| January 22 |  |
Editor says, what if Lyndon Johnson had been discredited for his lack of overseas adventurism? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).
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In 1973, on this day at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, Secret Service agents found Lyndon Baines Johnson dead in his bed with a telephone in his hand. The thirty-fifth President of the United States had been trying to call for help after suffering a massive heart attack brought on by years of heavy smoking, poor diet, and extreme stress.
Disgraced President Johnson diesA Southern Democrat, he served as a United States Representative from Texas, from 1937-1949 and as United States Senator from 1949-1961, including six years as United States Senate Majority Leader, two as Senate Minority Leader and two as Senate Majority Whip. After campaigning unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 1960, Johnson was asked by John F. Kennedy to be his running mate for the 1960 presidential election.
But fate intervened and Johnson himself succeeded to the White House after the assassination of the President-elect on Palm Beach, Florida on December 11, 1960. Once in the Oval Office, he immediately cancelled a covert operation to attack Fidel Castro with a light force of Cuban Rebels. With hindsight he would come to bitterly regret this decision. Because within two years, he would be fighting impeachment charges when it was discovered that the USSR had used the strategic pause to introduce nuclear weapons onto the island.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Wikipedia Labels: Lyndon Baines Johnson, John F Kennedy, Assassination, Presidency, Premature Death. Editor says, in this article we repurpose content from Wikipedia and explore a POD also revisited by Chris Oakley in his A Shock to the System thread. Also we are grateful to Eric Oppen, Scott Palter and Stan Brin for their contributions towards the writing of this post.
~ I think it's highly improbable that an LBJ who was president in 1961 would have cancelled the Bay of Pigs operation. It's more likely that once the exiles had landed and, as in our timeline, the Cuban people had failed to rise up in support of them against Castro, he would have backed them up with a full-scale U.S. invasion, as in our history JFK refused to do.
That would have avoided the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but might have given LBJ a Caribbean quagmire of guerrilla warfare to go with the Southeast Asian one he almost certainly would have plunged into just as in our history. Debatable of course, in this article I took a bit of a tongue in cheek, ironic route to make the outcome slightly divergent, linking up the two Cuban crises, his earlier assumption of the Presidency.. contrast with the Vietnam Escalation in Tonkin etc all into one scenario.
~ Would be curious to see a TL where Containment wasn't a thing. Communism might over-extend itself, as was seen in Afghanistan, but only with under-the-table US aid.
~ LBJ was a fool and a crook, but I think he'd have gone ahead with the Bay of Pigs, and sent air support. But if he were impeached, a whole bunch of skeletons would come out of the closet---his old nickname in Congress was "Landslide Lyndon," after his first election was cinched with a bunch of stolen votes from Duval County, TX.
~ So the US in 1961 would do Budapest 1956 in reverse, do their own version of Suez? The visual politics of such a fake invasion followed by sending the Marines wouldn't fly. The key is having the invasion come off faster before Fidel uses the threat of invasion to institute mass arrests. In turn that requires that Fidel had not totally penetrated the operation. In short the covert op was beyond our ability to pull off because CIA was living in a fantasy land on Fidel's domestic popularity. Even many Cubans who had issues with his regime would have defended Cuba against another Yankee invasion.
~ It could have worked and I think he'd have gone ahead with it.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
