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THE GUNS OF NOVEMBER

Before the usual catcalls to my political left start, this was a challenge AH at Chris’s request. I truly do not regard a coup in the US as likely. Our military just does not work that way. We had a civil war but it was not a military uprising. Indeed quite a number of Dixie born regulars stood by the Old Flag in the face of intense social pressure [George Thomas of Chickamauga and Nashville fame had his name cut out of the family bible]. However we have had a few incidents where the polity neared meltdown. Probably the worst was 1930-36. However the one I have chosen is the crisis of 1968 where the Democratic Party ripped itself apart. We had a President who essentially couldn’t give a speech outside a military base because he would not order the security necessary to do so without riot. We had a three way Presidential race that could easily have been a four way.

My POD is the Chicago Democratic convention. The left was furious at the rubber stamp of Humphrey. Then there was the police riot [yes, the police were provoked but that was not how the left saw it; it was a crazy time]. They wanted to start their own left party. They could not find a standard bearer. McCarthy, McGovern and Ted Kennedy refused. King was dead. The mass of disgruntled anti-war liberals were not about to form a party under the banner of the more hard left Movement people. The “no enemies to the left” was still a relatively new meme at this stage of the Long March to the left. So I am going to play a long shot here. Since retirement Walter Cronkite has been increasingly willing to show his left sentiments. However in OTL 1968 he was dedicatedly mainstream [in public]. His on air claim that the war was lost after Tet had essentially sunk LBJ but that in OTL was as far as he would go. So we will presume he has an epiphany. Have him lose it covering the convention, and resign on the air after blasting the establishment for its sins.

The obvious running mate would have been Coretta Scott King, the martyr’s widow. I do not believe she would have challenged the establishments of the Democratic Party or the civil rights world that way. So have her refuse, but also refuse to endorse Humphrey. This brings the Peace + Freedom Party to the ultimate rabble rouser, Jesse Jackson. The Party runs on unilateral withdrawal from Indochina and massive social engineering for civil equality at home.

We now are bringing forward from 1972 the Wallace assignation but instead of the white loser Bremer, we will have some hippy type with ties to the radical wing of the anti-war and black power movements as the shooter. This turns lose the still armed white supremacists to play death squad with the left. Every political rally of all four candidates is a shooting gallery. Race riots keep happening but in the more normal pre 60’s fashion of more whites killing blacks than blacks killing whites.

Over LBJ’s veto, Congress suspends posse comitatas and by legislation orders the army to ensure sufficient civic peace to conduct an election. Two weeks later it suspends the writ of habeas corpus, again over LBJ’s veto. The army units sent on civic pacification leak deserters but not in numbers meaningful enough to stop them from allowing an election of sorts to take place. By the time the last ballot has been counted the political campaign has claimed eight thousand lives [civil and military] and seen one hundred thousand people put behind wire in the Sonoran Desert. There are burned out districts in a hundred cities and it takes armed military constabulary to keep the civic peace. Had it produced a President it might well have been worth it. Instead it produced disputed results in 20 states, the litigation of which was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction. As near as anyone could tell Humphrey had finished a distant 4^th in the popular vote and 4th in the Electoral College. The still hospitalized Wallace was 3rd in the popular and 2^nd in the Electoral College. Cronkite was 2^nd in the popular and 3^rd in the electoral [his followers claimed he was first in both and had been elected before the election was stolen; the postelection riots were worse than the ones during the campaign]. Nixon finished first both ways in the semiofficial counts BUT was under 40% in the popular vote and under 270 [majority] in the electoral vote. This kicked the election into the Congress. The Democrats owned majorities in both Houses but only with Congressmen and Senators friendly to the Wallace and Left [Peace + Freedom] parties. The Congress refuses to choose anyone for President or VP outraging the Republicans and what was left of the neutral mainstream media. The Congressional Democrats claim that this makes the Speaker of the House President. However the same political divisions that saw no President or VP chosen had prevented a Speaker from being chosen. The Democrats claimed that made the old Speaker President. Other said it made the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, but he simply refused to take the oath of office. So February of 1969 saw a flurry of court orders and no administration, new or old. Cronkite was sworn in by a sympathetic judge and barricaded himself and his ‘administration’ in on the Columbia campus in upper Manhattan. The old Speaker, John McCormack, in OTL was in the House until 1971 and lived until 1980. He was 77 in February of 1969. Let us presume that the strain of being a pretender to the office of President wrecks his health sufficiently for him to step aside within a few weeks and without creating an administration that anyone in the bureaucracy will take orders from.

So the Joint Chiefs essentially find themselves running the country. There is no constitutional provision for rerunning the election and no pragmatic reason to believe it would go any better. They are faced with a Congress unable to even organize itself much less legislate or appropriate monies. There is a major war on. The country is essentially under military occupation by act of Congress. It would take very little for them to formalize the situation and directly start giving orders to keep the wheels running. They would have the de facto support of the Nixon and Wallace voters, and probably of many of their Congressional representatives. The military-industrial complex was still functional in early 1969. Getting the business and labor union leadership in a room with the senior military and permanent government types would not have been difficult. From there the easy next step is a cabinet of experts broadly acceptable to military and elite opinion to run the various civilian bureaucracies with a proper retired senior general as nominal Secretary of Defense under the Chiefs. They do not so much take over the political system as ignore it. The Peace + Freedom leadership is arrested when they refuse to recognize a Supreme Court decision that they did not win the election. The bulk of the remaining activists go into the old McCarran Act internment camps with the hundred thousand already detained. Hoover and military intelligence are turned lose against the armed cadres of the right and left. The net is cast widely. Tens of thousands flee overseas. Tens of thousands more go behind the wire. An American style coup has happened.

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