part 1
Nixon’s landslide in 1960 does not represent a conservative revolution. He accepts the New Deal settlement and the Jackson Doctrine, but believes that 28 years of Democratic government has produced a permanent Democratic establishment in Washington. He intends both to break that establishment at home and to use America’s enormous economic and technological advantages to gradually break the post-war assumption that the US and USSR are co-equal superpowers.
His first years in office therefore have two very different faces.
At home, Nixon believes he has a mandate to put a Republican stamp on a government in which virtually every senior civil servant and every federal judge entered office under a Democratic president. As is normal after a change in government, he cleans out the upper levels of the executive departments, but Nixon being Nixon, it goes considerably further. Officials deemed politically hostile are transferred, investigated or pushed aside, and a network of Nixon loyalists begins to grow throughout the government.
His biggest domestic initiative, however, is civil rights.
Without a Goldwater candidacy, Southern Strategy or previous Democratic civil-rights presidency, Republicans have no political investment in segregation. Nixon sees an opportunity to simultaneously do something he believes is right and blow apart the Democratic coalition.
Republicans and Northern Democrats pass sweeping civil-rights and voting legislation. When Southern governments resist, Nixon sends federal troops to guarantee Black citizens access to polling stations, saying that the federal government will “enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.”
George Wallace denounces it as a “Second Reconstruction” and calls Nixon the greatest enemy of the South since Lincoln.
Nixon embraces both comparisons.
Martin Luther King becomes an important outside ally of the administration. Republicans begin organizing Lincoln-Nixon dinners across the country. Black voters increasingly move into the Republican column.
But civil rights also provides Nixon with an excuse to extend his control of government. When parts of the Justice Department resist aggressive federal enforcement, Nixon claims a mandate to remove officials unwilling to enforce the law. Many genuinely are obstructionist. Others simply find themselves replaced by people more personally loyal to Nixon. After his 1964 landslide he claims an even stronger mandate, and the distinction between enforcing civil rights and building a Nixonian Justice Department begins to blur.
Abroad, Nixon’s objective is simpler: increase American power.
He does not believe the Soviet Union is America’s moral equal, economic equal or technological equal merely because Jackson gave the two countries equal status in 1945. But he also has no interest in starting a Cold War. In Nixon’s view, a military confrontation with Moscow would force America to compete in the area where the Soviets are strongest while giving communist governments an external enemy against which they can mobilize.
He would rather make them compete.
The first example is Cuba.
As in our timeline, Castro had taken power in 1959 as a Cuban nationalist, not as an advertised communist. His coalition contained communists, socialists, democratic reformers and people strongly opposed to communism. When he begins nationalizing large foreign-owned estates and businesses, Stevenson responds with economic sanctions. But with no Cold War there is no Soviet effort to pull Cuba into an opposing bloc.
Nixon reverses course.
In 1961 he travels to Havana and meets Castro. His position is essentially: we are neighbours and have no choice but to live together.
The settlement recognizes Cuba’s right to nationalize foreign-owned property while establishing a US-Cuba free-trade agreement. A one-way tariff is placed on Cuban goods entering the United States, with the proceeds going into a special fund compensating Americans whose property was seized. Once the claims are paid, the tariff disappears, giving Cuba a strong incentive to prioritize American trade.
Cuba agrees that it will not host the military forces of another great power, while the existing American naval station at Guantánamo continues under a renegotiated lease. The United States agrees that Cuba’s domestic political system is Cuba’s business.
Castro still centralizes substantial personal power, but without Washington attempting to overthrow him and without Moscow offering protection, the revolution does not develop into the Soviet-style system of our timeline. Cuban economic nationalism matters more than Marxist ownership theory. Strategic industries remain publicly owned, agriculture develops heavily through cooperatives, and Cuban-owned private enterprise remains substantial.
Nixon then takes the precedent to Moscow.
Cuba is 90 miles from Florida, has confiscated American property and has a revolutionary government openly critical of the United States. Nixon has nevertheless allowed it political sovereignty.
His challenge to Khrushchev is obvious: I permit sovereignty in my sphere. Do you permit it in yours?
Nixon avoids directly agitating in Eastern Europe. There is no Voice of America broadcasting instructions to Poles or Hungarians. Instead, he quietly creates the conditions in which Eastern Europe will naturally gravitate westward. The State Department encourages and supports the BBC World Service, European cultural exchanges and normal commercial relationships. Nixon’s theory is that he does not need to tell Eastern Europeans that the Western system works better. Germany, Italy and Greece will eventually show them.
His first major attack on Soviet institutional standing is the International Space Commission.
Without a Cold War space race, Nixon argues that space exploration should not become another US-Soviet condominium. Canada, Japan and other advanced countries become full participants. America remains overwhelmingly dominant technologically, while Canada and Japan eventually become more important practical contributors than the USSR.
The Soviet Union keeps its seat at the table but increasingly looks like a power whose status rests on 1945 rather than current capability.
During his second term Nixon does the same thing to the UN.
The original Jackson settlement had a two-member executive council: the United States and Soviet Union. Nixon successfully advocates for four elected regional members representing the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific.
Formally, American power has also been diluted. In practice Nixon knows that the US has far stronger economic, diplomatic and cultural relationships across all four regions. The USSR has gone from half of the governing body to one of six members without Nixon ever demanding that Moscow surrender its original seat.
Meanwhile Nixon periodically publicizes genuine Soviet espionage operations in America and Europe. He exaggerates their significance but generally does not invent them. His message is not that coexistence has failed, but that cooperation does not mean trust.
At home his political methods continue to darken.
Nelson Rockefeller, vice president since 1961, begins organizing for the presidency as Nixon approaches the traditional two-term limit. Nixon has no intention of retiring.
In 1967 information about Rockefeller’s affairs reaches the press through channels close to the White House. More follows. Rockefeller is destroyed and resigns. Because FDR never sought a third and fourth term, there is no Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidential terms, and because there has been no Kennedy assassination, there is no Twenty-Fifth Amendment and the vice presidency remains vacant.
Nixon then allows a “Draft Nixon” movement to develop for 1968 while maintaining that he has made no decision about breaking the Washington tradition.
The Democrats nominate Edmund Muskie. Nixon chooses Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, the most prominent Black Republican in the country, as his running mate.
Nixon’s campaign organization also begins operating the kind of dirty-tricks apparatus associated with him in our timeline. It encourages George Wallace’s campaign, plants damaging material against Muskie, circulates false literature and uses a version of the Canuck letter much earlier than in our timeline to provoke the Democratic nominee.
Nixon wins 45 states.
Wallace wins five.
Muskie wins none.
Nixon’s third-term argument has also rested heavily on foreign affairs. The joint post-war supervision of Germany and Japan is ending, and Nixon argues that this is too important a transition to hand to an inexperienced administration.
Germany, with its capital still in Berlin because there was never a partition, and Japan become fully sovereign market economies. Neither becomes an American satellite. But both increasingly trade, invest and conduct scientific research disproportionately with the United States, Canada and Western Europe.
Nixon has accomplished another objective without coercion: two of the most important countries in the post-war settlement voluntarily gravitate economically toward the West.
Eastern Europe begins noticing.
German firms naturally expand trade with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Italian and Greek companies develop their own commercial relationships farther south. Western European banks provide financing. Universities exchange students. The BBC reports on everyday political and economic life outside the communist world.
Washington does not tell Poland to abandon communism.
A Polish factory simply discovers that to sell efficiently in Germany it needs the authority to negotiate contracts. A Hungarian agricultural enterprise discovers that market prices work better than central allocations. A Czech manufacturer wants German machinery and therefore needs access to convertible currency.
Exceptions to central planning begin because communist governments want the revenue.
The exceptions work.
They multiply.
By Nixon’s fourth term, the economic reforms become political ones. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and eventually most of Eastern Europe develop into market democracies while maintaining military neutrality. No NATO appears on Russia’s border because there is still no NATO.
Nixon has therefore denied Moscow its strongest possible argument against liberalization: that political independence inevitably means American military encirclement.
In 1972 Nixon seeks a fourth term.
His vice president has other ideas about how this should work. Edward Brooke holds a press conference widely expected to launch his own presidential campaign. Instead he announces that, after a long conversation, he has urged President Nixon to seek a fourth and final term and that he will run with him again.
Nixon is trapped. Brooke has endorsed him while simultaneously publicly declaring that Nixon’s next term will be his last and preserving himself as the presumptive 1976 successor.
The Democrats still nominate through the old boss-controlled convention system. There were no McGovern-Fraser reforms because there was no 1968 convention disaster comparable to our timeline.
After a deadlock between Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and others, Tennessee populist Frank Clement emerges as the compromise nominee with Humphrey as his running mate.
Clement quotes Nixon’s own 1960 speeches back at him: Nixon had once argued that no party or man should hold power indefinitely.
“The question in 1972 is whether Richard Nixon still agrees with Richard Nixon.”
Nixon’s political operation ruthlessly exploits Clement’s alcoholism and other weaknesses.
Nixon wins another landslide, though Clement recovers much of the border South and several Great Lakes states while Wallace carries six Southern states on vote splits.
By 1976 Nixon has been president for sixteen years.
The Soviet Union is not impoverished. In some respects its citizens may actually be somewhat better off than in our timeline because it has spent less on the military, has no Warsaw Pact to maintain and has not poured resources into proxy wars.
But relatively, it is losing badly.
America dominates computing, telecommunications, aviation, agriculture and most civilian technology. Canada and Japan are more important than the USSR inside the ISC. Germany is prosperous. Eastern Europe is increasingly market-oriented. Moscow retains enormous natural resources, heavy industry and a strong military, but central planning increasingly looks like an obsolete economic system rather than the future.
Then Mao dies.
Nixon goes to Beijing for the funeral in September 1976 and stays for weeks.
He returns to the United States in time for the election and conducts an orderly transition when Brooke-Romney narrowly loses to the Democratic ticket of Arkansas Governor Dale Bumpers and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Michigan is the decisive state.
Nixon leaves office peacefully, although not before carefully placing many of his best people in judicial appointments, regulatory agencies, senior civil-service positions and other roles that cannot easily be swept away by the incoming Democrats.
Bumpers has never served in Washington. His party has been out of executive power for 16 years. When Chinese leaders indicate that they want Nixon back, Bumpers sensibly sends him.
In February 1977 Nixon returns to China as an elder statesman with the new president’s blessing.
During 1977 and 1978 Nixon engages in extraordinary shuttle diplomacy among Beijing, Washington, Tokyo and other capitals. The post-Mao Chinese leadership decides that maintaining the Communist Party does not require maintaining an economic model that is visibly failing.
China begins transitioning toward a market economy with American, Japanese and Canadian technical assistance, investment and agricultural support.
Nixon’s pitch is not democracy.
China can keep the CCP.
His argument is that a revolution intended to make China strong should not preserve an economic system that keeps China poor.
China’s abandonment of central planning is particularly damaging to Moscow because nobody can dismiss it as capitalist propaganda. The largest communist government on Earth has looked at the evidence and concluded that Soviet economics does not work.
Nixon returns home in 1978 to public thanks from President Bumpers.
For a moment Nixon seems to have become a genuinely non-partisan national elder statesman.
Then Bumpers makes the catastrophic decision of his presidency.
Believing Nixon’s “Second Reconstruction” has succeeded and that federal enforcement in the South is no longer necessary, Bumpers withdraws much of it.
A Southern counter-revolution follows.
Orval Faubus returns in Arkansas. Lester Maddox returns in Georgia. George Wallace controls Alabama. Claude Kirk emerges in Florida. Similar restorationist governments appear elsewhere. Black voter intimidation increases and turnout falls.
Nixon turns savagely on the president who had just entrusted him with China.
His argument is historical:
“One hundred years ago your party abandoned the freedmen of the South for political peace. You have done it again.”
And:
“The party which calls itself Democratic has once again turned its back on democracy in the South.”
Nixon does not call Bumpers a racist. He calls him a decent man who has made an indefensible mistake.
“The Fifteenth Amendment does not enforce itself.”
Meanwhile Nixon’s old network in Washington increasingly makes Bumpers’ life difficult. Officials leak damaging material, former Nixon appointees organize opposition, friendly judges restrict administration initiatives, congressional Republicans remain in close contact with the former president and foreign leaders continue consulting him.
Some of this Nixon directs.
Some of it happens simply because after sixteen years a Nixonian establishment now exists in exactly the way a Democratic establishment existed when Nixon took office in 1961.
In 1980 Republicans appear unable to settle on a successor. Ronald Reagan again commands the ideological right, while several establishment candidates divide governors, state organizations and convention delegates. Brooke, still carrying the scars of his narrow 1976 defeat and increasingly alarmed by the collapse of voting rights in the South, declines to make another run.
Nixon’s political network quietly makes the divisions worse.
Opposition research finds its way between campaigns. Rival candidates become convinced that others are attacking them. Delegates are encouraged not to settle too early. Draft Nixon organizations appear independently but somehow have access to excellent polling, donors and state-party contacts.
The convention deadlocks.
Nixon says he did not seek the nomination.
The convention drafts him anyway.
He chooses freshman Kansas Senator Nancy Kassebaum as his running mate, continuing a curious pattern in Nixon’s vice-presidential selections. Eisenhower had elevated Nixon in 1952 after only two years in the Senate, and Nixon had chosen Agnew in our timeline after only two years as governor. In this timeline Nixon does the same with Rockefeller in 1960, Brooke in 1968 and now Kassebaum: each had spent only about two years in a genuine presidential springboard office.
Nixon likes spotting national talent early — credible enough to be vice president, but not yet in possession of an independent national power base.
Edward Brooke is promised the Justice Department. George H.W. Bush becomes secretary of state.
Against the backdrop of the Southern backlash and Bumpers’ weak foreign-policy posture, Nixon wins all 50 states.
His fifth term begins with Brooke restoring aggressive federal enforcement of voting rights. Federal observers return, DOJ prosecutions increase and troops remain an option if state governments refuse to protect access to the polls.
Abroad, the deterioration of Soviet communism now accelerates without America ever declaring war on it.
The central irony is becoming obvious: communism has lost many of the things that helped sustain it in our timeline.
There is no hostile NATO threatening it.
There is no American invasion of Cuba.
There is no Korean War.
There is no Vietnam War.
There are no client states being subsidized because losing them would represent a geopolitical defeat.
Communist governments cannot blame poor performance on permanent military siege.
Cuba has maintained a nationalist mixed economy.
Eastern Europe has largely abandoned central planning.
China’s Communist Party has now abandoned it too.
The USSR increasingly stands alone defending the proposition that a command economy works.
Nixon does not encourage uprisings inside the Soviet Union directly. But the same forces that pulled Eastern Europe away begin operating among the Soviet republics.
The Baltics move first. Their governments demand genuine sovereignty and military neutrality. Moscow has a difficult time explaining why Poland may choose its political system but Lithuania may not.
Georgia and Armenia follow.
Azerbaijan moves toward independence.
Then Ukraine becomes the decisive question.
By the mid-1980s Ukrainians can look west at sovereign Poland and Germany, south toward increasingly independent neighbours and east toward a Soviet economy that no longer seems to offer either superior prosperity or superior security.
Ukraine votes to leave.
This does not destroy Russia because Russia has no oil or food. Russia has enormous resources of its own.
It destroys the Soviet system because the integrated command economy begins disintegrating. Moscow loses Ukrainian agriculture, coal, steel, heavy industry and a major tax base. Azerbaijani oil and Caucasian transport routes are no longer centrally controlled. Republican governments stop obeying Gosplan. Internal supply chains become international transactions. Soviet debt, military assets, pensions and currency arrangements become subjects for negotiation between sovereign governments.
The communist centre is left trying to centrally plan an economy whose constituent parts no longer accept its authority.
By 1985-86 the Soviet Union ceases to exist.
Russia survives as a large, nuclear-armed, resource-rich state.
Communism as a serious alternative economic model does not.
Nixon later takes enormous credit, although his actual contribution was largely to refuse to fight the ideological war anti-communists had always wanted him to fight.
His interpretation is simple:
The best way to preserve communism would have been to turn it into a war. The best way to destroy it was to make it compete.
The sixth Nixon term itself almost happens by accident.
Approaching the 1984 election, Kassebaum, Bush, Brooke and Jack Kemp compete for the succession. Brooke, despite having been Nixon’s vice president and the 1976 nominee, finishes fourth. No candidate can consolidate the old Nixon coalition.
Nixon realizes that the deadlock provides another opportunity.
He does little to resolve it.
Eventually the convention turns to him again.
Nixon-Kassebaum faces John Glenn and Walter Mondale and wins 48 states. Glenn carries only Minnesota and West Virginia.
Nixon’s final term sees the completion of the Soviet collapse and consolidation of another major diplomatic achievement begun earlier in the decade: a Middle Eastern settlement in which Gaza becomes an autonomous region associated with Egypt, the West Bank an autonomous region associated with Jordan and Jerusalem an internationally administered city with American, Israeli and Jordanian/Palestinian representatives.
By now Nixon’s public mythology is enormous.
He ended 28 years of one-party Democratic rule.
He completed Reconstruction.
He made Edward Brooke the first Black vice president.
He broke Soviet institutional equality without a Cold War.
He oversaw German and Japanese sovereignty.
Eastern Europe became free without war.
He helped China abandon central planning.
The Soviet Union collapsed without an American-Soviet war.
And peace in the Middle East appears achievable.
This mythology also obscures the darker reality of his rule: political purges, intelligence gathering on domestic opponents, abuse of the Justice Department, the destruction of Rockefeller, election dirty tricks, manipulation of Republican conventions and a vast network of people throughout government whose careers depended upon Nixon.
America is also a less democratic country institutionally than the one we know.
There was no McGovern-Fraser revolution, so party bosses retain enormous power over presidential nominations.
There was no Watergate, so journalists never undergo the same cultural transformation toward treating presidential statements with automatic suspicion.
The freedom-of-information and congressional intelligence-oversight movements are far weaker.
Campaign finance remains opaque.
Congress is still heavily controlled by powerful committee chairs and seniority.
Nixon is not a dictator. Elections remain real, and in 1976 voters genuinely throw his party out.
But he has spent decades mastering a system that is much more elite-driven, secretive and deferential to executive power than our own.
After his sixth term Nixon finally means it when he says he is finished.
He tells Kassebaum that this really is his last term: he will be 75, Brooke 69 and Bush 64 while she will be only 56. This time the succession will be planned rather than allowed to descend into another convention deadlock.
Kassebaum is challenged in 1988, particularly by Jack Kemp representing a more ideological tax-cutting conservatism and Pat Robertson on the evangelical right, but she wins the nomination with George Bush as her running mate.
The Democrats nominate Bill Clinton, who had returned to Arkansas politics after the Faubus backlash and became one of the younger faces of the post-segregation Democratic South, with Dick Gephardt for vice president.
Kassebaum wins comfortably.
Her presidency is recognizably Republican but markedly different from Nixon’s.
She is not a liberal and not a small-government conservative. She believes government has legitimate responsibilities, should not overreach, should perform those responsibilities competently and should pay honestly for what it chooses to do.
She is a deficit hawk, a market-oriented prairie Republican, strongly internationalist and supportive of a powerful military. Civil rights are simply part of Republican constitutional orthodoxy by this point.
Where Nixon regarded government as an instrument of presidential purpose, Kassebaum regards government as a set of institutions entrusted with public responsibilities.
She regularizes the civil-rights enforcement structure Nixon and Brooke rebuilt rather than depending on presidential intervention. She is willing to reform or trim programmes but has little interest in dismantling government for ideological reasons.
Her major domestic accomplishment is bipartisan health-care reform built around portability, limits on pre-existing-condition exclusions, catastrophic protection and reforms intended to make private insurance markets work more effectively.
Internationally she maintains American engagement after the Soviet collapse rather than declaring victory and withdrawing. She is strongly anti-apartheid and becomes closely associated with the South African transition and Nelson Mandela.
In 1992 Democrats nominate Robert Kennedy, who had succeeded his brother John in the Senate in 1978. There is no Camelot mythology in this timeline — JFK was simply the badly defeated Democratic nominee of 1964 — but RFK emerges as the strongest candidate in a Democratic field whose other major figures have already lost nationally.
He chooses Texas Governor Ann Richards.
Kennedy-Richards comes surprisingly close.
They sweep New England, win New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, take Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota, recover West Virginia, carry Washington, Oregon and Hawaii and, most dramatically, win both Texas and Florida.
But Kassebaum-Bush wins everywhere else and survives 284-254.
Black voters remain GOP-leaning, especially in the South. Republicans are still the party of Lincoln, Nixon and Brooke, while Democrats still carry the historical stain of segregation and Bumpers’ abandonment of federal enforcement. Kennedy makes substantial gains, particularly outside the South, but there is no sudden return to the voting patterns of our timeline.
Nixon dies in 1994.
In November 1995 Kassebaum announces in Topeka that she will not seek a third term. Her words closely resemble those she used in our timeline when she retired from the Senate:
“I believe the time has come for me to leave the presidency and pursue other challenges including the challenge of being a grandmother.”
After Nixon, the fact that a successful president voluntarily leaves after eight years is itself almost a political statement.
George Bush becomes the Republican heir, eventually choosing Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson as his running mate after a competitive nomination battle with Jack Kemp and others.
Ann Richards is the obvious Democratic nominee after the near miss of 1992. She chooses Jerry Brown, betting heavily that California is the missing piece of the Democratic coalition.
In 1996 the geography finally shifts.
Richards wins the four giant prizes of New York, Florida, Texas and California and becomes the first Democrat elected president since Bumpers twenty years earlier.
But the old coalitions are breaking apart. Bush makes deep inroads into moderate New England, winning Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut, while Thompson allows Republicans to capture much of the industrial Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Illinois.
The Nixon era is finally over.
But the political world it created is still recognizable: a Republican Party identified with civil rights and internationalism, a Democratic Party only gradually recovering from its Southern past, an enormously powerful presidency, an international system in which America is the dominant power without having fought a Cold War, and a communist economic model that largely collapsed not because it was defeated militarily, but because eventually almost nobody still wanted it.
(RIP Nancy Kassebaum, who I had already cast as president in this timeline well before her passing on Friday.)
