• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Stupid deaths that never happened

Hillary Clinton nearly being taken out by a stagelight just before the 1992 New Hampshire Primary is the first one which comes to mind.

Another is Gorbachev's house arrest during the '91 coup, all it would take is the man being a bit irate and one of the armed guards being a bit more jittery and trigger-happy, and then in the midst of this crisis of legitimacy the only internationally-recognised leader of the collapsing USSR has been fucking murdered.
 
On the night of Kennedy's assassination the Secret Service was understandably jumpy and I recall the memoirs of one agent who raised his Thompson submachine gun on a figure in the dark hallway. Turns out it was LBJ. Imagine if he was riddled with bullets by his own bodyguards only a few hours into his presidency.
 
Jean Chrétien was almost assassinated by a deranged separatist a few nights after the 1995 Quebec independence referendum. What truly pushes it into stupid territory is the fact that security around 24 Sussex Drive was so lax that the would-be killer spent 20 minutes throwing stones and waving a pocket knife at security cameras, spent another 30 minutes wandering the grounds and building, and only once he moved up towards the bedroom did he run into Chrétien's wife. Even though she retreated inside, locked the door, and called the Mounties, it still took seven minutes to apprehend the intruder, in part because the first officer to respond forgot his keys. And in that seven minutes, rather than attempting to break down the door, the assassin spent the whole time right by the door twiddling his thumbs before being apprehended.
 
Thande said:
I've mentioned this before, but Dale Cozort took an interesting approach to this - in all his WW2 timelines, no matter the POD, Hitler usually gets assassinated within a couple of months of it, because he argued that OTL is the least probable case given the number of attempts.
Click to expand...

I thought this for a while, but have gradually soured on it - obviously from an AH perspective the discourse is "if Hitler had *just* not left fifteen minutes early the bomb installed in a cuckoo clock would have got him" but you don't even really have to read between the lines to see that Hitler was constantly deviating from his schedule to, er, avoid assasination attempts, and this was compounded by the fact that the only people with the means to take him out (i.e. the German military hierarchy) were not certain they could take over in the aftermath or frankly all that motivated, hence why they kept trying to rube goldberg machine him to death. Von Stauffenberg is really the one exception and I will agree that *that* attempt came close.

Ultimately, I honestly think Hitler had a lower life expectancy as A Prominent Politician In Weimar than as Chancellor.
 
zaffre said:
Von Stauffenberg is really the one exception and I will agree that *that* attempt came close.
Click to expand...

Actually getting a bomb right up next to Hitler was obviously an accomplishment, but if you were going to give me carte blanche to pick one of the attempts to write into a timeline, I would go with the one in November 1943. An Army major named Axel von dem Bussche was going to suicide bomb Hitler with a landmine under his clothes when Hitler came to view a display of a new type of military winter uniform, but the night before the display was to take place, an Allied air raid destroyed the rail car they were being stored in.
 
After the 1907 Tiflis Bank Robbery Vladimir Lenin fled Finland (then part of the Russian Empire) to avoid arrest. To avoid detection he walked across a frozen lake in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly this plan nearly ended with Lenin falling through the ice and drowning. He later said that it would have been "a stupid way to die."
 
Venocara said:
Interestingly, Churchill was nearly killed in the trenches in 1916 and Mussolini could have killed both Hitler and himself in 1941 had he been allowed to fly a plane they were both on without a co-pilot.
Click to expand...

The number of times both Churchill & Hitler cheated death has been a boon to AH writers.

Churchill was determined to learn to fly and was in a plane crash in July 1919, which injured him and his instructor.
 
zaffre said:
I thought this for a while, but have gradually soured on it - obviously from an AH perspective the discourse is "if Hitler had *just* not left fifteen minutes early the bomb installed in a cuckoo clock would have got him" but you don't even really have to read between the lines to see that Hitler was constantly deviating from his schedule to, er, avoid assasination attempts, and this was compounded by the fact that the only people with the means to take him out (i.e. the German military hierarchy) were not certain they could take over in the aftermath or frankly all that motivated, hence why they kept trying to rube goldberg machine him to death. Von Stauffenberg is really the one exception and I will agree that *that* attempt came close.

Ultimately, I honestly think Hitler had a lower life expectancy as A Prominent Politician In Weimar than as Chancellor.
Click to expand...
Speaking of,I’m reminded that in 1929,one of Hitler’s SS bodyguards,disgruntled at him,planted a bomb under the platform where Hitler was scheduled to make a speech,but it needed to be manually detonated and he couldn’t do that,as he had to go to the toilet and locked himself in the bathroom by accident.
 
I remember reading an article where Brezhnev, after being gifted a Lincoln Continental by Nixon at Camp David, took the car on a joyride with Nixon in shotgun. However, Brezhnev wasn't used to the car's controls and had nearly crashed it, making for a very interesting scenario to say the least.
 
Kerguelen said:
I remember reading an article where Brezhnev, after being gifted a Lincoln Continental by Nixon at Camp David, took the car on a joyride with Nixon in shotgun. However, Brezhnev wasn't used to the car's controls and had nearly crashed it, making for a very interesting scenario to say the least.
Click to expand...

Wasn't there a TL based on this in the old country?
 
Bolt451 said:
"No Longer Jimmy"
Click to expand...
Carter unleashes the full might of the executive office in trying to sabotage Reagan's campaign with his Georgia Gang of tricksters while he shows that he's tough with airstrikes in Iran. Carter wins reelection but the scandals of his administration gets blown wide open, ultimately ending in the impeachment and removal of Jimmy Carter after the 1982 midterms lead to the rise of Speaker Michel. Poor President Mondale has to deal with the flames of the Iran War and insane oil prices as the Republican primaries looks like it will be a rematch between Governor Reagan and former President Ford. Meanwhile, there is talk that Jimmy Carter, mad as hell, will challenge Mondale for the presidency...




Okay I totally basically did a list like this except with Bill Clinton but these are always fun!
 
Brezhnev taking Nixon for a drive and their near-prang going horribly wrong and turning into a freak accident that kills them both. The leaders of the Free and Unfree worlds dying in the same car at the same time would be a heck of a moment in Detente.

Similarly, LBJ's amphibious car malfunctioning and killing him and whichever poor passenger he was pranking (Humphrey, for maximum impact, probably).

Mao swimming the Yangtze and - depending on what you believe - just getting cramp and drowning before anyone can help him, or his divers holding him up fuck up somehow and he drowns. Would probably be remembered as one of the all-time most hilariously ironic deaths, given his hatefulness as a figure and the fact it was literally meant to show how vibrant and alive he was.
 
Meadow said:
Mao swimming the Yangtze and - depending on what you believe - just getting cramp and drowning before anyone can help him, or his divers holding him up fuck up somehow and he drowns. Would probably be remembered as one of the all-time most hilariously ironic deaths, given his hatefulness as a figure and the fact it was literally meant to show how vibrant and alive he was.
Click to expand...

That reminds me about the swimming pool meeting Mao had with Khrushchev in 58 in which the latter had to be given water wings before entering the pool. Imagine if the Chinese skipped that and went "swim, bitch."
 
Last edited:
Meadow said:
Mao swimming the Yangtze and - depending on what you believe - just getting cramp and drowning before anyone can help him, or his divers holding him up fuck up somehow and he drowns. Would probably be remembered as one of the all-time most hilariously ironic deaths, given his hatefulness as a figure and the fact it was literally meant to show how vibrant and alive he was.
Click to expand...

Weirdest thing about Mao's swimming was that he was a self-taught swimmer, in the sense that he had literally just been experimenting when he was a kid with various things until he found something that kept his head above the water and allowed him to propel himself forward. When "swimming", he consequently more or less had his feet directly beneath his head. Of course, nobody dared to bring it to the Great Helmsman's attention once he became, well, the Great Helmsman. The official news release about his famous swim over the Yangtze in fact claimed that Mao had swam fifteen kilometres in one hour and five minutes, which if true would have placed him well, well, well above the athletic prowess of modern Olympic swimmers swimming comparative lengths.
 
Makemakean said:
Weirdest thing about Mao's swimming was that he was a self-taught swimmer, in the sense that he had literally just been experimenting when he was a kid with various things until he found something that kept his head above the water and allowed him to propel himself forward. When "swimming", he consequently more or less had his feet directly beneath his head. Of course, nobody dared to bring it to the Great Helmsman's attention once he became, well, the Great Helmsman. The official news release about his famous swim over the Yangtze in fact claimed that Mao had swam fifteen kilometres in one hour and five minutes, which if true would have placed him well, well, well above the athletic prowess of modern Olympic swimmers swimming comparative lengths.
Click to expand...

I'm sure it's as believable as when Kim Jong-il scored 38-under par and five holes-in-one on his first ever round of golf, or bowled a perfect 300 at his first ever try at bowling.
 
Bonniecanuck said:
I'm sure it's as believable as when Kim Jong-il scored 38-under par and five holes-in-one on his first ever round of golf, or bowled a perfect 300 at his first ever try at bowling.
Click to expand...

Part of me wants to believe that one of them is a lie and the other actually happened, and Kim Jong-il was actually very bitter and saddened that nobody, not even his most loyal henchmen, actually truly believed that it happened.

"So, I actually scored a perfect 300 first time I tried bowling! It was amazing! I remember standing there, it was the final roll, I knew that if I got the pins down, I would get the perfect game! So, I stand there, and-..."

"Yes, Comrade General-Secretary! Very amazing! Like that time you scored 38-under par and five holes-in-one first time you tried golf!"

"Err-... Yeah, but, this really happened... Anyway, so I'm standing there-..."

"Of course it really happened, Comrade General-Secretary! Just like how when you were born on Mount Paektu, double rainbows and a new star appeared in the sky to signify the birth of a great leader who would defend our fatherland from the capitalists and imperialists!"

"Well, I mean-... Sure, but, back to the story-... So, I'm standing there, and-..."

"Or how you wrote six full operas alone, and are an internationally recognized and lauded film theorist!"

"Look, if you could just-..."

"Or how you're an international fashion icon, or how-..."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top