Oh boy. In that case then I suspect you get some GOP hawk unless Stevenson's VP is a hawk.
TLIAW: Camelot Lost
- Thread starter Enigma-Conundrum
- Start date
Watched! Always good to see a TILAW and especially one by Enigma Conundrum and his circle
@Enigma-Conundrum
Fascinating stuff, particularly showcasing the strengths and failures of a Stevenson II administration.
I feel like two interesting things would occur;
- I feel South Korea doesn’t fall to Park Chung Hee, either via Stevenson supporting the Chang Government or Stevenson supporting Yun Posun for President in 1963, as a result South Korea retains a Democratic if Conservative government for the long run.
- Be interesting to see how Stevenson affects Britain, Gaitskell’s death could be butterflied but I doubt it, only enough room for one egghead at a time. Mainly I see people like Wilson maybe not having the same sheen in a No JFK world, could see maybe a figure like Richard Crossman, Gordon Patrick Walker or James Callaghan having more potential than otl
Fascinating stuff, particularly showcasing the strengths and failures of a Stevenson II administration.
I feel like two interesting things would occur;
- I feel South Korea doesn’t fall to Park Chung Hee, either via Stevenson supporting the Chang Government or Stevenson supporting Yun Posun for President in 1963, as a result South Korea retains a Democratic if Conservative government for the long run.
- Be interesting to see how Stevenson affects Britain, Gaitskell’s death could be butterflied but I doubt it, only enough room for one egghead at a time. Mainly I see people like Wilson maybe not having the same sheen in a No JFK world, could see maybe a figure like Richard Crossman, Gordon Patrick Walker or James Callaghan having more potential than otl
The closeness of the 1960 election probably has less to do with Nixon being an excellent candidate or the strength of the Republican Party and more to do with Kennedy being Catholic. The issue wasn't as big as it was in 1928, but Kennedy still under ran congressional democrats by nearly a million votes during a recession year. JFK was the party's top vote-getter in only a handful of states, with most Democrats handily outpacing him.
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From what I under stand we got a much earlier Henry Hyde, a surviving Walter Judd and Albert Watson possibly getting an earlier try for the governorship after being beaten by Floyd Spence.
oh wow a switchblade ban man I really want him to be president now
I have no clue why he thought it'd make a big splash but it seems like he did. The '60s were a bizarre time man
Hey if it makes switchblades rather than gun control the key issue, I'm fine.
Oh no goddamn clue -- the switchblade ban was a real thing Kefauver did lol. What I wrote about Kefauver is basically what happened when he tried to run in 1960 IRL
36. J. William Fulbright (D-AR)
36. J. William Fulbright (Democratic-AR)
July 14, 1964 - January 20, 1969
“Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.”
July 14, 1964 - January 20, 1969
“Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.”
Going into re-election, Adlai Stevenson seemed like a dead man walking. Then the dead man stopped walking.
When President Stevenson was pronounced dead, the Vice President was mere miles away, speaking at Georgetown University. As those in attendance recounted, the Secret Service rushed to the podium, whispered in Fulbright’s ear, and the Vice President quickly apologized before hustling out of the room. Then, as he was driven to the White House, he wept.
Adlai Stevenson was determined to not repeat 1956. He had handed his running mate’s selection to the convention, leading to a dramatic fight between Kefauver and Kennedy, neither of whom Stevenson particularly liked (though he had privately preferred Kennedy). Upon his return, he wanted to ensure that the ticket was one he could truly live with should he win what looked to be the closest election of his career to date. He knew that, despite his popularity with the Solid South, his support primarily coming from northern machine bosses like Mayor Daley and pro-civil rights northerners like Eugene McCarthy meant that he would need a southerner. But it couldn’t be some firebrand, and it’d have to be someone Stevenson could see eye to eye with. As such, there was only ever one name that truly made sense. A key surrogate of Stevenson’s from 1956 and the junior senator from Arkansas, James William Fulbright - though virtually everyone called him by his middle name, or Bill for short - was his man.
There was much Bill Fulbright and Adlai Stevenson agreed on. Stevenson was a staunch supporter of the United Nations, and Fulbright had authored a resolution backing what would become the so-called “blue helmets” as early as 1943. Stevenson hated McCarthyism even when it was incredibly politically popular, and Fulbright had sparred with McCarthy on the Senate floor at the height of the Red Scare. Stevenson was so utterly academically-minded to attract his “egghead” moniker, and Fulbright the Oxford-educated professor had fought tooth and nail to establish the pre-eminent cultural exchange scholarship system bearing his own name. The only thing truly worrying was Fulbright’s support of the Southern Manifesto potentially undermining Democratic support in the northern cities, but a meeting with Stevenson assuaged fears that he was a raging racist, and besides, to Stevenson Fulbright’s genuine agreement with what would become New America was more important anyhow.
Fulbright proved relatively valuable on the ticket. His support from oil moguls back in Arkansas translated to meetings with executives and industry-wide support, filling the Stevenson campaign’s coffers and helping to keep the Texas establishment onboard despite Lyndon Johnson’s passivity (privately, Johnson thought Stevenson was doomed to failure, and saw himself as the natural candidate to defeat Richard Nixon in 1964). Given Richard Nixon’s attempts to fight to claim the Eisenhower-voting chunks of the south, Fulbright campaigned vigorously across the region. Though the Stevenson-Fulbright ticket owed its victory to a string of narrow midwestern state victories, the ticket won the entire south apart from Virginia and Florida, and a string of single-digit margins in Texas, Louisiana, and Kentucky proved equally vital if not as close to the wire.
In direct contrast with Eisenhower basically treating Nixon as a spare tire, Stevenson pioneered “the most powerful vice presidency in history” for his choice. Fulbright was the first vice president to have an office in the White House, and both men’s tendency towards long-winded academic discussions of policy led to the continuing tradition of weekly dinners between the president and vice president. The modern activist vice presidency was born as Fulbright found himself an advisor, ambassador, and confidante for Stevenson, aiding in key decisions relating to everything from defense to healthcare policy and representing Stevenson in a number of international meetings. By 1964, both men regarded each other as genuine friends, especially as Washington grew increasingly hostile towards Stevenson. Upon the return of Tecumseh’s curse, Fulbright’s televised address was a fitting sendoff, equal parts emotional eulogy and a call to action for Stevenson’s unfinished work. Even though some thought it a bit dry and philosophical, that was likely what Stevenson would’ve wanted anyways.
The brief calm was more akin to the eye of a hurricane than a pacifying of the partisan rancor eating up Washington. Despite a handful of challenges from the party liberals, Barry Goldwater had emerged as the Republicans’ likely candidate. “Adlai Chamberlain” was an easy punching bag for the uber-hawkish conservative, and there was certainly much for an anti-communist to be angry about in 1964’s world. The continuation of the “southern strategy” dating back to Robert Taft seemed all too easy to Goldwater, who routinely polled well throughout the “Eisenhower-Stevenson” parts of the region.
But Stevenson died, and the calculus changed, especially in regards to civil rights. Fulbright had routinely won over black leadership in Arkansas with pleas to the necessity of certain symbolic actions to avoid primary losses, but national leadership was far different. This, combined with the nomination of the broad opponent of an activist federal government Goldwater, was intolerable to one Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the “wildman” who wore that term as a badge of honor. Powell and Stevenson had been in barely-concealed combat over civil rights, and now here was a replacement who “actually has the guts to say what he thinks out loud.” So Powell made clear his intent to not only not go to Atlantic City, but also the launching of the independent “Human Rights” ticket with him at the helm. Privately, Powell had been orchestrating the new party’s ballot access for months with the burgeoning student movement and had implied earlier in the summer that he would have run against Stevenson all the same, but Fulbright’s outright segregationist views provided an even better foil in his eyes.
Despite the walkout, the Democratic convention was made memorable by Fulbright. His selection of running mate, New York City’s mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., proved a shrewd choice that both mended fences with northeastern Catholics and subtly pushed back on the lavender brush Stevenson was painted with given Wagner’s recent crackdown on gay bars. Rumblings of a convention challenge by the spurned Senator Kennedy quickly fizzled in mourning, and Fulbright’s first-ballot victory led to his delivery of a very typically himself address to evening press cameras. Calling upon the nation to continue the work of its great Democrats from Wilson to FDR to Stevenson, Fulbright heavily emphasized his predecessor’s new ideas: “We must learn to explore all of the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world,” he declared, “and we must explore those self-evident truths about the world around us to build a better foundation for peaceful co-existence with all our fellow man.” It was, in a sense, very typical of Bill Fulbright, but also gave clear definition to what New America sought. It sought peace, it sought freedom, and it sought to strengthen the bonds between all nations.
In making the election a referendum on foreign policy, attention was drawn away from Powell and towards what, at that moment, seemed to be Goldwater’s greatest strength. But, as Nelson Rockefeller privately groused, “only Barry could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Goldwater’s loose lips led to a joke about lobbing a nuke in the Kremlin men’s room, which horrified onlookers and quickly led to a slate of attacks from Fulbright. Fulbright’s first state visit - a trip to meet with newly elected British Prime Minister George Brown in what would be a successful effort to convince him to join the EEC - drew favorable press coverage, but only led to Goldwater intensifying his attacks on Fulbright’s apparent apathy towards ordinary Americans. Suggestions that Cuba still held Khrushchev’s WMDs were all the rage with the John Birch Society, but the idea of an outright invasion of a smaller neighbor over such suspicion - as Goldwater himself seemed to imply in an interview - led to Fulbright condemning his opponent as “the closest thing to American Stalinism,” a remark that drew harsh condemnation in its own right. Back and forth it went, with both candidates proclaiming the other reckless and dangerous to not only American interests but even American lives. Powell’s focus on civil rights, while popular with student organizers and quietly with a spurned Kennedy clan which sought to help Powell and his student army kill Fulbright’s chances to vindicate their own in four years, saw less purchase with the general electorate. Instead, the election was quickly dominated by what more sensationalist reporters claimed was a referendum on Cold War policy itself. Would America choose to fight, or to thaw?
The answer was apparently more complicated on election night. As states turned yellow and blue respectively, it seemed clear that Fulbright would carry the south overwhelmingly, due in no small part to Powell’s candidacy peeling a number of civil rights-minded Republicans uncomfortable with Goldwater and southern surrogates underhandedly pointing to Goldwater’s ties to the Arizona NAACP helping to win over southern conservatives who at one time were weighing Goldwater over Stevenson. Much in the same fashion, Goldwater swept across the west, the attacks on him as a nuclear cowboy resonating as not necessarily such a bad thing. A true shock came when Powell carried D.C. in its first federal election, one quickly surpassed when he claimed Massachusetts by the skin of his teeth, raising the specter of a hung electoral college. Jubilation filled the Goldwater camp as Michigan and Connecticut both flipped, then despondence as Mayor Wagner's old-school whistle-stop tour from Pittsburgh to Newark paid dividends in holding Pennsylvania and New Jersey for the Democrats. The atmosphere in the White House grew bleak as it became clear Goldwater had both won a plurality of the popular vote by nearly a million votes and New York remained the last state uncalled for. Whoever won its 43 electoral votes would become president, and Powell’s vote share was nothing to scoff at in the Empire State. Back and forth it went into the morning, but by daybreak the result was clear: by just 3,407 votes, New York had broken for President Fulbright.
The Republicans were faced with a gut-wrenchingly narrow loss, but Goldwater also didn’t have the heart to fight it out in the courts or in New York. Perhaps it was an expression of his own rock-solid principle and patriotism, as admirers tend to say. Less charitable coverage, like that of Rick Perlstein's epic biographical series of Goldwater as a lens into rising conservatism in the New America, points to his knowledge that the overseers of any challenge within New York would a spurned primary rival with everything to gain from Goldwater losing and the Democratic vice president-elect. Whatever the case, he bitterly conceded two days after the result was called, marking Fulbright’s ascent into a term of his own right.
Fulbright’s mandate was sorely lacking, though. The Democrats had a razor-thin majority in the house hardly befitting a re-elected president. This would normally have been no concern to Fulbright, an internationalist at heart, but he had one major item on his domestic bucket list: education. Though Adlai Stevenson had sought the massive expansion of teacher training and schoolhouse construction, less mind was paid to higher education. Fulbright, the former professor, saw this as intolerable. What he proposed and virtually all Democrats could agree on was no less than the redefining of college in America. The Higher Education Act, as it was plainly dubbed, did many things: it opened up a glut of federal money for colleges and universities, for one, but the crux of it came from its federal scholarship program. Dubbed “Fulbrights” - not to be confused with the Fulbright-Hays Scholarship exchange program that was folded into the HEA - the needs-based federal scholarships became a method of broadly funding higher education. Though priority was often given to high academic performers and state governments had much authority in distributing Fulbrights (to the detriment of nonwhite students), the beginning of their availability led to the opening of college access to many lower-class students. The debate took the better part of a year to win enough support to clear a filibuster, including some brutal carve-outs and Fulbright consenting to a Republican tax reform bill's passage, but by January 1966 Fulbright signed his signature legislation at the University of Arkansas, his academic and professorial alma mater.
Despite Fulbright’s advocacy for students of all stripes, the student movement had no love for him. Fulbright was, to them, worse than “Humpty Dumpty” - he was the representation of everything they hated in politics, the old southern relic stubbornly holding back true equality in America. So the students made the plight of civil rights their moment. As MLK Jr. penned letters from Georgia State Prison and Free King signs became commonplace outside the White House, both the black-led SNCC and the white-led SDS sought to bring about real change. For its part, the SNCC sought to take the fight to the south. They had, as early as 1963, conceived of the “Freedom Vote,” a project wherein activists would go and help black southerners register to vote over the literacy tests and poll taxes. Though initial versions of the program focused heavily on the 1964 race, the Powell campaign sapped much student attention, depleting the resources of the SNCC to launch such a project. As such, come 1965 and the return of Fulbright to the White House, both the SNCC and SDS revisited the Freedom Vote. Through both organizations, a number of suitable volunteers arose, so much so that the operation was expanded to three states: Mississippi, for its large unregistered black population; Georgia, for Dr. King’s continuing incarceration; Arkansas, due to the thorn that such a focus would be in President Fulbright’s eye. The Freedom Summer of 1966 was a brutal affair as white residents of all three states violently resisted the outside activists. The discovery of multiple missing students’ mutilated bodies in a shallow grave outside Savannah horrified the nation and brought further attention to local black community activists like Julian Bond and national white student activists like Tom Hayden alike.
President Fulbright was increasingly caught in a bind. As then-staffer William J. Clinton put it in his accounts of his time in the administration, “[Fulbright] spent a lot of days agonizing over what to do, hearing what his fellow Arkansans were capable of… he wasn’t a hateful man, he thought we needed more time to heal.” The crowds of protesters grew outside the White House for every passing day of inaction, and with them Fulbright’s misery grew exponentially. Ultimately, Fulbright’s choice rings out in the history books as perhaps the best encapsulation of a complicated, often contradictory man. In a speech given in front of a special session of Congress, Fulbright spoke on his past support for segregation. He saw it as a necessity to advance in the politics of his home, a minority position that was a prerequisite to advance the greater good. He insisted that his involvement kept the Southern Manifesto from endorsing violence, and that he thought he was doing good. Now, though, times had well and truly changed. He could not abide by such violence, and though he did not blatantly call his past views wrong, he stated that he believed “all Americans must come to take their rightful place in our society over time.” In his eyes, there must be peace and understanding if we are to progress, and the violence the peaceful students faced was a bridge too far. Therefore, “it is time that I call upon this body to, with all due haste, pass a law against lynching to bring those perpetuating this violence to justice.”
Fulbright’s pivot on the lynching law faced mixed reactions. While many northern Democrats and Republicans alike saw it as a fundamentally positive step forward, pro-civil rights figures in both parties also saw it as a half-measure. Though they praised its importance as a long-overdue protection against mob violence, many also echoed the idea that it shouldn't have waited for this long. Malcolm X memorably condemned it as “half of the least they can do, all because it was white kids who died this time” and much of the SDS echoed this sentiment. The southern filibuster was truly fierce in a way it hadn’t been in years, but shrewd whipping by Lyndon Johnson and the overwhelming bipartisan support of such a measure in response to the violence brought about cloture after a handful of days. President Fulbright signed the bill into law to applause, but many noted all of the civil rights leaders not in attendance or even given cursory mention by Fulbright.
All of this was a distraction from what truly mattered to Fulbright. Other than one Supreme Court appointment, on which he deferred to party leaders and nominated Solicitor General Cyrus Vance, he hardly cared for domestic horse-trading. He was a man of international affairs through and through, and in his eyes the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia was of the utmost importance. The legendarily petty negotiations were always within minutes of unraveling, and despite Fulbright’s continual involvement throughout 1965, they seemed in danger of collapse. Fulbright’s assessment of the Cold War was rather unique for its time, though. He saw the conflict through the lens of an imperialist Russia imposing its will, not any special ideological conflict. As such, treating the Soviets as the sole representatives of communism was misguided at best and tied one hand behind America’s back. So Fulbright did something unprecedented: he exploited the cracks in the Second World. China was by far one of the largest military supporters of North Vietnam, and despite this the mainland was hardly involved in the peace talks. Quietly, Secretary Ball made overtures to Mao, organizing a potential meeting to discuss the situation in Vietnam. Though the mainland was initially uncertain, Fulbright’s talk of normalization was far too sweet for the People’s Republic to evade, and Mao agreed to a publicized meeting with President Fulbright. Fulbright’s arrival in Beijing in February of 1966 was a major affair, and the image of him sitting across from Mao was even more groundbreaking and elicited comparisons to FDR at Yalta with Stalin, though this was not always meant as a compliment. Nikita Khrushchev was said to have turned beet-red and upturned an entire table upon seeing the footage, not just from watching his enemies fraternize but also from the sheer realization that he had been put on the backfoot.
During the weeklong trip, Fulbright and Mao came to a genuine agreement. Mao would pare back military aid to North Vietnam in exchange for the US allowing the mainland to take its seat on the UN Security Council as the sole legal Chinese representative as well as beginning the phased implementation of the “New Open Door,” as Fulbright dubbed the lofty aims that he had for the overtures to Mao. With the stroke of a pen, the North suddenly became far more desperate for an agreement. Instantly, the ceasefire they had become so utterly squirrelly about had turned into a must-sign deal, and by the spring they had hammered out a total agreement. Americans were far less happy about Fulbright “selling out,” though. Newly returned Senator Richard Nixon put it in terms most Americans could appreciate. “I’m not surprised that Bill Fulbright went to China. I’m just disappointed that he came back.”
Though the Fulbright administration had brought about some small amount of real, substantive change, civil rights opposition to his reluctance to go any amount further than this kept civil rights organizations as vibrant as ever. Nonetheless, the continuing disorder only inspired voters to flock to the Republicans, as the party increasingly focused on his ineptitude in maintaining order as every scuffle between pro-civil rights and pro-segregation protesters dominated the headlines. Though it was hardly an end to Jim Crow, some white southerners contemplated defection, though this only truly lowered the margins of victory rather than cause states to change hands. Pro-civil rights Democrats felled moderate incumbents in the north, but most of all the Republicans rode a six-year itch founded in anti-communist fury and condemnations of “President Halfbright” to a returned house majority as voters seemingly demanded the old order restored. The new speaker, Thomas B. Curtis of Missouri, was a prime example of the new strain of the party - a Lincolnian through and through, a supporter of civil rights as upholding national virtue, someone who was deeply concerned with Fulbright’s inability to quell the protests sweeping the nation or to protect all people equally. In the eyes of these new Republicans, America could not win the war of ideas without a strong sense of purpose and adherence to those ideals in full, and Bill Fulbright was the number one obstacle for those ideals.
With Congress so firmly against him, potential plans to pursue healthcare reform stalled out immediately. Investigations into Fulbright’s foreign policy by the Senate turned into an outright crucifixion of the president. Secretary of State Ball was put on the defensive in arguing for continuing to allow the UN to drive the intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo despite the clear gains by the Simbas in the east against an unstable Leopoldville government, trading barbs with hawkish Republicans and even muted criticism from Senator Kennedy. Fulbright’s decision to cut aid to Israel in the wake of a mishap where trigger-happy Israeli troops fired upon their American counterparts drew harsher condemnation across the political spectrum, so much so that the debate over whether Fulbright was an antisemite remains one of the more salient questions of his legacy. The entire administration was effectively brought to a standstill as a heavily opposition Congress brought hearing after hearing and near-constant debate of House bills on everything from counter-proposals for educational reform to farm policy to international aid.
This was of little concern to Fulbright, though. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Fulbright believed he had won one full term through his foreign policy, seeing the fact that Barry Goldwater had only netted 47% of the popular vote as proof that Americans had an appetite for peace. He could surely take it further, especially when the Republicans rejected his overtures. First was, Europhile that he was, a long trip throughout Western Europe designed to help rally continental cooperation and resolve the Empty Chair Crisis in the EEC that he had helped to create with Britain's entrance. Though this was broadly successful in its aims, Americans were broadly apathetic as well - the internal matters of European integration hardly concerned them, after all. Fulbright was practically a nonentity domestically, a recluse in a dour White House who only emerged to hop a plane to some faraway land. His visits designed to mollify East Asian anti-communists angry with the overtures to Beijing were similarly fruitful in a way that didn't make good headlines, not even when his facilitation helped to bring about normalization between South Korea and Japan and saw pictures of him smiling between Prime Ministers Chang Myon and Eisaku Satō sent back to the press room. Often was the case that Bill Fulbright did something highly useful and even praiseworthy abroad, but his neglect of the American audience it could be aimed to negated any political use it may have had. Instead, attacks on an "absentee president" tended to stick, and his approval ratings suffered for it.
Fulbright returned to Americans' focus when he returned to North America, but not necessarily home. Instead, his trip to Panama drew significant attention as he stated his intentions to cut a Gordian Knot. The Canal Zone Treaty was woefully outdated, and the Panamanian government was not shy about the pressure being placed on it. Fulbright was a firm believer in the idea that the United States had every moral imperative to cede some ground on the issue. As he put it in a televised interview about the ongoing negotiations, “we must disabuse ourselves of the myth that there is something morally sacred about our control of the Canal.” This statement brought fury from Republicans, but the Panamanians saw room for negotiation. By the end of 1967, Fulbright and Roberto Chiari had come to an official revised treaty, one that would provide equal control between the United States and Panama, with nominal United Nations control and mediation. This sparked a firestorm in conservative circles, with Republicans lining up to decry Fulbright giving away American power and prestige. Amidst rare heckling towards a State of the Union, in 1968 Fulbright simply offered up the defense “the real test in Panama is not of our valor or our military might but of our wisdom and judgment and common sense.” The treaty failed in the Senate a week later.
Heading into the 1968 elections, Fulbright was confident, yet his vulnerability was obvious. He had, after all, won 1964 by the skin of his teeth, and that was against a conservative firebrand with plenty of flaws. But as Kremlin functionaries grew tired of Nikita Khrushchev and replaced him in a bloodless coup with Yuri Andropov of Hungarian Revolution fame only for Andropov to send the Red Army into Czechoslovakia to halt the Dubcek reforms and more broadly send a message to independently-minded leaders across the Warsaw Pact, Fulbright’s take on the Cold War seemed foolish at best to Americans. Civil rights tensions remained high as the Federal Lynching Act remained controversial to hardliners within the south and the lack of a major civil rights act through eight years of Democratic government controversial to liberals in the north, especially as Speaker Curtis picked the height of the primaries as the perfect time to shepherd a Republican bill through the House. Though Fulbright would be renominated, it was not without challenge in the primaries - Georgia Governor James Gray to his right and a returned Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to his left, even if Powell’s legal troubles and his break with the party hampered his effectiveness - his style seemed naive at best and inept at worst. Despite a fierce campaign on his record of sustainable diplomacy and the unfinished business of Adlai Stevenson, Fulbright would suffer the consequences of a public once more scared of Soviet aggression and increasingly divided over his seeming disinterest in the affairs of America at home.
Even as he awaited his successor, Bill Fulbright never wavered. His farewell address had a quality to it reminiscent of Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex, a scathing critique of American foreign policy as a whole: “We are clinging to old myths in the face of new realities, and we seek to escape the contradictions by narrowing the permissible bounds of public discussion, by relegating an increasing number of ideas and viewpoints to a growing category of unthinkable thoughts. The core myth is that the devil resides immutably in Moscow, though the devil has betrayed us by traveling abroad and worse still, by dispersing himself, turning up now here, now there, and in many places at once, with a devilish disregard for the laboriously constructed frontiers of ideology.” It received nary a peep at the moment, though in the coming decades those reflecting upon the failings of American foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would cite Fulbright as a modern Cassandra.
Though he left office relatively unpopular and his handling of civil rights remains a black mark upon his record, in the years between 1969 and his 1995 death Bill Fulbright has received a modest historical recovery from that of an ill-equipped distant leader to a statesman ahead of his time. He was emblematic of New America, of its new policies and its new outlook, even of its new contradictions. Overall, though, the best summary of Bill Fulbright does not come from historians, not from pundits, not from biographers, not even from his friends. Rather, it comes from a constituent letter concerning his outspoken foreign policy sent to his Senate office. “This old world has always nailed its prophets to trees, so don't be surprised at those who come at you with hammers and spikes.”
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Thanks! I'm excited to get my next chapter up Saturday -- I genuinely think it's some of the best I've written period
@Enigma-Conundrum @Oliveia
Fascinating stuff, Bill Fulbright was a great feature to this, and he continuing the style of Stevenson certainly makes the 1960s a fascinating decade in terms of style as it were.
Additionally having a much older and mature series of Presidents certainly changes how America looks to its future Presidents as it were. Additionally his sparring with Adam Clayton Powell is fascinating and entertaining period.
Also George Brown, Haha oh god.
I don’t think Chang Myon would have lasted to the Mid 60s (probably would have been replaced by a Conservative), but I get what he represents, the success of the Reformist Liberalism on a world scale.
Fascinating stuff, Bill Fulbright was a great feature to this, and he continuing the style of Stevenson certainly makes the 1960s a fascinating decade in terms of style as it were.
Additionally having a much older and mature series of Presidents certainly changes how America looks to its future Presidents as it were. Additionally his sparring with Adam Clayton Powell is fascinating and entertaining period.
Also George Brown, Haha oh god.
I don’t think Chang Myon would have lasted to the Mid 60s (probably would have been replaced by a Conservative), but I get what he represents, the success of the Reformist Liberalism on a world scale.
Uhm, Eisenhower actually was the first President to push the Vice President (specifically because it was Nixon) as more an 'adjutant' of the President and delegated a lot of authority and tasks to him. Frankly, though he screwed Nixon over in the end he initially made Nixon a lot more involved in the executive decision making than previous (and many future) Vice Presidents were.
Good update though
Randy
Uhm, Eisenhower actually was the first President to push the Vice President (specifically because it was Nixon) as more an 'adjutant' of the President and delegated a lot of authority and tasks to him. Frankly, though he screwed Nixon over in the end he initially made Nixon a lot more involved in the executive decision making than previous (and many future) Vice Presidents were.
Good update though
Randy
I think Mondale is pretty widely considered the first "modern Vice President" and there's always going to be debates about degrees of influence, etc, but I think even though Nixon may have had more things to do on behalf of the administration than others, Eisenhower himself did not view him as essential -- the most famous example, of course, being the OTL 1960 campaign when he said if you gave him a few weeks he could come back with something Nixon had done... I think Enigma was trying to capture that Stevenson actually valued his vice president on a personal and professional level.
Uhm, Eisenhower actually was the first President to push the Vice President (specifically because it was Nixon) as more an 'adjutant' of the President and delegated a lot of authority and tasks to him. Frankly, though he screwed Nixon over in the end he initially made Nixon a lot more involved in the executive decision making than previous (and many future) Vice Presidents were.
Good update though
Randy
Vidal is, as usual, absolutely spot-on - sure, Nixon had more input than Cactus Jack’s “bucket of warm piss,” but at the end of the day Ike really didn’t value him or have much of a personal relationship with him (“give me a week and I’ll think of one”). My contrast was intended to capture how Stevenson and Fulbright personally warmed to each other on a level similar to, yeah, Carter and Mondale, and how Fulbright was really the first to be treated like an actual deputy for the president with significant policy input, state duties, and actual informal access to the president. You couldn’t really call it the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, but you could say Stevenson-Fulbright administration and have the actual team relationship captured. That sort of thing.
My thought process was an interrupted term, so he’s in-out-in Harold Wilson style with a conservative interruption. Mostly wanted to indicate reformist liberalism and that Park’s coup didn’t happen
I needed a good counterpart for the intense Anglophile/Europhile that is Bill Fulbright, and who better than a little Gaitskellite drunkard who he can make dance like a marionette?
I’m glad you enjoyed it!
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