The Greatest Honor History Can Bestow...
[Part 1 of an ongoing series]
Unknown Unknowns
[Part 2 of an
ongoing series]
1981-1989:
Donald Rumsfeld/Daniel J. Evans (Republican) [6]
'80 def. A. Noam Chomsky/Barbara Ehrenreich (New), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr./James B. Hunt (Democratic)
'84 def. Joe Biden/Philip Burton (Democratic), A. Noam Chomsky/Ramsey Clark (New)
1989-1993:
Lee Iacocca/James B. Longley (Independent) [7]
'88 def. Chuck Robb/Toney Anaya (Democratic), Jack Kemp/Frank D. White (Republican), John Sweeney/LaDonna Harris (New)
1993-1995:
Booth Gardner •/Bob Kerrey (Democratic) [8]
'92 def. Nicky Rowe/Pat Saiki (Republican), Bernard Sanders/Hilda Mason (New)
1995-1996: Bob Kerrey/Vacant (Democratic) [9]
1996-1997: Bob Kerrey/Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (Democratic)
1997-:
H. Ross Perot/Bill Schuette (Independent endorsed by Republican)
'96 def. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend/Robert Kerr III (Democratic), Christie Whitman/Ray Metcalfe (Republican Moderate)
[6] For eight years in power, Americans often seem to forget Donald Rumsfeld. He wasn't a figure of hate like Agnew or Schlesinger, he wasn't beloved like Iacocca or even Dole, he was just sort of there for eight years. The grey, boring, Midwestern Navy veteran and career politician came across more like an accountant than a politician, and his proclamations that there was no alternative to cutting taxes to stimulate the economy and cutting funding for welfare to fight inflation and get America back to work carried the ring of unavoidable truth rather than political statements, no matter what the economists said. And even though the 1980s saw some very significant events at home and across the world, none of it seemed to stick to Rumsfeld, for good or for ill.
"Donaldnomics" was the watchword of Rumsfeld's first term. Not social issues - even despite Phyllis Schlafly's campaigning, the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified with little comment from the White House, and one of Rumsfeld's Supreme Court nominees was the swing vote to invalidate anti-sodomy laws. Not foreign policy - after Vietnam, Greece, and Panama, most Americans wanted to leave the rest of the world well enough alone, and the administration was happy to oblige them on that, outside of "international market politics" like trade and the IMF. But the main priority of the administration was dealing with the recession.
Did Donaldnomics work? It's hard to say. The economic crisis of the late '70s was more or less over by 1984, but the recovery was more concentrated in some regions than others - many analysts have credited it more to the rise in oil prices as al-Ikhwan carried out a campaign against Saudi oilfields in their quest to topple the House of Saud and Iraq tried to consolidate authority after a messy palace coup by invading Iran, or to the Digital Revolution allowing companies like Electronic Data Systems, MITS, and Tesuji to create the Silicon Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico and the Silicon Plains of the I-35 corridor. Other analysts have pointed to Galbraith's inflation hawkery - destructive in the short term, but allowing the economy to regain its footing after he and his President were out of office. Still others have pointed to simple reversion to the mean.
But it's undeniable that the economy did, in fact, recover. By 1984, the United States was squarely in the middle of an economic boom, feeding off both similar booms in places like Michel Poniatowski's France, Edgardo Sogno's Italy, and third world trading partners like V. P. Singh's India and Widjojo Nitisastro's Indonesia, as well as the Latin American debt crisis. While regions of the country that did not share as much in the economic upturn, such as the deindustrializing Midwest and Northeast, turned out for Joe Biden in the 1984 elections, and Chomsky's second run for the Presidency won more states (though fewer votes, electoral or otherwise) than four years earlier, Rumsfeld still won a second term by a strong margin, though not the landslide of 1980.
His second term, though, did not go especially well for him or the country. The economy kept growing steadily in many regions, but the relaxation of trade began to create discontent amidst deindustrialization and the decline of labor unions. As radical AFSCME President Gerald McEntee led a coalition of about a dozen unions out of the increasingly establishment-friendly AFL-CIO, forming the United Labor Action Council, more independent actions began to proliferate - wildcat strikes on freight rail lines, protest trucks completely blocking off state capitols, family farmers raiding grain elevators and in one case even bombing a shipment of Argentine beef.
Immigration also became a flashpoint, with the establishment consensus shared by both Democratic leadership like Biden and the Rumsfeld administration - citizenship for "skilled" immigrants, temporary visas and benign neglect of violations for "unskilled" - facing criticism from both the left and the right. The left, embodied in people like Noam Chomsky and UFW President Philip Vera Cruz, criticized the consensus on the grounds that it allowed the victimization of workers in the United States and abroad. More conservative - or even quasi-left populist - voices criticized it for undercutting native-born Americans and fostering the sort of multiculturalism Schlesinger had warned about.
But by far the most significant event or policy of Rumsfeld's second term was the "East Asia Crisis". The name is a misnomer, as the crisis was made up of a number of essentially unrelated issues in places stretching from the Kuril Islands to the Indonesian island of Timor. The causes were myriad, but they stemmed mostly from a central tension - time was running out for the American-backed autocratic regimes that dotted the region, from Kim Jae-gyu's Republic of Korea to Wang Sheng's Taiwan to Toh Chin Chye's Singapore.
This manifested in a few ways - Singapore had frequent protests by leftist groups like the Singapore Radical Students' Union and Communist Party of Malaya, while Taiwan skirmished with the People's Republic of China over borders in the Strait. Indonesia and the Philippines dealt with separatists in Timor and primarily-Moro areas of Mindanao, while the Marcos regime also dealt with student and labor oppositions, assassinating opposition leader Jovito Salonga on American soil in 1985. Japan engaged in a settlement program of its disputed territories, and Prime Minister Koichi Tsukamoto began to openly talk about revising Article 9 and expressing skepticism about Japanese war crimes, backed by a wide variety of conservative
shinshūkyō.
But the most significant place, to American eyes at least, was Korea. The long-standing authoritarian regime there, led by former KCIA head Kim Jae-gyu after a 1981 coup d'etat, was facing increasing dissent - both from below, particularly in the form of student protest movements that occasionally boiled over into mass movements like the Gwangju Uprising, and from within the regime as figures within the government and security services jockeyed for power and influence. The
bête noire of the regime was North Korea, which was facing its own difficulties - increasing economic issues had sparked a coup against longtime leader Kim Il-sung by Minister of Armed Forces O Jin-u, and the instability of the O regime had led to increased uncertainty, as well as attempts to make the South and its American allies a unifying force by making it seem like a clear and present danger. For the South Korean part, its military intelligence served a similar role - inflated reports on the threat from the North were to the advantage of the intelligence services within the military, the military within the government, and the government within the nation. Something was going to give at some point.
The opportunity came with the state funeral for Ismail of Johor, the 90-year-old Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia. As Kim and a number of other top officials, as well as American ambassador William Clark, taxied toward Subang International Airport, a (suspected) North Korean agent shot a grenade toward the airplane. Kim lost an eye but survived, but Clark and a number of high officials did not. South Korea responded by aggressively patrolling the Northern Limit Line, sinking a North Korean ship that came too close within a week. The Second Korean War began in fits and starts throughout June 1986, and the United States officially joined a month later.
American involvement in KWII, as those fond of acronyms called it, was not very extensive. South Korea was not South Vietnam - its military was basically competent, and American involvement was mostly limited to advisory roles, naval patrols, and high-altitude bombing. Still, with the midterms so close, the administration pursued and received a declaration of war against the unpopular North Korea.
That came back to bite him. Sure, the Republicans won the midterms - between them and Senator Ross Perot, a pro-tech and anti-free-trade independent who caucused with them, they had control of both houses of Congress. But as South Korean troops inched toward Pyongyang, it became clear that the war was going to be something of a quagmire. Worse, news filtered back of the atrocities committed by U.S. allies - South Korea's suppression of home-front dissent in the Chungnam massacre, the assassination of Hsu Hsin-liang and crowds of his supporters at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, Singapore's secret prison on Pulau Blakang Mati - and American complicity.
In the end, the Istanbul Accords - providing a framework to bring about a unified, democratic, Korea, albeit not a vision that quite came to fruition in the thirty years since they were signed - were a major part of the Rumsfeld legacy. But even as Secretary of State Kirkpatrick became
Time's Woman of the Year, Rumsfeld's chosen successor in New York Senator Jack Kemp was fighting two very strong challengers, both Texan.
Nicky Rowe, the incumbent Governor of Texas, had seen American policy in East Asia up close over the span of two decades, from being a prisoner of war in Vietnam to being shot at in the Philippines. A Cold Warrior comfortable with the notion of American Empire, he nonetheless saw the Rumpatrick Doctrine as a breaking of promises to defend and foster democracy and human rights - else, what were our servicemen fighting for?
Senator Perot had a different criticism. The Rumsfeld administration had pursued free trade treaties across the world - with Canada and, after the breakup of the European Economic Community, constituent countries such as France and successor organizations such as the Nordic Council. This was controversial, particularly in deindustrializing areas of the Midwest and Northeast.
Conventional wisdom tells us that either one of them would have won if the other one hadn't run, but they cannibalized each others' votes and allowed Jack Kemp to lock the nomination up by a whisker.
[7] But it was not Chuck Robb, the Democratic candidate, who reaped the Republicans' misfortune. The former Virginia Governor, son-in-law of Lyndon Johnson, and Vietnam War veteran did well in the election - despite a hearty challenge by civil rights hero and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young which faltered over foreign policy, Robb cruised to the Democratic nomination, but was undone by allegations of infidelity and cocaine use.
John Sweeney, the New Party candidate, looked like he had a chance for a brief moment. The SEIU president and McEntee ally had ideas on internationalist foreign policy, labor rights, and a generally progressive, even democratic-socialist, policy opposed to the centrist "New Current" of the Democratic Party. But the New Party had problems of its own, ranging from tensions over race and immigration to attempts at entryism by Transcendentalists like Mike Tompkins. The Sweeney campaign was the high-water mark of the party, but it only won three states in the end.
No, the victor, like George Washington before him, was tied to no political party, at least not openly. Lee Iacocca took an unusual path to the Presidency - the son of Italian immigrants, he rose through the ranks at Ford from an entry-level engineer to management before moving laterally to Chrysler and saving it from the hole it was in in the late '70s. A public figure and celebrity, someone who had started from modest means and made his way to the top of American business, Iacocca was widely viewed as a natural future President.
The only problem was, he didn't really want to be. Comfortable in his business, he kept his politics generic and to himself. He came out of his shell during the Gavin-Iacocca Commission, where he co-chaired a federal commission on modernizing American industrial policy - the report that commission wrote was an unexpected bestseller in 1981, all stark prose and calmly authoritative criticism and clear suggestions. And then the Rumsfeld administration ignored it, seemed to take special glee in tearing it up with its free trade treaties and its movements to break the back of labor unions at home and abroad, even as Solidarity stood in front of Red Army tanks in Gdansk and Warsaw.
When he was approached in 1987, he was non-committal. With so many crises across the globe, it didn't seem like the right time for a novice. The mooted candidacies of Morton Downey, Jr., the arch-conservative television host who seemed, at least for a time, to be the kind of madman with enough of a chance to be plausibly dangerous, and Larry McDonald, the Bircher congressman who had held a seat in Northwest Georgia as an independent for several terms, changed that. Iacocca came to the conclusion that, if there was a demand for an outsider independent, he might as well harness it and keep it out of the hands of the truly dangerous.
He set a trickle of news to keep people interested and quietly build the infrastructure for a run before jumping in in early 1988. He immediately took a lead and never really looked back, winning in November on an unusual coalition of the booming Mountain West and the deindustrializing Rust Belt, plus Florida. The lame duck period was harder than that of most administrations - he had no party machinery, no bench of people to draw on for appointed positions - but he made do.
In office, his record was substantial. On foreign policy, he was perhaps the only President with the credibility and perception to pursue "strategic withdrawal" in East Asia without being accused of weakness, bringing about talks between the Koreas, as well as between the People's Republic of Singapore and its government-in-exile in Sydney. Japan was a harder problem, but the general tensions in the region, as well as the populist rhetoric of the Tsukamoto government in specific, had led to an economic slowdown anyway - an internal party coup removed Tsukamoto, and Iacocca threw new Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi a bone by shuttering the American bases on Okinawa. There was, of course, China, but since its chaotic 1970s the country had mostly turned inward, except for the negotiations regarding Hong Kong and some saber-rattling over Taiwan and Indian borders in the Himalayas.
But as the American presence waned in East Asia, it waxed in the Middle East. After the Yom Kippur War and Agnew's decision to provide only token aid (putting paid to American justifications for the occupation of Greece in the process), Israel had come to the conclusion that American assistance could not be counted upon even in case of grave danger. Rumsfeld's assistance in the Balata Uprising and subsequent war in Lebanon went some way to countering that, but the election of Likud hardliner Yitzhak Shamir with the support of far-right leader Meir Kahane brought about renewed concerns of Israel becoming a rogue state, a prospect more frightening due to Israel's unofficially-announced possession of nuclear weapons.
To the south, Saudi Arabia's war against al-Ikhwan was winding down, but the group had merely changed their tactics. Instead of striking at oil refineries or the Saud family itself, it turned to blackmail and extortion to try to accomplish political goals on the Peninsula, while sending aid to forces fighting elsewhere - for example, Palestine, or New Basmachi rebels against the Soviets in Central Asia, or rebels against the new Iranian puppet government in Iraq, or irregulars in Kashmir and Sri Lanka fighting the Indian occupations. In 1989, partly as a test of American resolve, al-Ikhwan carried out something the United States couldn't ignore - while on a routine refueling stop in Mumbai, the
USS Kinkaid was attacked by suicide bombers, nearly sinking the ship.
The Middle East conflict was a major issue of the Iacocca presidency. Colin Powell, Secretary of the Army during the Second Korean War and the new Secretary of Defense, sought to pursue a multilateralist strategy, aided by Sultan Qaboos of Oman, Prime Minister Peter Shore of the United Kingdom, and Prime Minister Indrajit Gupta, India's first leader from a left-of-center party. He also saw assistance from more unexpected directions - the Soviet Union especially, as the reformist Aitmatov Clique sought an end to the Cold War - and, perhaps more pressingly, to their own domestic unrest in Central Asia. The newly elected General Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze and the new ceremonial President, author Chinghiz Aitmatov, sought greater liberalization, democracy, and decentralization at home, as well as peace abroad - counterintuitively, they pursued that aim by coordinating with American actions in the Middle East. The talks between Secretary of State (and former President) Melvin Laird and Shevardnadze in Gothenburg, Sweden, became known to future pop-historians as "the day the Cold War ended".
"Victory" in the Cold War would be the greatest legacy of the Iacocca presidency. But domestic affairs would also be a concern. Iacocca's industrial policy was an odd duck - it seemed to have something for everyone, creating the Industrial Labor Relation Boards which increased union power by binding entire industries to commitments made through collective bargaining but which also prevented unions from playing employers against one another and more thoroughly banned wildcat strikes.
Economically, he worked with Federal Reserve Chair Martin Feldstein to prevent the economy from overheating and reduce geographic inequality. Skeptical of deficits and encouraged in that skepticism by Feldstein, Iacocca cut spending significantly, both on the military and (to a lesser extent) on domestic welfare. He also modestly raised taxes - particularly on extracting finite resources like aquifers, and especially on the oil industry. One inadvertent effect of those policies was to split the environmental movement - the administration supported reducing auto emissions, factory pollution, and overall oil production, but its public works projects ticked off conservationists by flooding valleys with dams, cutting highways and airports through wilderness, and encouraging sprawl.
Immigration was another major issue of the Iacocca presidency, especially as refugees and economic migrants left trouble spots across the world, from post-
Kaepang North Korea to divided Sri Lanka to Lebanon. In what is perhaps the darkest mark on Iacocca's record, he punted on the issue, refusing to decisively address it or meaningfully break from - or, for that matter, shore up - the 1980s consensus.
Perhaps he would have in his second term. But after a single term, Iacocca was less concerned about the fate of America under the leadership of others than he had been in 1988. In early 1992 - before the Iowa Caucuses, but well after the foreshortened fields of candidates in both parties had developed, with heavy hitters in both parties refusing to run against a wildly popular President - President Iacocca declared that he would not seek, nor would he accept, a second term.
[8] House Minority Leader Al Gore. Senator Michael Dukakis. Governor Kathleen Brown. Even former nominees Joe Biden and Chuck Robb, plus wild efforts to bring in former President Schlesinger and former Vice President Carter, or to tempt the incumbent VP James B. Longley back into the Democratic fold. All of these people were subject to concerted efforts to bring them into the race, and not a single one did.
Instead, the Democratic National Convention in Detroit, Michigan saw Senator Booth Gardner win the nomination, very nearly by acclamation. It was an odd journey for Gardner - heir to a timber fortune, the Senator had served as Governor in the late '70s and early '80s, first coming to the attention of national Democrats by winning re-election in the wave year of 1980. Those observers soon saw his tenure in the Governorship, in which he established a state health insurance program, protected and enforced the protection of hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness, and created the first state-level ordinance prohibiting discrimination against gay and lesbian employees, leading to his gaining a reputation as the most progressive Governor in the United States.
Elected to the Senate to succeed the retiring Warren Magnuson two years after leaving the Governorship, Gardner continued his progressive record, becoming known for a 16-hour filibuster against a bill that would have dramatically increased the scope of domestic surveillance programs and for shepherding the Collective Bargaining Reform Act through the Senate over the Democrats' "New Current" leadership and the objections of conservative Republicans. He did all this - and rocketed to the Democratic nomination over idiosyncratic longtime gadfly Mike Gravel and calm, centrist, pathbreaking Pennsylvania Governor William Gray - with a voice compared to "Elmer Fudd on helium" and a personal manner that even his closest allies called unusual.
And then he won. His opponent, Nikki Rowe, was a formidable competitor, but bad blood within the Republican party and concerns over his undistinguished record in Texas hurt his campaign in a way that all the trumpeting of his military experience in the world couldn't correct for. And Gardner's progressive credentials peeled off relatively moderate New Party members, leaving Senator Bernie Sanders to win only his home state and openly propose a merger of the two parties - meanwhile, Senator Paul Wellstone, elected two years earlier, joined the Democratic caucus soon after the election.
The Gardner presidency has been polarizing to Americans from the start, a factor that to some extent is irrespective of political affiliation. For good or for ill, he certainly accomplished a lot in his single term. Foreign affairs was a major preoccupation of his administration. He turned Iacocca's desultory attempts at negotiating German reunification into standing roundtable talks, although those took a while to come to fruition. With the aid of UN Secretary-General Raul Manglapus, himself a symbol of democratization in the Philippines, he helped bring an end to civil wars in Nigeria and Nepal, and negotiate many other wars from even beginning. In Latin America, he is known and respected for promoting a "New Good Neighbor Policy", and particularly for taking steps to normalize relations with Cuba, albeit unsuccessfully, and pressing the Mexican government into recognizing the democratic election of Luis Álvarez, PAN candidate, over the PRI establishment. In East Asia, intersecting streets in the Xiamen International Peace City are named for Gardner and Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who helped bring about peace and mutual recognition between Taiwan and mainland China - Holbrooke and then-Presidents Li Peng of China and Lin Yi-hsiung of Taiwan won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize for that accomplishment.
He looms large in domestic policy as well. While his dreams of a comprehensive bill protecting the rights of romantic and sexual minorities foundered on the rocks of the fact that not even most Democrats supported the idea, he did end discrimination against HPTA individuals in civilian government posts and expand hate crime laws to protect them. Education reform was another major focus of his Presidency - he worked with Congress to overhaul primary and secondary school funding in America, establish nationally standardized exams to measure progress, and improve and expand postsecondary education, especially for smaller and more urban schools. While the Comprehensive Education Quality and Access Reform Act has had its critics, especially for its focus on standardized testing, it remains a major part of the educational ecosystem.
But his largest achievement on the domestic front was the Health Security Act, known to most Americans as GardnerCare. Imposing price controls on health insurance and an employer mandate to provide it, as well as funding state-level health providers and providing certain grants to access healthcare, particularly long-term care, the HSA was a truly radical shift, one Gardner (and his newly-minted Secretary of Healthcare Martha Griffiths) fought tooth-and-nail for in Congress, only narrowly passing by scuttling a planned public option. Like CEQARA, the HSA has come under criticism both for how far it went and how much further it, perhaps, could have gone. But universal healthcare, albeit neither complete in what it covers nor publicly administered, was still a massive achievement.
In the 1994 midterm elections, the House of Representatives flipped to the Republican Party for the first time in more than four decades. Gardner took the opportunity to turn his attention to something supported by both himself and Republican leaders like former Presidential nominee Jack Kemp. Throughout the Cold War the American line had been that if the Soviets opened up to capitalism, the West would welcome them with open arms. Shevardnadze now sought to test that, attempting to bring about free trade between the United States, the Soviet Union, and if possible other nations. It has since been argued that the proposal was wholly or in part insincere, a ploy to make the Americans seem untrustworthy and bolster the credibility of the Soviet government. But if it were a ploy, it was a ploy that worked.
Gardner backed it from the get-go, but didn't count on the depths of public opposition to it. It came from many corners - visceral anti-communists who saw any proposal by the Kremlin as inherently suspect and the treaty as a possible Trojan Horse for price-dumping, protectionists worried about the implications for American jobs, and people concerned about giving up American supremacy and shoring up the Soviet government among them. Overnight, Ross Perot became one of the best-known and best-regarded politicians in the United States. And as Shevardnadze effigies and Gardner dartboards spread across America's streets and living rooms, the President fought even harder for the agreement, holding summit after summit, broadcasting PSAs to the American people, and pressing harder for some sort of treaty rather than a mere executive agreement.
Like Wilson before him, what happened in that effort made the state of the President's health a major issue. Throughout his Presidency, Booth Gardner was known for some odd physical movements in public appearances, but most people chalked that up to his general idiosyncracies. It was only a few people who noticed, at first, how he tended to keep his hands stilled on desks and tables, how when he didn't, they sometimes trembled and made odd circular motions with the fingers and thumbs. It wasn't common, after all. Just something he did a few times on the campaign trail, and a bit more in the presidency.
His family and closest colleagues urged him to go to the Physician to the President about it, but there was always so much to do. Too many bills that needed to be passed, too many fires that needed to be put out. In retrospect, Gardner said in interviews, this was denial, trying to avoid the problem. What we do know is that he was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome sometime in early 1995.
He did consider resigning, even drawing up the paperwork for it, but he came to decide that he could stick it out for a bit longer. Executive dysfunction was a common symptom, but not one he had experienced, on or off medication, and the physical symptoms he could deal with - had been dealing with, without even knowing it, for years. Besides, there was too much to do - the Arctic Trade Zone Agreement, ending the Cold War, all the domestic policy reforms there were. It wouldn't be fair to put that on Kerrey, and he suspected that, perhaps, the more hawkish Kerrey would be received worse than he was.
Only a few people knew for sure. Kerrey, his family, the Vice President and a few key members of the Cabinet and Congress, some top White House staff. And then there were the conspiracy theorists - some people who saw in Gardner the same symptoms they had seen in their own relatives, others conservatives looking for something, anything, that would end the Gardner experiment. This got all the way to the ears of the press, who asked a few pointed questions of the White House, but they managed to be just non-committal enough to stay within the bounds of truth, if not honesty.
But on the campaign trail it was getting too much to bear. As Gardner shuffled to the lectern in Georgetown, as he slurred in interviews with his face like a mask, as his hands shook and he occasionally stopped, feet rooted to the ground, frozen like a deer in headlights, he came to the conclusion that he simply couldn't go on.
He did not give a televised resignation address, suspecting that were he to do so the emotion of the moment would get to him. In his written address, he spoke of having Parkinson's, of wanting to spend the remaining years of his life with his family. Of having let down the American people by waiting so long to get checked out and to resign. But also of his hope that the new President Kerrey would work to build peace and prosperity abroad and at home.
[9] Bob Kerrey was a lame duck virtually on the day of his inauguration, and probably would have been even if he had run for a second term. A two-term former governor of Nebraska, he had been a dark-horse choice for the Vice Presidency, and with a young and apparently healthy President it seemed unlikely that he would rise any farther than that. And then the President turned out to have MS.
His Presidency did not become much more auspicious after its beginning. At least Kerrey was spared being questioned by Congress for his role in the "cover-up" - Speaker Lawrence Hogan Jr., son of the Larry Hogan who had helped undermine the Agnew presidency in the '70s, stonewalled such attempts by the more cussed members of his caucus. But he couldn't keep the dream of Gardner's New World Order alive.
The first sign of trouble was in Vietnam. Postwar reunification had been, in the terse words of President Rumsfeld, "a bitch", with tensions between the North and South still remaining a major factor in Vietnamese politics. President Gardner had attempted to reach out to Vietnam - crucially, not only to the then-ruling Nationalist Democratic Party (in Vietnamese, Quốc Dân Chủ Đảng) of the South, but also to the Socialist Party of the North. The elevation of Kerrey to the Presidency upset those delicate efforts due to the simple fact of Kerrey being who he was, a Vietnam War veteran hailed as a hero in the United States and considered a war criminal by the North. Even many members of the QDCĐ opposed him, and when Lê Đức Anh, the hardline Communist Shadow Minister of Defense, was elected Prime Minister, it was with the support of schismatic QDCĐ members.
On the other end of the post-Communist world, Yugoslavia was in crisis. Tito had died ten years previously, and his successors Džemal Bijedić, Branko Horvat, and Janez Drnovšek had proven much less able to hold the nation together. Before his resignation, Gardner had worked to put together roundtable talks to avoid war, but those talks broke down, despite holdover Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke's better efforts. Holbrooke's resignation in protest over Kerrey's "apparent disinterest" in continuing the Gardner doctrine severely weakened Kerrey's position.
At home, things were not much better. The economy, which had boomed under Iacocca and Gardner, was beginning to plateau - partly due to the chaotic and unexpected end of the Gardner presidency undermining investor confidence, and partly due to a sort of "death by a thousand cuts" in the words of Paul Krugman, as disparate industries such as air travel, energy, and finance came to their own crises. While the economy had not quite reached a recession, and indeed, according to many economists, was merely growing at its long-term average rate after a period of unusual expansion, the "Kerrey Shock" was an unwelcome development for many Americans, including the President.
The dramatic proving-right of conspiracy theorists also its own effects - anti-establishment figures like Jack Gargan and Larry McDonald, who had promoted conspiracy theories in the past, gained a public following and more power in the House. Perhaps more troublingly, other, more radical, conspiracy theories arose, propagated on the growing Hypernet. A supporter of The Great Awakening, a far-right conspiracy accusing the Kennedy family (including former Governor of Maryland and newly-appointed Vice President Kathleen Kennedy Townsend) of running world politics behind the scenes to maintain their international sex-slave-trafficking ring, assassinated John F. Kennedy Jr. in Manhattan, while supporters of another theory attempted to storm the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, succeeding in firebombing the parking garage.
Perhaps the greatest anti-establishment figure in the United States was Ross Perot. By now a three-term independent Senator from Texas, he had planned to retire back when it looked like Gardner would serve two terms as President, leaving his seat open in 1996. But the ignominious end of the Gardner presidency and the shambolic nature of the Kerrey era changed his mind somewhat. He elected to run for President - both as an independent effort and by running in the 1996 Republican primaries.
Somewhat surprisingly, it worked. Perot swept the first tranche of primaries, helped by his better-organized outside effort and oodles of Silicon Plains cash. By the time the Convention came around, Perot was able to dictate terms to the Republican Party, helped by a convention walkout over proposed pro-tariff planks and some of Perot's supporters' ties to conspiritarians and militia groups. Christie Whitman's new Republican Moderate ticket arose out of that walkout, but the end result led to the Republican Party backing Perot to the hilt, with a few fig-leaves such as the nomination of Michigan Governor Bill Schuette as Perot's running mate.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the chosen successor of still-respected former President Gardner in the absence of Kerrey's run, was the first woman to win the nomination of a major political party, and shared the honor of being the first woman to win a state with Whitman (who won in Alaska and Delaware). But she did not become the first female President, despite a number of polls early in the election suggesting she might be able to pull it off, despite the first results on Election Night suggesting a close race, as northeastern states turned out for Townsend in full force. But the Midwest was good for Perot, and the South very good for him. It was clear well before midnight that Perot would be the next President of the United States.
On January 6, 1997, a mere two weeks before the inauguration, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly a quarter of its value. A few hours later, the panic spread to markets in Australia and East Asia, and from there west with the sunrise. The "Perot Panic" had begun.