I'm noticing Wyoming isn't on this list. Did Teno Roncalio lose reelection?
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Hmm maybe. It was his slow rise in the 80s during the Reagan years that really made him a big player; so we’ll see.
Up there with Saving Private Ryan on getting its rightful Oscar denied! (And Ordinary People is at least good, unlike that which shall not be named)
They called him “Ayatollah” fascetiously for his antics. Also a not insignificant chunk of the movie’s budget was skimmed towards cocaine, apparently
lets say he was re-elected, just so I have options in 1982
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
Oh thank God!
Jokes aside, I'm sure he has a bright future in the defense contracting industry or lobbying or something skeevy like that. Could he run for Congress in 1982? I think it's very possible. But it is just as likely that he pursues an enriching career at Blackwater. Either way, Cheney will have something to do.
He’ll find a landing spot somewhere, that’s for sure. It is pretty rare for WH CoS to run for Congress, though. But maybe Cheney does it, just this time in 1982
Part II - Keep Calm and Carey On
Part II - Keep Calm and Carey On: 1981-1985
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I decided, in the end, not to do a sequel thread and just keep the story going here, as originally. The narrative will probably speed up a bit compared to the first few years of content when I was still sticking with my original media motif, and my hope will be to keep the updates going at a relatively reasonable/consistent interval, since I've got a lot on my plate with all the fireworks over in Cinco de Mayo right now
Not bad! Chapter title Guess Who's Shooting at Dinner is quite good, too.
Great use of the pun. Excited to see Carey as President as well as who he picks to be in his cabinet
I was very proud of that one! Haha
Thank you!
The Carey Cabinet Comes Together - Part I
The Carey Cabinet Comes Together - Part I
Hugh Carey formally resigned as Governor of the State of New York on January 4th, 1981, handing the responsibilities of the office over to Mary Krupsak, who would become the first female Governor of the State. Carey and Krupsak had not gotten along over the years - she had nearly refused to stand on his ticket again and had mulled a primary challenge to him - but all hatchets were buried as she got the top job in Albany.
Carey prepared for inauguration day 1981 diligently. He took the time to meet with his opponent Reagan at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where the former California Governor surprised him by urging him to press ahead with all haste with the SALT II negotiations with the Soviet Union that had stalled in Ford's last years in office and to perhaps go even further; despite his reputation as a hard-edged hawk, Reagan was privately and eventually publicly committed to dramatically reducing the world's nuclear stockpiles, and in the early Carey years, he emerged as a surprising ally in Republican backchannels for Carey's arms reduction plans as the next "phase" of detente. Carey also met with dozens of diplomats, business leaders, labor officials, and political figures in New York during his "holiday blitz" to rapidly staff up an administration and survey the lay of the land that would greet him on January 20th.
The most important job, of course, would be Secretary of State. George Bush had been an able administrator and despite the debacle in Panama had built a modestly successful legacy by helping nudge the Iranian government into a workable compromise with rebellious elements, spearheading the Internal Settlement in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and deepening and enhancing American ties in Europe. Carey's first instinct was to look back to the Kennedy years for inspiration, and his initial choice for the role was George Ball. It became clear within days of the name being floated as an option, however, that Ball was regarded by a number of key Southern Democrats as too liberal and Ball himself was disinterested in the role due to his advancing age; he was instead made Permanent Representative to NATO, a minor diplomatic post more like a sinecure, as a reward for his long career of public service, and Ball would retire entirely from government service within two years.
The role of Secretary of State instead fell to Nicholas Katzenbach, a fellow New Yorker and old Cabinet hand of the 1960s. As the "yin to his yang," as it was later put, Carey made good on a promise made during the primaries - Scoop Jackson, Washington's long-serving junior senator and leader of the "neoconservative" hawkish wing of the Democratic Party, would be appointed to the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. Jackson's tenure at the Pentagon, cut short by his fatal stroke in late 1983, would be among the most impactful in the history of the organization; a slew of young proteges from his office in the early 1970s such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Richard Pipes, and most importantly Paul Wolfowitz, who would by the mid-1980s have been appointed to a variety of key positions throughout the national security ecosystem and become the dominant thinkers of "hard liberalism" within the Democratic Party as the anti-Vietnam New Left instincts of the early 1970s became a distant memory. Carey rounded out his national security team by appointing former Army Secretary Cyrus Vance as his CIA chief and Polish-American analyst Zbigniew Brezinski his National Security Advisor. One more man needed a home after that - George McGovern, recently ejected from the Senate, himself rejected the offer of serving as Agriculture Secretary; Askew cannily advised Carey to instead make him Ambassador to the United Nations and elevate it to a Cabinet role, where he could be "kept off doing his thing in New York." And with that, the foreign policy arm of the Carey administration had been built out, resembling the more muscular Cold War Liberalism of the Truman and Kennedy variety.
It was the domestic offices, with the horse-trading necessary to get buy-in from so many varied constituencies, that would be much more difficult...
Huh...a Democratic-flavored "neoconservative" foreign policy. Some sorta muscular liberalism, make-the-world-safe-for-democracy-by-dropping-ALL-the-bombs sort of ideology.
Believe it or not - that’s all OTL! Wolfowitz et al didn’t start ditching the Dems until the very end of the Carter years when they found a home in the Reagan admin