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Editor says, what if Hubert Humphrey had won in 1968? muses Eric Lipps. Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).
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In 1969, aboard the recovery ship USS Hornet, U.S. President Hubert H. Humphrey welcomed home the triumphant crew of Apollo 11, the first men to land on the moon.
President Humphrey welcomes home Apollo 11It might easily have been someone else. The presidential election of 1968 had been a fractious affair, with riots disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the unsuccessful attempt on third-party candidate Gov. George Corley Wallace by escaped mental patient Arthur Bremer. The Alabaman survived the encounter with only minor injuries, instantly becoming a hero to many on the right despite having said that if the bitterly divisive Vietnam War then in progress could not be won within ninety days of his assuming office he would call for an immediate U.S. withdrawal. (Conservatives hearing those words interpreted them, as did many liberals, as a signal that a President Wallace would use nuclear weapons to force an end to the Southeast Asian conflict.) Wallace had hoped to win enough votes to force the election into the House of Representatives and then extract concessions on racial issues in exchange for throwing his support to either Humphrey or Nixon; instead, he managed to draw just enough votes from Republicans and conservative Democrats to make Humphrey the clear winner, though the Minnesotan fell just short of a popular-vote majority.
Humphrey's victory was arguably critical to the future of the space program. A strong supporter of Apollo, he would push back against efforts, including some by influential figures in his own party, including fellow North Star Stater Sen. Walter Mondale, to terminate the program and forget its ambitious follow-on initiatives in order to free up money for social programs. By contrast, Richard Nixon was known to regard the Apollo program as an extravagance which would have outlived its usefulness once the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the race to put a man on the moon. The fact that the lunar-landing project was so closely tied in the public mind to Nixon's personal nemesis John F. Kennedy would surely not have helped its prospects had the Californian been elected to the White House. As things were, the program continued as planned through Apollo XX, laying the groundwork for the establishment of Tranquillity Base in 1980.
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Eric Lipps
© Eric Lipps,2007-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: New York Times Labels: Hubert Humphrey, USS Hornet, Apollo 11, Moon, Tranquility.
~ "Apollo XX"? Does this mean NASA's being sponsored by Dos Equis now? :D
Comment from Jim Hadac on Facebook: I think HHH would have gotten out of Nam sooner. Would he have gone to China? Author says - Teddy wouldn't have been VP; unless disaster intervened, it would have beeen Ed Muskie.That's what I mean. It takes a Nixon to go to China. H would also be blamed for the fall of South Vietnam. If this happens by 72, there's a chance Reagan would run then and win. Interesting also, if Ted Kennedy is Vice-President...
~ Heh heh. My understanding is that Apollo was originally supposed to go all the way to a twentieth flight, but Nixon cut it short, supposedly to help balaance the budget.
My father was working for NASA at the time, as a physicist, and lost his job due to the cutback.
~ Humphrey would doubtless have tried to salvage the peace deal which had been in the works in '68 until people associated with the Nixon campaign, notably Claire Chennault, convinced the South Vietnamese delegation to reject it by promising them a better bargain if Nixon won. As for China, if Humphrey had gone, Nixon would surely have called him "soft on Communism."
~ Ah, if only. Well, it's nice to think it could have. Hey, does this get us "L-5 by '95?"
~ Ah, if only--but I've never been persuaded that an L-5 colony is relly practical. The only way I can see it happening is if someone diverted an asteroid into the proper orbit and then exploited its resources to build the colony--and that wouldn't happen by 1995 no matter who was ruinning the country short of ultra-advanced aliens. Building one with resources launched from Earth, or even the moon, doesn't seem likely to ever be practical. It took 20 years just to build the tin can we have in in orbit now.
~ Would Humphrey have been hated as bitterly as Nixon was?
~ There were so many surprises in the late '60s that even this would not have phased a lot of people.
~ I think building it from resources launched from the Moon would be practical, but only if we a) got launch costs down by a couple of orders of magnitude and b) kept up an Apollo-like level of effort and investment.
~ The trick is that we don't really have construction techniques suitable for working in space--even on the moon, let alone n zero gravity. Again, look how long it took to build the space station. And constrction workers would have to operate in a vacuum. I'm not saying it can't be done, but getting from raw resources, whether terestrial, lunar or asteroidal, to a finished L-5 colony will be a major technical challenge--and that assumes the political will can be found, which is another challenge.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
