’s handling of Ole Miss was mixed. Several Southern newspapers vilified Ledyard as being a modern-day William Tecumseh Sherman: a Northern brute who assaulted the Southern way of life without mercy. On the flip side of the coin, Ledyard was hailed as a hero by civil rights supporters for his firm and resolute leadership in getting Meredith enrolled. According to an editorial in “The Washington Post”, the Attorney General had handled the situation in Mississippi better than anyone else could have handled it. Some people even put Ledyard’s name forward as a Republican Presidential candidate in 1964. In his characteristic blunt style, The Enforcer shot that idea down:
“I have never had the desire to be President of the United States. I will never be President of the United States. So stop wasting your time thinking about me becoming President of the United States.”
Despite having the Federal Government on his side, Meredith wasn’t completely accepted by his peers during his two semesters at the University of Mississippi. While some white students did accept him as an equal, others harassed Meredith every chance they got – even though the U.S. Marshals guarded him twenty-four hours a day. For example, students who lived in the dorm room directly above Meredith’s would bounce basketballs on the floor at all hours of the night. He was also subjected to isolation. Whenever Meredith walked into the cafeteria to get his food, other students would turn their backs on him and steer clear of whichever table he sat at. Having gotten this far, Meredith endured this treatment and graduated on August 18th, 1963 with a degree in political science.
The desegregation of the University of Mississippi in September 1962 became a watershed moment in the fight against Southern racism. Southern whites, so used to being able to deny blacks their rights as American citizens with impunity, now found that the tables had turned. Having once condoned the Jim Crow system, the Federal Government was now moving aggressively in dismantling it piece by piece. By forcing Ole Miss to register James Meredith, the Jackson Administration had demonstrated to African-Americans that they had a powerful ally in their fight against segregation. This in turn emboldened blacks to step up their campaign to ultimately eradicate Jim Crow from all walks of life. Ledyard’s actions had told white Southerners in the clearest manner possible that the days of the Federal Government accommodating their attitude against blacks were over. These Southerners would grow violently desperate to hold back the rising tide of racial progress. Thus Ole Miss had set the stage for what would follow in 1963.
I have plans for Reagan, which may or may not include the White House. One of my several ideas is to run Reagan-Bush in 1976, which would naturally set Bush up in 1984. That idea has the advantage of already being developed; then again, I have several other ideas as well so who knows which way I’ll go. Once I get past 1968, the Presidents becomes really uncertain until 1984.
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The Enforcer
“Court orders are precisely that: an order. They are to be obeyed like the word of God. If you believe a court order does not apply to you, you must be disabused of that notion in the strictest manner possible.”
-Attorney General Roger Ledyard
As the United States Attorney General in the early 1960s, Roger Ledyard took his job as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer very seriously. He had a black-and-white view of the world: the law was the law and it had to be enforced with the utmost zeal. Throughout his life, from his childhood in Groton, Connecticut to his submarine service in the Pacific during World War Two to his postwar legal career, Ledyard had a religious zealot-like attitude about following the rules and was willing to confront anyone who thought the rules didn’t apply to them. His unwavering commitment to the rule of law earned him the nickname “The Enforcer”, which Ledyard wore as a badge of honor as he climbed up the legal ladder to the top post at the United States Department of Justice. That he had an icy personality was something Ledyard freely acknowledged:
“I do not expect many people to like me. I do expect them to fear me, and it is my hope that this fear will compel them to do the right thing all the time.”
Serving as Attorney General at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, The Enforcer had no patience for the South. None. He coldly dismissed their arguments about states’ rights as “meaningless words only a stupid person would utter” and prosecuted the South with gusto for their failure to fully adhere to civil rights laws and court orders. By January 1963, the Justice Department had sued seven Southern states for not following court orders in enforcing school integration and had sued seventy-five Southern counties over their excluding blacks from the polls (which was against the law). When the state of Mississippi tried to defy court-mandated school integration in the autumn of 1962, Ledyard decided to make an example out of the state by showing that resistance is futile.
James Meredith could sense that the time was right. Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in June 1933, the African-American escaped the strictly-segregated world of Mississippi by serving in the integrated United States Air Force during the 1950s. He left the Air Force in 1960, the year Vice President Henry M. Jackson was elected the country’s next President. When Jackson signaled in 1961 that he was going to embrace civil rights instead of ignoring it like his two predecessors had, Meredith became inspired to break the color line by applying for admission at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The twenty-eight-year-old felt that it was time for the University of Mississippi to drop her policy of whites only, which was in defiance of the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision ruling segregated public schools to be unconstitutional...and he was going to be the one who brought about that long-overdue change in policy. In his application for admission, Meredith wrote that he wanted to attend Ole Miss – her nickname – for the sake of his country, race, family, and himself. “I am familiar with the probable difficulties involved in such a move as I am undertaking,” he wrote, “And I am fully prepared to pursue it all the way to a degree from the University of Mississippi.”
Ole Miss denied him admission...twice. With support from Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, Meredith filed suit with the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi on May 31st, 1961, alleging that the university had rejected him solely on account of his race. He argued that his academic record was good enough to be accepted. The case went up to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled in Meredith’s favor. Mississippi then appealed to the Supreme Court, which on September 10th, 1962 upheld the ruling of the appeals court. Ole Miss was ordered by the High Bench to end its “calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity” and admit him. In response to losing the court battle, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett (a devoted segregationist) went on statewide television on September 13th to denounce “this flagrant assault on our freedom to choose our way of life.”
Emotionally promising not to “surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny,” Barnett declared “we must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the Federal Government or stand up like men and tell them ‘NEVER’.”
Barnett’s defiant pledge that “no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor” attracted Ledyard’s attention in no time. Calling the Governor’s speech “the ramblings of a stupid man,” the Attorney General reacted the next day by suing the state of Mississippi for refusing to admit Meredith at Ole Miss. He called Barnett and asked him point blank, “Are you out of your mind, Governor?”
Hearing this enraged Barnett:
“How dare you speak to me that way!”
“I am the Attorney General of the United States,” Ledyard retorted with no manner of politeness in his voice, “I will speak to you as I damn well need to!”
He thought it was so stupid for the Governor to go on TV and “act like you can ignore the law just because you don’t like it. I have news for you, Governor. YOU CAN’T!”
The two men angrily went back and forth for several minutes.
Barnett: “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do!”
Ledyard: “As the Attorney General, it’s my job to tell you what you can and can’t do!”
Ledyard had no sympathy for the South, which he made abundantly clear to Barnett. Returning the volley, Barnett called Ledyard “a snow-digging Yankee Republican” who was too ignorant to understand that segregation was perfectly moral because the Bible said so. “The Good Lord was the original segregationist,” he proclaimed, “He put the black man in Africa...”
As he started to preach, Barnett suddenly heard the phone line go dead. After about ten or fifteen minutes of arguing with the Governor, the Attorney General finally got fed up and hung up on him midsentence. “That man really is out of his mind,” he angrily told his deputy who watched the shouting match unfold with his eyes wide open. The fact that Barnett said with all seriousness that Mississippi had the largest percentage of African-Americans in the country because “they love our way of life here, and that way is segregation” made Ledyard want to reach through the phone and strangle him. As he saw it, Barnett had no legitimate reason to argue with him whatsoever. The law was the law. The courts had ordered Ole Miss to register Meredith. Ole Miss had to register Meredith and let him enter the university because that is where he wanted to go. End of story. This “pointless” resistance greatly angered Ledyard since it ran against everything he believed in. Concluding that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Barnett over the phone, Ledyard decided that he would have to personally make the Governor obey the law. After discussing the matter with the President, the Attorney General flew to Mississippi. Meredith would get enrolled, one way or another.
(Ole Miss)
Barnett was fuming at the way he had been spoken to, so you can imagine his reaction when he learned that Ledyard had come to Jackson, Mississippi (the state capital) to see him personally. Not only that, the Attorney General had brought along six U.S. Marshals. “Governor, you chose on your own not to enforce the law,” Ledyard told him sternly in his own office, “So I have no choice but to come here and enforce the law myself.”
An undeterred Barnett informed Ledyard that he wouldn’t submit to Federal authority, having publicly vowed to resist integrating the University of Mississippi. “Like I told you,” The Enforcer snapped, “You do not have the right to ignore court orders!”
He then uttered his now-famous “court orders are precisely that” line, followed by his announcement that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had just held Barnett in contempt of court for defying their order to enroll Meredith. He was to be arrested and fined $10,000 a day for each day he refused to obey their order. To drive home his intention to arrest the Governor, Ledyard signaled to one of the U.S. Marshals to brandish handcuffs in the most menacingly way possible. “While you’re sitting in jail, Governor,” Ledyard added with cold straightforwardness, “Your state will not be receiving another penny.”
When the Governor demanded to know what he was talking about, the Attorney General revealed that the President had issued an executive order that was to go into effect the moment Barnett was arrested. This executive order would withhold all Federal funds from the state of Mississippi for her not demonstrating “compliance with the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
The Jackson Administration, playing political hardball with the South in a way no other Democratic Administration would have dared, knew taking this legal step would hurt Mississippi because the state received $668 million from Federal coffers. If the Governor continued his refusal to comply with the court order, the stroke of Jackson’s pen would completely cut that off. In addition, Mississippi would see all her NASA, defense, and other Federal contracts be held up. Ole Miss would see her accreditation suspended and even her football team would be negatively impacted by being stripped of her postseason eligibility to participate in bowl games. Having forced Barnett into a corner by laying out the steep cost of his opposition to Federal authority, The Enforcer gave him a final ultimatum:
- He could back down, allow Meredith to enroll at Ole Miss, and figure out a way to spin his about-face in the best possible light. Taking his route would also void Barnett’s arrest, fine, and the executive order.
- He could be arrested, face the fine of $10,000 a day, and have Mississippi suffer greatly.
When asked if that meant he would finally give in, the Governor blurted out the rest of his sentence:
“But what am I supposed to tell my people?! I gave them my word that I would never agree to let that boy get into Ole Miss!”
“Tell them the truth,” Ledyard answered, “Tell them that the United States is a nation of laws and not of men. Tell them that every American citizen must abide by the law even if they disagree with it.”
The Governor looked down at the floor, staring intently at the polished tiles. He could sense that he was running out of time. He only had two options and he had to decide quickly. After what felt like an eternity, Barnett lifted his head up and shot an inquisitive look at Ledyard. “Can I tell them you pointed a gun at my head?”
Ledyard stared right back at him.
“You can tell your people that we fired at you and missed for all I care.”
Under pressure, Barnett reluctantly decided that he wasn’t going to try to be a hero in the end. A short discussion followed and a deal was struck: Barnett would agree to allow Meredith to register in exchange for being granted a free hand to come up with a face-saving story about why he was doing what he said he wasn’t going to do just days ago. The Attorney General didn’t really care how the Governor would spin this; all he cared about was living up to his nickname.
On Thursday, September 20th, under the protection of 500 U.S. Marshals, Ledyard escorted Meredith onto the Ole Miss campus in Oxford. Knowing that the media was covering the event for newspapers and the evening news, the Attorney General wanted every American to see that he was personally overseeing the enforcement of the law. In the admissions office, Ledyard stood by and watched as university registrar Robert B. Ellis handed Meredith registration paperwork for him to fill out. In the meantime, the segregationist Governor was painting himself as someone who tried with all his might to prevent this moment from happening but was defeated by superior Federal power. In his victimized account of the meeting in his office, Barnett claimed that a U.S. Marshal had actually held a handgun against his head and had the gun ready to fire. Ledyard, upholding his end of the deal, neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. Although he was just doing his job of enforcing the law, the Attorney General couldn’t completely resist feeling pleased as he watched Meredith fill out the paperwork. This was after all an unprecedented moment: the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. After Meredith had been led to his dorm room, Ledyard called the President at the White House to inform him that “the rule of law has prevailed in the United States of America.”
While that was true, it didn’t mean that whites opposed to Meredith’s enrollment wouldn’t go down without a fight. That evening, the U.S. Marshals assembled on campus became accosted by a crowd of about a thousand people. Most of them were students who felt provoked by the heavy-handed Federal presence on their campus. The mob began to harass the U.S. Marshals at 7:25 PM local time. Over the next few hours, two thousand more agitators made their way onto the Oxford campus and soon the harassment swelled into a full-on riot.
Faced with such a large and violent mob, the 500 U.S. Marshals proved wholly unable to contain the rioters. Those angrily protesting the Marshals’ presence pelted them with rocks, bricks, and small arms fire. The white mob also set cars on fire and damaged university property. The Marshals defended themselves as best they could with tear gas...until they ran out of it. With the rioting growing worse by the hour, President Jackson ordered four thousand motorized infantry troops to head to Oxford and restore order there. Having intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic the previous spring, Scoop was not about to look inept dealing with violence within his own country. When they arrived at Ole Miss in the pre-dawn hours of September 21st, the rioters turned their assault on them. The commanding general barely escaped getting killed when his staff car was surrounded at the university’s gate and set on fire. The general and his other passengers were luckily able to escape the burning car and make the 200 yard dash to safety. Gradually, the arriving soldiers were able to establish control over the campus and force the mob to dissolve. When the rioting ended that Friday morning and an uneasy peace had returned, 166 U.S. Marshals and 40 soldiers were wounded. Grimly, two men had been killed during the rioting:
- Foreign-born journalist Paul Guihard, who was covering the event for the British tabloid newspaper “The Daily Sketch”. His body was found behind a building with a gunshot wound in the back of his head.
- Ray Gunter, a local white jukebox repairman who had come to the campus merely out of curiosity. He was found with a gunshot wound in his forehead.
After spending the weekend at Ole Miss making sure that the U.S. Marshals would be adequately able to protect Meredith while he attended his classes, Ledyard returned to Washington on Monday, September 24th. He regarded Ole Miss as “Mission Accomplished”: he had stared down Barnett and forced him to desegregate the University of Mississippi. In doing so, the Attorney General had demonstrated to the South that resisting Federal court orders was futile. National reaction to The Enforcer’s handling of Ole Miss was mixed. Several Southern newspapers vilified Ledyard as being a modern-day William Tecumseh Sherman: a Northern brute who assaulted the Southern way of life without mercy. On the flip side of the coin, Ledyard was hailed as a hero by civil rights supporters for his firm and resolute leadership in getting Meredith enrolled. According to an editorial in “The Washington Post”, the Attorney General had handled the situation in Mississippi better than anyone else could have handled it. Some people even put Ledyard’s name forward as a Republican Presidential candidate in 1964. In his characteristic blunt style, The Enforcer shot that idea down:
“I have never had the desire to be President of the United States. I will never be President of the United States. So stop wasting your time thinking about me becoming President of the United States.”
Despite having the Federal Government on his side, Meredith wasn’t completely accepted by his peers during his two semesters at the University of Mississippi. While some white students did accept him as an equal, others harassed Meredith every chance they got – even though the U.S. Marshals guarded him twenty-four hours a day. For example, students who lived in the dorm room directly above Meredith’s would bounce basketballs on the floor at all hours of the night. He was also subjected to isolation. Whenever Meredith walked into the cafeteria to get his food, other students would turn their backs on him and steer clear of whichever table he sat at. Having gotten this far, Meredith endured this treatment and graduated on August 18th, 1963 with a degree in political science.
The desegregation of the University of Mississippi in September 1962 became a watershed moment in the fight against Southern racism. Southern whites, so used to being able to deny blacks their rights as American citizens with impunity, now found that the tables had turned. Having once condoned the Jim Crow system, the Federal Government was now moving aggressively in dismantling it piece by piece. By forcing Ole Miss to register James Meredith, the Jackson Administration had demonstrated to African-Americans that they had a powerful ally in their fight against segregation. This in turn emboldened blacks to step up their campaign to ultimately eradicate Jim Crow from all walks of life. Ledyard’s actions had told white Southerners in the clearest manner possible that the days of the Federal Government accommodating their attitude against blacks were over. These Southerners would grow violently desperate to hold back the rising tide of racial progress. Thus Ole Miss had set the stage for what would follow in 1963.
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Well, bit by bit the job is done, but I fear that the problem is far from being solved...
I think a Dixicrat resurgence is coming. If the Republicans nominate an Anti-segregationist, I can easily see how Jackson would lose the election.
Kurt_Steiner: You’re right about that, Kurt. We’re still dealing with racial problems today, despite all the progress made in the last half-century.
jeeshadow: Jackson did face Dixicratic opposition in the 1960 election courtesy of Harry Byrd of Virginia. He took several states in the South, nearly costing Jackson the election as far as the Electoral College is concerned. Now four years later, I easily see a Dixiecrat like George Wallace challenging the two main parties on the national level.
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Why We Fight
In January 1963, television host David Susskind conducted a series of interviews with former President Thomas E. Dewey at his Presidential Library in Pawling, New York. 1963 marked ten years since Dewey left office and Susskind thought this was the perfect time to take a retrospective look at the life and legacy of the nation’s 35th President. Over a number of days, Susskind and Dewey discussed a wide range of topics including his Gangbuster days in the 1930s which made him a national celebrity, his brief tenure as Governor of New York, his nomination as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 1944 and unexpected elevation to the top of the ticket following the death of President Wendell Willkie a month before the election, his two terms in the White House (1945-1953), his life since leaving office, and his views on national politics heading into 1964. When Susskind asked Dewey what his biggest regret was, the former President had a quick one word answer: “China.”
By the time Dewey was inaugurated President in January 1945, the decision had already been made by the Allies that Chiang Kai-shek would be restored to power in China after the war. Chiang had been forced into exile in the United States after Japan defeated Nationalist China in 1939 and was therefore the natural choice to lead China following Japan’s surrender in 1947. Dewey had no reason to think that Chiang wouldn’t be a dependable pro-West ally in the subsequent Cold War and therefore went along with restoring him to power. That, in hindsight, was his biggest error. Instead of being on America’s side, Chiang stabbed the US in the back by pursuing an imperialist course which would make China the great power in Asia at the expense of her former allies. “Now we have a situation [in Asia],” Dewey observed, “That is not much different from what we faced twenty years ago. We have a nation that believes itself to be the master of the continent and is pushing for war against her neighbors...including us.”
Since they were speaking about Asia, Susskind brought up the subject of Vietnam. As the man who committed the United States to Southeast Asia in the early 1950s by agreeing to provide the French with military aid in their ultimately unsuccessful effort to hold onto Indochina, Dewey was asked if he supported President Henry M. Jackson’s decision to deploy 40,000 combat troops to South Vietnam. The former President said he did, explaining that it was very important for the United States to “stand up and fight for this part of the world.”
He saw Laos as the preview of a grim future awaiting Southeast Asia should America fail to win the Vietnam War. The Chinese had invaded the country in 1961 on the humanitarian pretext of putting an end to her ongoing civil war. When Chinese soldiers were withdrawn, Laos had been forcibly transformed into a puppet state that looked to Nanjing for “guidance”. Dewey warned Susskind that without American military action, “Vietnam will become another Laos and we will find ourselves repeating the same experience in Cambodia and Thailand and Burma.”
Since the United States was sending troops to South Vietnam, she needed to follow up that deployment “with whatever support is necessary to achieve the objectives of their mission.”
(Thomas E. Dewey’s official Presidential portrait)
Dewey’s comments reflected the Jackson Administration’s thinking in 1963. Having lost Laos, Scoop was anxious to avoid having anymore countries get absorbed into China’s sphere of influence. In addition to South Vietnam, Jackson had also deployed a few thousand soldiers to Thailand and Korea to ward off the potential of a Chinese invasion of those two countries. Indeed, the Korean Peninsula in recent years had seen the capital Seoul swing from a pro-US government to a pro-China government back to a pro-US government. However, the main focus was on South Vietnam. The American-backed government in Saigon was a roadblock preventing China from exerting control over the entire Indochina region. To continue their expansion southward, the Chinese provided military aide to the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were Communist guerrillas who wanted to overthrow the Saigon government and unify the two Vietnams under a Communist government led by Ho Chi Minh. Chiang cared little for Communism; he was operating on the doctrine that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Thus his support for the Viet Cong was one of convenience and not of ideology. Once the two Vietnams were unified under Ho’s leadership, Chiang would figure out how to bring Vietnam under his country’s wings – either through peaceful or not-so-peaceful means.
To stop the Chinese from using the Viet Cong to topple the military regime in Saigon, President Jackson authorized the deployment of 40,000 soldiers to South Vietnam. They were under the command of General Maxwell Taylor, who in the 1950s led the American military mission in Yugoslavia which helped the pro-US royalist government win her war against Communist guerillas. It was his experience of eradicating the guerilla threat in the Balkans that got Taylor sent to Southeast Asia. After arriving in Saigon and taking stock of the situation, Taylor crafted a plan to eradicate the Viet Cong with just 40,000 troops. The General presented his plan to Washington and got the green light to pursue it. Scoop trusted Taylor’s judgment and proceeded to stay out of his way. The Commander-in-Chief made no effort to micromanage the Vietnam War, believing that those fighting on the ground shouldn’t be hamstrung by second-guessing done thousands of miles away. This hands-off "let Taylor run the show because he knows what he is doing" policy appeared to be paying off in the spring of 1963. Reports were reaching the President from American military and civilian officials that the US was slowly making gains against the Viet Cong and that security in and around Saigon was improving. Taylor was holding back from really going after the guerillas, waiting until the last of the 40,000 combat troops assigned to his command arrived in the country at the end of October 1963.
In May 1963, Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze made a two-day trip to South Vietnam. He met with the soldiers and found that they were gung-ho about fighting. These young men (their average age being 22, four years younger than the average American serviceman in World War Two) had been little boys during WWII and had grown up being taught that it had been “The Good War” in which freedom and democracy triumphed over tyranny and conquest. They had seen countless movies – particularly those starring box office draw John Wayne – in which the good guy always beats the bad guy and gets the girl. These men who were fighting the Viet Cong on Jackson’s orders were excited about doing so, believing that as the good guys they were fighting for the right reasons. Just as “The Greatest Generation” before them had fought to liberate Europe from Nazism and Asia from Japanese Imperialism, this generation was fighting to save the people of South Vietnam from Chinese Imperialism. The men Nitze talked to felt they were fighting for a noble cause, which gave them high morale and the willingness to go into battle against what they regarded to be an instrument of oppression. The Secretary of Defense was impressed by their fighting spirit and came away from the trip believing that the United States was on the right track. “I have seen nothing but progress and indications of further progress,” he declared afterwards.
The optimism that America was bound to win the Vietnam War because winning wars is what she did best extended all the way to the top. In July 1963, Jackson flew out to Honolulu, Hawaii for a military briefing with Taylor. The General informed his Commander-in-Chief that “the present situation in Vietnam is satisfactory” and that he would not need to increase the troop level at the present time. Taylor then confidently predicted that if everything went according to plan, the Viet Cong would be destroyed as a threat by the end of 1965 and the U.S. military would be able to start making a methodical withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1966. As the South Vietnamese forces grew better adept at defending their own country, the number of American soldiers leaving South Vietnam would increase. The United States wouldn’t pull out of the country completely, though; a token force would stay behind to provide support just like in Thailand and Korea. By 1969, Taylor envisioned maybe two or three thousand combat soldiers garrisoned in South Vietnam (less than 8% of the original force of 40,000). It was a very confident prediction...one Jackson took at face value. If one of the best Generals in the Army was telling him that the Vietnam War would be over by the middle of the decade, why doubt him? The President after all was a man who trusted the military to get the job done and get it done well. Taylor was so far satisfying both criteria.
Jackson came out of the briefing greatly encouraged by the military progress being made in South Vietnam. When he addressed the nation the year before to announce his decision to get America into Vietnam, he stressed that there was an exit strategy. Now the President was armed with a specific target date for that exit. He felt this was very important for two reasons:
It was against this backdrop of liberal angst over Vietnam that South Dakota Senator George McGovern announced his candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination on September 20th, 1963. A dove, McGovern had been highly critical of Jackson’s policies from the beginning. He had voted against higher appropriations for defense spending in 1961, believing it to be wholly unnecessary. By the autumn of 1963, the South Dakota Senator had emerged as one of the President’s leading critics within the Democratic Party. In addition to opposing him politically, McGovern didn’t like Scoop personally – a feeling that was quite mutual. In his speech announcing his candidacy, McGovern attacked the President in a way that was reminiscent of the Dewey-Taft Feud which had marred Dewey’s second term. He wholly dismissed the Administration’s optimism about Vietnam as “self-delusion” and asserted that the war was unwinnable on the grounds that “we are being asked to believe that our men will be able to defeat guerrillas who are fighting in the jungle terrain that they know so well. That, my friends, is folly.”
McGovern warned that Vietnam would become “a debacle” that would end in “a political defeat” for the United States. As President, he would withdraw US forces from “this trap” before it was too late and thereby spare the country “an unnecessary war which will haunt us in every corner of this world.”
Theodore Roosevelt had tried to wrestle the Republican nomination away from President William Howard Taft in 1912. Huey Long had mounted a spirited challenge against President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the 1936 Democratic National Convention. Now it was President Henry M. Jackson who would face opposition to his re-nomination. McGovern would run against him in the 1964 Democratic primaries as the anti-war candidate who wanted no involvement in South Vietnam (which he regarded as a political and not a military problem). McGovern’s decision to toss his hat into the ring had been prompted by the Dump Jackson Movement. Formed by left-wing activists in August 1963, the Dump Jackson Movement was exactly what its’ name implied. These activists were strongly opposed to Jackson’s bid for re-nomination, believing the President posed a dangerous threat to the United States. He was too hawkish for their comfort and they feared he would carelessly get the country into a nuclear war if given the chance (a fear Hollywood would tap into with the December 1963 release of the black comedy “Dr. Strangelove”). The way to stop Jackson was to prevent his re-nomination and that meant mounting a campaign challenge in the primaries. The Dump Jackson Movement approached McGovern as their first choice, attracted by his record of opposing the President. They urged him to run, saying that he had a moral obligation to stop the march to war and save countless Americans from returning home from South Vietnam in body bags. After thinking it over, McGovern agreed to run. He told the left-wing activists, “Somebody has to stop this madness...and I will.”
Needless to say, news of McGovern’s candidacy wasn’t received well at the White House. The fact that it was McGovern who wanted to stop him from being re-nominated upset Jackson more than the challenge itself. To him, the South Dakota Senator represented everything that was wrong with the Left when it came to foreign policy and national defense. In a press conference held shortly after McGovern’s announcement, the President pulled no punches about his archrival. “Senator McGovern is running as is his right,” he said, “But he should be ashamed of himself for wanting to run a campaign of ignorance and falsehoods.”
Scoop went on to argue that “Not once during his speech did Senator McGovern say he would protect and defend the United States of America. That is the main duty a man solemnly swears to do when he takes this office.”
It was strong stuff – a preview of the bitter fight that would unfold on the Democratic side in 1964. It wasn’t just that Jackson and McGovern were rivals for the nomination; these were two men who sincerely believed the other was wholly unfit to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. The President’s primary campaign against the South Dakota Senator would be fueled by outrage over McGovern portraying the Vietnam War as a lost cause when the facts on the ground were pointing the other way. “He isn’t just wrong,” Scoop complained behind closed doors, “He doesn’t even care about what will happen if we pull out completely!”
The Vietnam War had been Jackson’s decision, made in order to prevent the Chinese from taking over all of Southeast Asia. He was now even more determined to win the war, which would completely discredit McGovern as someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.
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Thus we get "McGovern for President" eight years early...
jeeshadow: Jackson did face Dixicratic opposition in the 1960 election courtesy of Harry Byrd of Virginia. He took several states in the South, nearly costing Jackson the election as far as the Electoral College is concerned. Now four years later, I easily see a Dixiecrat like George Wallace challenging the two main parties on the national level.
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Why We Fight
In January 1963, television host David Susskind conducted a series of interviews with former President Thomas E. Dewey at his Presidential Library in Pawling, New York. 1963 marked ten years since Dewey left office and Susskind thought this was the perfect time to take a retrospective look at the life and legacy of the nation’s 35th President. Over a number of days, Susskind and Dewey discussed a wide range of topics including his Gangbuster days in the 1930s which made him a national celebrity, his brief tenure as Governor of New York, his nomination as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 1944 and unexpected elevation to the top of the ticket following the death of President Wendell Willkie a month before the election, his two terms in the White House (1945-1953), his life since leaving office, and his views on national politics heading into 1964. When Susskind asked Dewey what his biggest regret was, the former President had a quick one word answer: “China.”
By the time Dewey was inaugurated President in January 1945, the decision had already been made by the Allies that Chiang Kai-shek would be restored to power in China after the war. Chiang had been forced into exile in the United States after Japan defeated Nationalist China in 1939 and was therefore the natural choice to lead China following Japan’s surrender in 1947. Dewey had no reason to think that Chiang wouldn’t be a dependable pro-West ally in the subsequent Cold War and therefore went along with restoring him to power. That, in hindsight, was his biggest error. Instead of being on America’s side, Chiang stabbed the US in the back by pursuing an imperialist course which would make China the great power in Asia at the expense of her former allies. “Now we have a situation [in Asia],” Dewey observed, “That is not much different from what we faced twenty years ago. We have a nation that believes itself to be the master of the continent and is pushing for war against her neighbors...including us.”
Since they were speaking about Asia, Susskind brought up the subject of Vietnam. As the man who committed the United States to Southeast Asia in the early 1950s by agreeing to provide the French with military aid in their ultimately unsuccessful effort to hold onto Indochina, Dewey was asked if he supported President Henry M. Jackson’s decision to deploy 40,000 combat troops to South Vietnam. The former President said he did, explaining that it was very important for the United States to “stand up and fight for this part of the world.”
He saw Laos as the preview of a grim future awaiting Southeast Asia should America fail to win the Vietnam War. The Chinese had invaded the country in 1961 on the humanitarian pretext of putting an end to her ongoing civil war. When Chinese soldiers were withdrawn, Laos had been forcibly transformed into a puppet state that looked to Nanjing for “guidance”. Dewey warned Susskind that without American military action, “Vietnam will become another Laos and we will find ourselves repeating the same experience in Cambodia and Thailand and Burma.”
Since the United States was sending troops to South Vietnam, she needed to follow up that deployment “with whatever support is necessary to achieve the objectives of their mission.”
(Thomas E. Dewey’s official Presidential portrait)
Dewey’s comments reflected the Jackson Administration’s thinking in 1963. Having lost Laos, Scoop was anxious to avoid having anymore countries get absorbed into China’s sphere of influence. In addition to South Vietnam, Jackson had also deployed a few thousand soldiers to Thailand and Korea to ward off the potential of a Chinese invasion of those two countries. Indeed, the Korean Peninsula in recent years had seen the capital Seoul swing from a pro-US government to a pro-China government back to a pro-US government. However, the main focus was on South Vietnam. The American-backed government in Saigon was a roadblock preventing China from exerting control over the entire Indochina region. To continue their expansion southward, the Chinese provided military aide to the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were Communist guerrillas who wanted to overthrow the Saigon government and unify the two Vietnams under a Communist government led by Ho Chi Minh. Chiang cared little for Communism; he was operating on the doctrine that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Thus his support for the Viet Cong was one of convenience and not of ideology. Once the two Vietnams were unified under Ho’s leadership, Chiang would figure out how to bring Vietnam under his country’s wings – either through peaceful or not-so-peaceful means.
To stop the Chinese from using the Viet Cong to topple the military regime in Saigon, President Jackson authorized the deployment of 40,000 soldiers to South Vietnam. They were under the command of General Maxwell Taylor, who in the 1950s led the American military mission in Yugoslavia which helped the pro-US royalist government win her war against Communist guerillas. It was his experience of eradicating the guerilla threat in the Balkans that got Taylor sent to Southeast Asia. After arriving in Saigon and taking stock of the situation, Taylor crafted a plan to eradicate the Viet Cong with just 40,000 troops. The General presented his plan to Washington and got the green light to pursue it. Scoop trusted Taylor’s judgment and proceeded to stay out of his way. The Commander-in-Chief made no effort to micromanage the Vietnam War, believing that those fighting on the ground shouldn’t be hamstrung by second-guessing done thousands of miles away. This hands-off "let Taylor run the show because he knows what he is doing" policy appeared to be paying off in the spring of 1963. Reports were reaching the President from American military and civilian officials that the US was slowly making gains against the Viet Cong and that security in and around Saigon was improving. Taylor was holding back from really going after the guerillas, waiting until the last of the 40,000 combat troops assigned to his command arrived in the country at the end of October 1963.
In May 1963, Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze made a two-day trip to South Vietnam. He met with the soldiers and found that they were gung-ho about fighting. These young men (their average age being 22, four years younger than the average American serviceman in World War Two) had been little boys during WWII and had grown up being taught that it had been “The Good War” in which freedom and democracy triumphed over tyranny and conquest. They had seen countless movies – particularly those starring box office draw John Wayne – in which the good guy always beats the bad guy and gets the girl. These men who were fighting the Viet Cong on Jackson’s orders were excited about doing so, believing that as the good guys they were fighting for the right reasons. Just as “The Greatest Generation” before them had fought to liberate Europe from Nazism and Asia from Japanese Imperialism, this generation was fighting to save the people of South Vietnam from Chinese Imperialism. The men Nitze talked to felt they were fighting for a noble cause, which gave them high morale and the willingness to go into battle against what they regarded to be an instrument of oppression. The Secretary of Defense was impressed by their fighting spirit and came away from the trip believing that the United States was on the right track. “I have seen nothing but progress and indications of further progress,” he declared afterwards.
The optimism that America was bound to win the Vietnam War because winning wars is what she did best extended all the way to the top. In July 1963, Jackson flew out to Honolulu, Hawaii for a military briefing with Taylor. The General informed his Commander-in-Chief that “the present situation in Vietnam is satisfactory” and that he would not need to increase the troop level at the present time. Taylor then confidently predicted that if everything went according to plan, the Viet Cong would be destroyed as a threat by the end of 1965 and the U.S. military would be able to start making a methodical withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1966. As the South Vietnamese forces grew better adept at defending their own country, the number of American soldiers leaving South Vietnam would increase. The United States wouldn’t pull out of the country completely, though; a token force would stay behind to provide support just like in Thailand and Korea. By 1969, Taylor envisioned maybe two or three thousand combat soldiers garrisoned in South Vietnam (less than 8% of the original force of 40,000). It was a very confident prediction...one Jackson took at face value. If one of the best Generals in the Army was telling him that the Vietnam War would be over by the middle of the decade, why doubt him? The President after all was a man who trusted the military to get the job done and get it done well. Taylor was so far satisfying both criteria.
Jackson came out of the briefing greatly encouraged by the military progress being made in South Vietnam. When he addressed the nation the year before to announce his decision to get America into Vietnam, he stressed that there was an exit strategy. Now the President was armed with a specific target date for that exit. He felt this was very important for two reasons:
- The American public would be more likely to support the Vietnam War if they saw that everything was under control and that the majority of the 40,000 soldiers would only be there for a few years.
- He needed to push back hard against his critics on the left.
It was against this backdrop of liberal angst over Vietnam that South Dakota Senator George McGovern announced his candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination on September 20th, 1963. A dove, McGovern had been highly critical of Jackson’s policies from the beginning. He had voted against higher appropriations for defense spending in 1961, believing it to be wholly unnecessary. By the autumn of 1963, the South Dakota Senator had emerged as one of the President’s leading critics within the Democratic Party. In addition to opposing him politically, McGovern didn’t like Scoop personally – a feeling that was quite mutual. In his speech announcing his candidacy, McGovern attacked the President in a way that was reminiscent of the Dewey-Taft Feud which had marred Dewey’s second term. He wholly dismissed the Administration’s optimism about Vietnam as “self-delusion” and asserted that the war was unwinnable on the grounds that “we are being asked to believe that our men will be able to defeat guerrillas who are fighting in the jungle terrain that they know so well. That, my friends, is folly.”
McGovern warned that Vietnam would become “a debacle” that would end in “a political defeat” for the United States. As President, he would withdraw US forces from “this trap” before it was too late and thereby spare the country “an unnecessary war which will haunt us in every corner of this world.”
Theodore Roosevelt had tried to wrestle the Republican nomination away from President William Howard Taft in 1912. Huey Long had mounted a spirited challenge against President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the 1936 Democratic National Convention. Now it was President Henry M. Jackson who would face opposition to his re-nomination. McGovern would run against him in the 1964 Democratic primaries as the anti-war candidate who wanted no involvement in South Vietnam (which he regarded as a political and not a military problem). McGovern’s decision to toss his hat into the ring had been prompted by the Dump Jackson Movement. Formed by left-wing activists in August 1963, the Dump Jackson Movement was exactly what its’ name implied. These activists were strongly opposed to Jackson’s bid for re-nomination, believing the President posed a dangerous threat to the United States. He was too hawkish for their comfort and they feared he would carelessly get the country into a nuclear war if given the chance (a fear Hollywood would tap into with the December 1963 release of the black comedy “Dr. Strangelove”). The way to stop Jackson was to prevent his re-nomination and that meant mounting a campaign challenge in the primaries. The Dump Jackson Movement approached McGovern as their first choice, attracted by his record of opposing the President. They urged him to run, saying that he had a moral obligation to stop the march to war and save countless Americans from returning home from South Vietnam in body bags. After thinking it over, McGovern agreed to run. He told the left-wing activists, “Somebody has to stop this madness...and I will.”
Needless to say, news of McGovern’s candidacy wasn’t received well at the White House. The fact that it was McGovern who wanted to stop him from being re-nominated upset Jackson more than the challenge itself. To him, the South Dakota Senator represented everything that was wrong with the Left when it came to foreign policy and national defense. In a press conference held shortly after McGovern’s announcement, the President pulled no punches about his archrival. “Senator McGovern is running as is his right,” he said, “But he should be ashamed of himself for wanting to run a campaign of ignorance and falsehoods.”
Scoop went on to argue that “Not once during his speech did Senator McGovern say he would protect and defend the United States of America. That is the main duty a man solemnly swears to do when he takes this office.”
It was strong stuff – a preview of the bitter fight that would unfold on the Democratic side in 1964. It wasn’t just that Jackson and McGovern were rivals for the nomination; these were two men who sincerely believed the other was wholly unfit to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. The President’s primary campaign against the South Dakota Senator would be fueled by outrage over McGovern portraying the Vietnam War as a lost cause when the facts on the ground were pointing the other way. “He isn’t just wrong,” Scoop complained behind closed doors, “He doesn’t even care about what will happen if we pull out completely!”
The Vietnam War had been Jackson’s decision, made in order to prevent the Chinese from taking over all of Southeast Asia. He was now even more determined to win the war, which would completely discredit McGovern as someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.
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Thus we get "McGovern for President" eight years early...
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Let's hope that Charlie is not able to do a Tet now or 'Nam is going to be a quite interesting place for a while... not to mention the electoral price to pay at home...
Perhaps McGovern has more chances now that the US army is not (yet) heavily involved in the war.
Perhaps McGovern has more chances now that the US army is not (yet) heavily involved in the war.
Actually, I hope Charlie will have an ace up their sleave. Atleast it shouldn't be a walk in the park. And what about the NVA, will they play a bigger role in this war, will they send troops to South Vietnam down the Ho Chi Minh Trail like they did IOTL?
Ugh! McGovern and Scoop! I kinda like both of them... Then their is also who ever wins the republican nomination. This election should be interesting! Also, this AAR is finally appropriately named
hope your Vietnam does turn out like in real life ?what page is the American military mission in Yugoslavia i must have miss reading about it
Kurt_Steiner: It will be interesting to see what the AI does in the Vietnam Mod.
Had McGovern won the 1972 Presidential election, I think we probably would’ve seen McGovern versus Reagan in 1976. With Ford out of the way, I think Reagan would’ve had a clear shot to the GOP nomination.
NickFeyR: We shall see. This is after all setting up the Vietnam Mod that I will actually be getting to at the end of 1963.
jeeshadow: McGovern and Scoop historically were rivals for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Scoop learned the hard way that the Democratic Party of the 1970s had become more intuned with McGovern’s dovishness than Jackson’s hawkishness.
The Republican field will include several big names from that era (and one from out of the blue).
Yeah, I know. For an AAR about the Vietnam War, I sure have taken a long time getting there. But it has been worth the wait, right?
strategymad3500: America is pursuing a different strategy in Vietnam than she did historically. Whether the outcome will be any different is the question mark. For all I know, I could just find a different way to lose the war in Vietnam. Yes, the Americans are very confident that they can win the war...but of course confidence doesn’t mean you’ll actually win in the long run.
As for Yugoslavia, I did an update about it back in 1956. Exactly which page that is I don’t know.
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The Mercury-Gemini Transition
For NASA, it was the end of an era. On the morning of February 28th, 1963, astronaut Scott Carpenter boarded a cramped one-seat spacecraft (call sign “Aurora 7”) at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After nearly three years and six spaceflights, Carpenter’s flight would be the last for Project Mercury. The road to this point began six years earlier. Riding high on the success of launching the world’s first man-made satellite into Earth’s orbit in May 1957, President John Sparkman pushed through Congress legislation establishing NASA to oversee America’s exploration of space. In March 1958, the new government agency unveiled her first program: Project Mercury. The goal of Project Mercury was to demonstrate that the United States had the technological prowess to put a man into space – long the dream of science fiction. Carpenter, along with six other military test pilots, were carefully selected to become the first generation of astronauts known as the Mercury Seven. Carpenter’s colleague Alan Shepard had the honor of being the first member of the group to man a Mercury mission. In August 1960, Shepard became the first man in space when he reached sub-orbit. When Freedom 7 splashed down into the North Atlantic about fifteen minutes after launch, Shepard emerged from his spacecraft as the most famous man in the world. Five more Mercury flights followed; John Glenn’s flight in June 1961 was the first to orbit the Earth (although the Soviets, who also had a space program, had gotten into orbit ahead of the Americans). Now in February 1963, it fell to Carpenter as the last man in the group to bring Project Mercury to a close.
The Mercury spacecraft that Carpenter boarded had been built by McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and weighed over 3,000 pounds. Shortly before 1:00 PM on February 28th, the Atlas rocket on which Aurora 7 sat blasted off the launch pad and hurtled Carpenter into Earth’s orbit. For the next three days, the astronaut orbited the Earth in a demonstration that man could endure a few days in the weightlessness of space. This was important, as NASA was planning to make a Moon landing by the end of the decade. If one astronaut couldn’t handle being in space for three days, how could they expect a crew to make it all the way to the Moon and back when they would be weightless for days? As Carpenter orbited the Earth 48 times, he conducted a number of scientific experiments including how weightlessness affected the behavior of liquids and finding out whether you could observe a flare fired from the ground (he couldn’t). During one of the orbits, Carpenter bumped his hand against the inside wall of the cabin and accidentally found the answer to a question that had stumped NASA ever since Glenn’s flight. Glenn had noticed a mysterious bright shower of particles outside his spacecraft Friendship 7, which he called “fireflies”.
NASA couldn’t figure out what was causing these “fireflies” to appear; Carpenter discovered that they were nothing more than ice particles shaken loose from the spacecraft’s exterior. Both Aurora 7 and Carpenter performed excellently in NASA’s judgment. Once the spacecraft had completed its’ 48th orbit and all primary mission objectives had been carried out, it was time to bring Carpenter back down to Earth. Unfortunately, they ran into a snag during re-entry. There was a malfunction in the automatic alignment system; as a result, Carpenter overshot his planned re-entry mark and ended up splashing down in the Pacific Ocean 250 miles off-target. Aurora 7 bobbed on the ocean surface like a cork as the recovery ships had to make the 250-mile trek to the unanticipated landing site.
With Carpenter safely recovered, Project Mercury was officially declared to be over. The program had achieved all its’ goals; it had put men into space and had demonstrated that they could function in a weightless environment. With Project Mercury now behind her, NASA shifted her focus to the next program on the docket: Project Gemini. The Gemini missions would be more complex than the Mercury missions because they would involve a crew of two astronauts (“Gemini” is Latin for “twins”, hence the program’s name) who would conduct advanced maneuvers with their spacecraft. These maneuvers would prepare the astronauts for Project Apollo, which would put them into orbit around the Moon and hopefully onto the Moon’s cratered surface. Specifically, Project Gemini had to accomplish the following objectives:
With Project Gemini came the need for NASA to greatly expand the size of the Astronaut Corps. They would after all need more than the original seven Mercury astronauts for the Gemini missions, which would be the training ground for the lunar missions of Project Apollo. In January 1962, NASA officially rolled out the second generation of astronauts. Dubbed “The New Nine” by the media, these new astronauts had been selected more for their engineering skills than their test pilot experience (although that was important as well). The men who would train to undertake the Gemini missions were:
(Back Row Left-to-Right: See, McDivitt, Lovell, White, and Stafford. Front Row Left-to-Right: Conrad, Borman, Armstrong, and Young)
The addition of The New Nine raised the number of astronauts from seven to sixteen. Still, NASA needed more astronauts so she introduced the third generation in February 1963. Since there were fourteen astronauts in this third group, the media dubbed them simply “The Fourteen”. Unlike the previous two generations, the requirement that you had to have a test pilot background in order to qualify for selection was waived for the third generation. Instead, NASA accepted men who had experience flying jet fighters. The Fourteen comprised of:
(Back Row Left-to-Right: Collins, Cunningham, Eisele, Freeman, Gordon, Schweickart, Scott, and Williams. Front Row Left-to-Right: Aldrin, Anders, Bassett, Bean, Cernan, and Chaffee)
A few months after the final Mercury mission, NASA was ready to launch the first Gemini mission. On August 14th, Gemini 1 blasted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. It didn’t carry any astronauts, though. NASA, not wanting to take chances by putting human lives into the brand new spacecraft without having it go through its’ paces first, had decided to make Gemini 1 an unmanned test flight. NASA would test the structural integrity of the new spacecraft as well as the new tracking and communication systems designed for Project Gemini. If there were any serious problems, then no lives would be at risk because of it. For the unmanned mission, Gemini 1 had her crew life support system stripped out and replaced by ballast in order to properly stimulate the weight of the two-man crew. In addition, four large holes were drilled into the spacecraft’s heat shield because NASA had no intention to recover Gemini 1 following re-entry. Once the spacecraft had relayed back measurements concerning pressure, vibration, acceleration, temperature, and structural load during the short flight, Gemini 1 would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Two-and-a-half minutes after launch, the first stage was jettisoned. Right at that moment, there was an unexpected signal loss with the spacecraft that lasted three seconds. The brief disruption had been caused by charged ions created during the separation and startup of the second stage – a natural phenomena NASA would take into account for all subsequent Gemini flights. The spacecraft – still attached to the second stage of the Titan II rocket – entered Earth’s orbit three minutes after communications had restored itself. For the next five hours, Gemini 1 made three orbits while sending data back to the ground. Once the spacecraft had relayed all the information NASA wanted, the pull of Earth’s gravity was allowed to take over. Three-and-a-half days after the launch, with her heat shield deliberately compromised, Gemini 1 re-entered the atmosphere over the South Atlantic and burned up. The first Gemini mission had been a success as it gave NASA an idea of how the new spacecraft would operate in space. However, the space agency wanted one more unmanned test flight before putting astronauts back into space. In May 1964, Gemini 2 made a suborbital flight in order to test the spacecraft’s heat shield and retrorockets. After she reached an altitude of 92.4 nautical miles over the North Atlantic, Gemini 2 automatically fired her retrorockets and safely splashed down eighteen minutes after launch. Satisfied by the two unmanned Gemini missions, NASA finally consented to a manned Gemini mission. Gemini 3 would be launched the following July – nearly four years after Shepard’s history-making flight aboard Freedom 7.
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Historically, there were only six Mercury missions. The seventh one never got off the drawing board. However, since the US space program got started earlier TTL, I have extra time on my hands so I went ahead and did one more mission.
Had McGovern won the 1972 Presidential election, I think we probably would’ve seen McGovern versus Reagan in 1976. With Ford out of the way, I think Reagan would’ve had a clear shot to the GOP nomination.
NickFeyR: We shall see. This is after all setting up the Vietnam Mod that I will actually be getting to at the end of 1963.
jeeshadow: McGovern and Scoop historically were rivals for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Scoop learned the hard way that the Democratic Party of the 1970s had become more intuned with McGovern’s dovishness than Jackson’s hawkishness.
The Republican field will include several big names from that era (and one from out of the blue).
Yeah, I know. For an AAR about the Vietnam War, I sure have taken a long time getting there. But it has been worth the wait, right?
strategymad3500: America is pursuing a different strategy in Vietnam than she did historically. Whether the outcome will be any different is the question mark. For all I know, I could just find a different way to lose the war in Vietnam. Yes, the Americans are very confident that they can win the war...but of course confidence doesn’t mean you’ll actually win in the long run.
As for Yugoslavia, I did an update about it back in 1956. Exactly which page that is I don’t know.
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The Mercury-Gemini Transition
For NASA, it was the end of an era. On the morning of February 28th, 1963, astronaut Scott Carpenter boarded a cramped one-seat spacecraft (call sign “Aurora 7”) at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After nearly three years and six spaceflights, Carpenter’s flight would be the last for Project Mercury. The road to this point began six years earlier. Riding high on the success of launching the world’s first man-made satellite into Earth’s orbit in May 1957, President John Sparkman pushed through Congress legislation establishing NASA to oversee America’s exploration of space. In March 1958, the new government agency unveiled her first program: Project Mercury. The goal of Project Mercury was to demonstrate that the United States had the technological prowess to put a man into space – long the dream of science fiction. Carpenter, along with six other military test pilots, were carefully selected to become the first generation of astronauts known as the Mercury Seven. Carpenter’s colleague Alan Shepard had the honor of being the first member of the group to man a Mercury mission. In August 1960, Shepard became the first man in space when he reached sub-orbit. When Freedom 7 splashed down into the North Atlantic about fifteen minutes after launch, Shepard emerged from his spacecraft as the most famous man in the world. Five more Mercury flights followed; John Glenn’s flight in June 1961 was the first to orbit the Earth (although the Soviets, who also had a space program, had gotten into orbit ahead of the Americans). Now in February 1963, it fell to Carpenter as the last man in the group to bring Project Mercury to a close.
The Mercury spacecraft that Carpenter boarded had been built by McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and weighed over 3,000 pounds. Shortly before 1:00 PM on February 28th, the Atlas rocket on which Aurora 7 sat blasted off the launch pad and hurtled Carpenter into Earth’s orbit. For the next three days, the astronaut orbited the Earth in a demonstration that man could endure a few days in the weightlessness of space. This was important, as NASA was planning to make a Moon landing by the end of the decade. If one astronaut couldn’t handle being in space for three days, how could they expect a crew to make it all the way to the Moon and back when they would be weightless for days? As Carpenter orbited the Earth 48 times, he conducted a number of scientific experiments including how weightlessness affected the behavior of liquids and finding out whether you could observe a flare fired from the ground (he couldn’t). During one of the orbits, Carpenter bumped his hand against the inside wall of the cabin and accidentally found the answer to a question that had stumped NASA ever since Glenn’s flight. Glenn had noticed a mysterious bright shower of particles outside his spacecraft Friendship 7, which he called “fireflies”.
NASA couldn’t figure out what was causing these “fireflies” to appear; Carpenter discovered that they were nothing more than ice particles shaken loose from the spacecraft’s exterior. Both Aurora 7 and Carpenter performed excellently in NASA’s judgment. Once the spacecraft had completed its’ 48th orbit and all primary mission objectives had been carried out, it was time to bring Carpenter back down to Earth. Unfortunately, they ran into a snag during re-entry. There was a malfunction in the automatic alignment system; as a result, Carpenter overshot his planned re-entry mark and ended up splashing down in the Pacific Ocean 250 miles off-target. Aurora 7 bobbed on the ocean surface like a cork as the recovery ships had to make the 250-mile trek to the unanticipated landing site.
With Carpenter safely recovered, Project Mercury was officially declared to be over. The program had achieved all its’ goals; it had put men into space and had demonstrated that they could function in a weightless environment. With Project Mercury now behind her, NASA shifted her focus to the next program on the docket: Project Gemini. The Gemini missions would be more complex than the Mercury missions because they would involve a crew of two astronauts (“Gemini” is Latin for “twins”, hence the program’s name) who would conduct advanced maneuvers with their spacecraft. These maneuvers would prepare the astronauts for Project Apollo, which would put them into orbit around the Moon and hopefully onto the Moon’s cratered surface. Specifically, Project Gemini had to accomplish the following objectives:
- Demonstrate that astronauts could endure spaceflight for at least eight days, the amount of time it would take to reach the Moon and return to Earth.
- Demonstrate that two spacecrafts could rendezvous and dock with each other in space.
- Demonstrate that astronauts could safely conduct spacewalks outside the protection of their spacecraft.
- Improve techniques for atmospheric re-entry and touching down at a pre-selected location.
With Project Gemini came the need for NASA to greatly expand the size of the Astronaut Corps. They would after all need more than the original seven Mercury astronauts for the Gemini missions, which would be the training ground for the lunar missions of Project Apollo. In January 1962, NASA officially rolled out the second generation of astronauts. Dubbed “The New Nine” by the media, these new astronauts had been selected more for their engineering skills than their test pilot experience (although that was important as well). The men who would train to undertake the Gemini missions were:
- Elliot See (age thirty-four, from Texas)
- Jim Lovell (age thirty-three, from Ohio)
- Frank Borman (age thirty-three, from Indiana)
- Jim McDivitt (age thirty-two, from Illinois)
- Ed White (age thirty-one, from Texas)
- John Young (age thirty-one, from California)
- Tom Stafford (age thirty-one, from Oklahoma)
- Neil Armstrong (age thirty-one, from Ohio)
- Pete Conrad (age thirty-one, from Pennsylvania)
(Back Row Left-to-Right: See, McDivitt, Lovell, White, and Stafford. Front Row Left-to-Right: Conrad, Borman, Armstrong, and Young)
The addition of The New Nine raised the number of astronauts from seven to sixteen. Still, NASA needed more astronauts so she introduced the third generation in February 1963. Since there were fourteen astronauts in this third group, the media dubbed them simply “The Fourteen”. Unlike the previous two generations, the requirement that you had to have a test pilot background in order to qualify for selection was waived for the third generation. Instead, NASA accepted men who had experience flying jet fighters. The Fourteen comprised of:
- Dick Gordon (age thirty-three, from Washington)
- Ted Freeman (age thirty-three, from Pennsylvania)
- Buzz Aldrin (age thirty-three, from New Jersey)
- Michael Collins (age thirty-two, born in Italy)
- Donn Eisele (age thirty-two, from Ohio)
- Charlie Bassett (age thirty-one, from Ohio)
- C.C. Williams (age thirty, from Alabama)
- Dave Scott (age thirty, from Texas)
- Walt Cunningham (age thirty, from Iowa)
- Alan Bean (age thirty, from Texas)
- Bill Anders (age twenty-nine, born in Hong Kong)
- Gene Cernan (age twenty-eight, from Illinois)
- Roger Chaffee (age twenty-eight, from Michigan)
- Rusty Schweickart (age twenty-seven, from New Jersey)
(Back Row Left-to-Right: Collins, Cunningham, Eisele, Freeman, Gordon, Schweickart, Scott, and Williams. Front Row Left-to-Right: Aldrin, Anders, Bassett, Bean, Cernan, and Chaffee)
A few months after the final Mercury mission, NASA was ready to launch the first Gemini mission. On August 14th, Gemini 1 blasted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. It didn’t carry any astronauts, though. NASA, not wanting to take chances by putting human lives into the brand new spacecraft without having it go through its’ paces first, had decided to make Gemini 1 an unmanned test flight. NASA would test the structural integrity of the new spacecraft as well as the new tracking and communication systems designed for Project Gemini. If there were any serious problems, then no lives would be at risk because of it. For the unmanned mission, Gemini 1 had her crew life support system stripped out and replaced by ballast in order to properly stimulate the weight of the two-man crew. In addition, four large holes were drilled into the spacecraft’s heat shield because NASA had no intention to recover Gemini 1 following re-entry. Once the spacecraft had relayed back measurements concerning pressure, vibration, acceleration, temperature, and structural load during the short flight, Gemini 1 would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Two-and-a-half minutes after launch, the first stage was jettisoned. Right at that moment, there was an unexpected signal loss with the spacecraft that lasted three seconds. The brief disruption had been caused by charged ions created during the separation and startup of the second stage – a natural phenomena NASA would take into account for all subsequent Gemini flights. The spacecraft – still attached to the second stage of the Titan II rocket – entered Earth’s orbit three minutes after communications had restored itself. For the next five hours, Gemini 1 made three orbits while sending data back to the ground. Once the spacecraft had relayed all the information NASA wanted, the pull of Earth’s gravity was allowed to take over. Three-and-a-half days after the launch, with her heat shield deliberately compromised, Gemini 1 re-entered the atmosphere over the South Atlantic and burned up. The first Gemini mission had been a success as it gave NASA an idea of how the new spacecraft would operate in space. However, the space agency wanted one more unmanned test flight before putting astronauts back into space. In May 1964, Gemini 2 made a suborbital flight in order to test the spacecraft’s heat shield and retrorockets. After she reached an altitude of 92.4 nautical miles over the North Atlantic, Gemini 2 automatically fired her retrorockets and safely splashed down eighteen minutes after launch. Satisfied by the two unmanned Gemini missions, NASA finally consented to a manned Gemini mission. Gemini 3 would be launched the following July – nearly four years after Shepard’s history-making flight aboard Freedom 7.
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Historically, there were only six Mercury missions. The seventh one never got off the drawing board. However, since the US space program got started earlier TTL, I have extra time on my hands so I went ahead and did one more mission.
strategymad3500: I’ll return to it when the time comes. At the moment, there’s nothing new to add from what I wrote in the last update dealing with China and Japan.
Kurt_Steiner: Considering Columbia first went up historically in 1981, it’s entirely possible we might see the first space shuttle mission in 1979 or 1980 TTL.
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(“I Saw Her Standing There”: the first track on the “Please Please Me” album)
The Looming Threat
In March 1963:
On March 7th, China gave the world a reminder that South Vietnam wasn’t the only place she had her eyes on. On that Thursday, British radar operators in Hong Kong detected several blips coming towards the island city from the mainland. Since British aircraft always came up from the south, the operators quickly realized that these blips weren’t friendly. English Electric Lightning interceptors, which had a remarkably fast rate of climb and could reach Mach 2 speed, were scrambled to intercept the incoming planes. When the English Electric Lightning pilots made contact with the other side, markings on the planes revealed them to belonging to the Republic of China Air Force. Definitely not friendly! The planes the Chinese were piloting were Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 Fagot swept-wing jet fighters, a Soviet design which the Chinese government had acquired the license to produce for her own air force back in the late 1950s. In the skies above Hong Kong, the Lightnings and the Fagots engaged in a jet dance of twisting and turning. Since they weren't being attacked, the British pilots held off on opening fire. The Chinese pilots avoided colliding with their British counterparts as they made several planned passes over the city. Once they had done so, the Fagots broke off the international dance and returned to the mainland. The Lightnings, ordered not to give chase, remained circling over Hong Kong until they were given the command to land. During the entire engagement, not one shot had been fired by either side. It became apparent to the British afterwards that the Fagots had merely been probing Hong Kong’s air defense.
(English Electric Lightning)
The encounter between the Lightnings and the Fagots became known as the March 7th Incident and it underscored the growing tensions between England and China over the possession of Hong Kong. The British had acquired Hong Kong Island in 1842 as a result of their victory against the Qing Empire in the First Opium War (1839-1842). In 1961, the Chinese government unilaterally nullified the treaties which gave the British possession of Hong Kong and declared their presence there to be illegal. Nanjing demanded that the British leave Hong Kong at once so the Chinese could annex the island; London refused to comply. Two years later, to show that he wasn’t messing around, Chiang Kai-shek authorized the Fagots to deliberately fly over the disputed city and cast a menacing shadow over it. The resulting incident just made a bad situation worse. London regarded the fly-over as an unprovoked Chinese violation of British airspace and threatened to shoot down any Chinese airplanes that flew deliberately into said airspace. Nanjing countered that the British were illegally occupying their sovereign territory and therefore could lay no claims to airspace over the island. If the British did indeed shoot down one of her planes, Nanjing warned that she would regard the shoot-down as an overt act of war and she would retaliate accordingly “in the defense of the sovereignty of the Republic of China.”
A week after the March 7th Incident, Prime Minister Rab Butler made a surprise visit to Hong Kong. That war could break out at any time over Hong Kong was something the sixty-year-old head of Her Majesty’s Government had to deal with on a daily basis. Butler’s old boss Winston Churchill once wrote that what kept him up at night during World War Two was the threat posed to England by German submarines. What kept Butler up at night was the very real possibility that the telephone would ring with the terrible news from Hong Kong “that we are being attacked at last.”
As Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1938-1941), Butler had been one of the advocates of appeasement. He preferred to “settle our differences with Germany by consultation” instead of going to war which he said would solve nothing. “Common sense not bravado” was how he thought British policy towards Berlin should be pursued. The failure of appeasement to prevent war in Europe haunted Butler ever since and became a contributing factor in his taking a hard line against China. He wanted to show that he wasn’t the same Butler who as late as the summer of 1940 thought Adolf Hitler could still be reasoned with. No. This was an older wiser Butler who recognized that dictators had to be opposed from a position of strength. The Prime Minister toured the city, reviewing the military forces stationed there. Since the crisis over Hong Kong began in 1961, the number of British soldiers and warplanes defending the island steadily increased. In addition, a carrier task force became based in Hong Kong to guard against a naval attack. Butler also checked out the anti-aircraft batteries and fortifications that were being constructed to strengthen the city’s defenses. “We must not and cannot allow the Chinese to drive us out of Hong Kong by military force,” the Prime Minister said in a speech that was meant to convey his resolve in preserving British control of the island. “Should the Chinese continue with their policy of encroachment, further threatening the peace and security of the people of Hong Kong, action will be justified.”
(Prime Minister Rab Butler, on whose watch Hong Kong flared up into a major Cold War hotspot)
Watching England and China go eyeball-to-eyeball over Hong Kong was the United States. The Americans had a stake in the outcome of who possessed Hong Kong. The island after all was home to a level 10 naval base. If the Chinese took Hong Kong, possession of the naval base would strengthen her strategic position in the South China Sea considerably. It would allow them to put pressure on the American position in the Philippines and South Vietnam. It was for that reason that Washington secretly pledged to London her support in the event of a Chinese attack. The Pentagon drew up a war plan codenamed Operation Orient Express. The plan called for US forces stationed in the Philippines to be rushed to Hong Kong to relieve the besieged British defenders. Military planners assumed the Americans would break through whatever naval blockade the Chinese threw up around the island. They also assumed that the Chinese would attack Hong Kong through a traditional siege, breaking down the city’s outer defenses before attempting to land soldiers on the island. These assumptions, while logical, were also nagging some within the Jackson Administration. What if the Chinese didn’t try to capture Hong Kong at all? In the past, if you wanted to remove the enemy from a certain position, you sent soldiers to kick them out of that position. Then 1945 saw the introduction of a new tactic that could spare the attackers casualties. Instead of throwing wave after wave of men against a strong fortified position, you could simply wipe the position off the face of the Earth with just one bomb.
In the early 20th Century, battleships were as much a status symbol as they were a weapon of war. If you possessed them, you were seen as being a great power. In the mid-20th Century, nuclear weapons replaced battleships as the status symbol of a great power. Four nations possessed these weapons of mass destruction in the early 1960s: the United States of America, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. Since Chiang envisioned China becoming a great power, it made symbolic sense for his country to have nuclear weapons. The Chinese nuclear weapons program began in 1952 with the establishment of a Faculty of Atomic Research to evaluate the feasibility of developing said weapons. China took the next step in 1955, building Atomic Research Laboratories to further understand the potential power of atoms. A Faculty of Nuclear Research was set up at Shanghai’s National Fudan University in 1958 to provide the technical leadership required for the project. By the time the CIA learned of the Chinese nuclear weapons program in the summer of 1960, China had an Isotope Separation Facility up and running which enabled them to build a size 1 nuclear reactor in the mountainous interior of the country. Having performed Nuclear Fuel Analysis in 1961 and built an Experimental Reactor in 1962, the Chinese were ready in March 1963 to begin research on Nuclear Reactor Operability. Once that was completed, only three steps remained:
Jackson, having dealt with the Soviet leader personally at the Kitchen Debate in 1959 and the Prague Summit in 1961, believed “Khrushchev is not going to wake up tomorrow morning and want to start a nuclear war. He will not get himself into a situation where the risks will outweigh the rewards.”
Chiang on the other hand was a mystery. No one could agree what he would do once he had nuclear weapons at his disposal. Some people thought he would be content to have nuclear weapons simply to show that China was a great power not to be messed with; others thought he would use the threat of nuclear weapons as leverage in his quest to expand his country’s power and influence over her neighbors. This uncertainty about what direction a nuclear China would take led to the fear of a nuclear strike against Hong Kong. After all, if the Chinese felt that trying to take the strongly defended city would be too costly an effort, they might conclude that wiping out Hong Kong in a nuclear blast – thereby making the island completely unusable for the British – might be the more efficient way to remove a thorn from their sides. The possibility of a nuclear attack made the looming threat against Hong Kong dangerously unpredictable.
Kurt_Steiner: Considering Columbia first went up historically in 1981, it’s entirely possible we might see the first space shuttle mission in 1979 or 1980 TTL.
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The Looming Threat
In March 1963:
- The Beach Boys releases the single “Surfin’ U.S.A.”. Written by Brian Wilson and set to the music of the 1958 Chuck Berry song “Sweet Little Sixteen”, “Surfin’ U.S.A.” would peak at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. To avoid a lawsuit over using Berry's music, The Beach Boys give him songwriting credit as well as most of the song's royalties.
- In New York City, the 59-story Pan Am Building opens for business. With over three million square feet of floor space, it becomes the largest commercial office building in the world.
- In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court rules unanimously in Gideon v. Wainwright that states are required under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to provide free legal counsel to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own attorneys.
- In England, The Beatles releases their first album “Please Please Me”. Recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London in just thirteen hours, “Please Please Me” would spend thirty weeks at the top of the UK Albums Chart and sell over 100,000 copies.
- Universal Pictures releases the horror thriller “The Birds”. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the film stars Tippi Hedren as a young socialite who must escape a Northern Californian town after birds in the area suddenly become inexplicably violent.
On March 7th, China gave the world a reminder that South Vietnam wasn’t the only place she had her eyes on. On that Thursday, British radar operators in Hong Kong detected several blips coming towards the island city from the mainland. Since British aircraft always came up from the south, the operators quickly realized that these blips weren’t friendly. English Electric Lightning interceptors, which had a remarkably fast rate of climb and could reach Mach 2 speed, were scrambled to intercept the incoming planes. When the English Electric Lightning pilots made contact with the other side, markings on the planes revealed them to belonging to the Republic of China Air Force. Definitely not friendly! The planes the Chinese were piloting were Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 Fagot swept-wing jet fighters, a Soviet design which the Chinese government had acquired the license to produce for her own air force back in the late 1950s. In the skies above Hong Kong, the Lightnings and the Fagots engaged in a jet dance of twisting and turning. Since they weren't being attacked, the British pilots held off on opening fire. The Chinese pilots avoided colliding with their British counterparts as they made several planned passes over the city. Once they had done so, the Fagots broke off the international dance and returned to the mainland. The Lightnings, ordered not to give chase, remained circling over Hong Kong until they were given the command to land. During the entire engagement, not one shot had been fired by either side. It became apparent to the British afterwards that the Fagots had merely been probing Hong Kong’s air defense.
(English Electric Lightning)
The encounter between the Lightnings and the Fagots became known as the March 7th Incident and it underscored the growing tensions between England and China over the possession of Hong Kong. The British had acquired Hong Kong Island in 1842 as a result of their victory against the Qing Empire in the First Opium War (1839-1842). In 1961, the Chinese government unilaterally nullified the treaties which gave the British possession of Hong Kong and declared their presence there to be illegal. Nanjing demanded that the British leave Hong Kong at once so the Chinese could annex the island; London refused to comply. Two years later, to show that he wasn’t messing around, Chiang Kai-shek authorized the Fagots to deliberately fly over the disputed city and cast a menacing shadow over it. The resulting incident just made a bad situation worse. London regarded the fly-over as an unprovoked Chinese violation of British airspace and threatened to shoot down any Chinese airplanes that flew deliberately into said airspace. Nanjing countered that the British were illegally occupying their sovereign territory and therefore could lay no claims to airspace over the island. If the British did indeed shoot down one of her planes, Nanjing warned that she would regard the shoot-down as an overt act of war and she would retaliate accordingly “in the defense of the sovereignty of the Republic of China.”
A week after the March 7th Incident, Prime Minister Rab Butler made a surprise visit to Hong Kong. That war could break out at any time over Hong Kong was something the sixty-year-old head of Her Majesty’s Government had to deal with on a daily basis. Butler’s old boss Winston Churchill once wrote that what kept him up at night during World War Two was the threat posed to England by German submarines. What kept Butler up at night was the very real possibility that the telephone would ring with the terrible news from Hong Kong “that we are being attacked at last.”
As Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1938-1941), Butler had been one of the advocates of appeasement. He preferred to “settle our differences with Germany by consultation” instead of going to war which he said would solve nothing. “Common sense not bravado” was how he thought British policy towards Berlin should be pursued. The failure of appeasement to prevent war in Europe haunted Butler ever since and became a contributing factor in his taking a hard line against China. He wanted to show that he wasn’t the same Butler who as late as the summer of 1940 thought Adolf Hitler could still be reasoned with. No. This was an older wiser Butler who recognized that dictators had to be opposed from a position of strength. The Prime Minister toured the city, reviewing the military forces stationed there. Since the crisis over Hong Kong began in 1961, the number of British soldiers and warplanes defending the island steadily increased. In addition, a carrier task force became based in Hong Kong to guard against a naval attack. Butler also checked out the anti-aircraft batteries and fortifications that were being constructed to strengthen the city’s defenses. “We must not and cannot allow the Chinese to drive us out of Hong Kong by military force,” the Prime Minister said in a speech that was meant to convey his resolve in preserving British control of the island. “Should the Chinese continue with their policy of encroachment, further threatening the peace and security of the people of Hong Kong, action will be justified.”
(Prime Minister Rab Butler, on whose watch Hong Kong flared up into a major Cold War hotspot)
Watching England and China go eyeball-to-eyeball over Hong Kong was the United States. The Americans had a stake in the outcome of who possessed Hong Kong. The island after all was home to a level 10 naval base. If the Chinese took Hong Kong, possession of the naval base would strengthen her strategic position in the South China Sea considerably. It would allow them to put pressure on the American position in the Philippines and South Vietnam. It was for that reason that Washington secretly pledged to London her support in the event of a Chinese attack. The Pentagon drew up a war plan codenamed Operation Orient Express. The plan called for US forces stationed in the Philippines to be rushed to Hong Kong to relieve the besieged British defenders. Military planners assumed the Americans would break through whatever naval blockade the Chinese threw up around the island. They also assumed that the Chinese would attack Hong Kong through a traditional siege, breaking down the city’s outer defenses before attempting to land soldiers on the island. These assumptions, while logical, were also nagging some within the Jackson Administration. What if the Chinese didn’t try to capture Hong Kong at all? In the past, if you wanted to remove the enemy from a certain position, you sent soldiers to kick them out of that position. Then 1945 saw the introduction of a new tactic that could spare the attackers casualties. Instead of throwing wave after wave of men against a strong fortified position, you could simply wipe the position off the face of the Earth with just one bomb.
In the early 20th Century, battleships were as much a status symbol as they were a weapon of war. If you possessed them, you were seen as being a great power. In the mid-20th Century, nuclear weapons replaced battleships as the status symbol of a great power. Four nations possessed these weapons of mass destruction in the early 1960s: the United States of America, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. Since Chiang envisioned China becoming a great power, it made symbolic sense for his country to have nuclear weapons. The Chinese nuclear weapons program began in 1952 with the establishment of a Faculty of Atomic Research to evaluate the feasibility of developing said weapons. China took the next step in 1955, building Atomic Research Laboratories to further understand the potential power of atoms. A Faculty of Nuclear Research was set up at Shanghai’s National Fudan University in 1958 to provide the technical leadership required for the project. By the time the CIA learned of the Chinese nuclear weapons program in the summer of 1960, China had an Isotope Separation Facility up and running which enabled them to build a size 1 nuclear reactor in the mountainous interior of the country. Having performed Nuclear Fuel Analysis in 1961 and built an Experimental Reactor in 1962, the Chinese were ready in March 1963 to begin research on Nuclear Reactor Operability. Once that was completed, only three steps remained:
- Nuclear Power Production
- Nuclear Waste Bomb
- Having a size 6 nuclear reactor
Jackson, having dealt with the Soviet leader personally at the Kitchen Debate in 1959 and the Prague Summit in 1961, believed “Khrushchev is not going to wake up tomorrow morning and want to start a nuclear war. He will not get himself into a situation where the risks will outweigh the rewards.”
Chiang on the other hand was a mystery. No one could agree what he would do once he had nuclear weapons at his disposal. Some people thought he would be content to have nuclear weapons simply to show that China was a great power not to be messed with; others thought he would use the threat of nuclear weapons as leverage in his quest to expand his country’s power and influence over her neighbors. This uncertainty about what direction a nuclear China would take led to the fear of a nuclear strike against Hong Kong. After all, if the Chinese felt that trying to take the strongly defended city would be too costly an effort, they might conclude that wiping out Hong Kong in a nuclear blast – thereby making the island completely unusable for the British – might be the more efficient way to remove a thorn from their sides. The possibility of a nuclear attack made the looming threat against Hong Kong dangerously unpredictable.
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An update that begins with one of my favourite songs by the Beatles has to be a good one...
And it is... but also very gloomy...
Is there any chance to remove Chiang from the game?
And it is... but also very gloomy...
Is there any chance to remove Chiang from the game?
I reeally love your detailed writing and all the characterisation and obviously deep research of the era you've done, weaving in all these tertiary details of pop culture historical events and teasing their interactions builds up a picture of a very believable and grounded alternate course for history that's a joy to read. And then all of a sudden there are the blunt and obvious references to the game like "Lvl 10 Base" that come along and figuratively smack me upside the head with a brick. I still love it, but now i have whiplash