42. Maynard Jackson (D-GA)
42. Maynard Jackson (Democratic-GA)
January 20, 2001 - October 15, 2003
“Politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live.”
January 20, 2001 - October 15, 2003
“Politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live.”
When Dick Cheney announced his withdrawal from re-election, it was purportedly due to health reasons - a heart attack he had suffered earlier that week, as medical records and a visit to Walter Reed showed. Very little of the public bought it as the sole reason, though. His approval rating at that moment - after his near-miss acquittal by the Senate - sat at just 13%, according to Gallup. A fairly commonly early piece of Usenet political satire showed Cheney edited in place of Al Capone, giving his trademark grimace as he held a “Cheney/Bush For Cellmates 2000” sign.
And what of the Vice President? It was true that Cheney had clearly passed the baton to the young Jeb Bush, the ambassador whose work in the Levantine Wars had earned him accolades at home and a spot on the ticket, but to many it looked like just more of the same. The core question that dogged his new campaign seemed simple - what did Bush know, and when? That was why, when given the opportunity, not one but three candidates leapt into action. There was Joe Biden, the 1984 nominee, Delawarean Senator, and self-appointed leader of the Progressive tradition in Republican political circles. There was Dick Armey, the Texan darling of right-wing academic circles like the Mises Foundation, emphasizing the way that Greenspanomic policies responsible for the great boom of the 1990s had fallen by the wayside as Cheney mired himself in scandal. There was even Evan Mecham, the Arizonan demagogue whose fiery attitude towards cultural issues saw his detractors labeled him outright reactionary. All three of them hopped into the primaries quickly, determined to save the natural party of government from itself.
All three of them, as a consequence, took what was a unified bloc of anti-Cheney voters and scattered it to the winds. Though the Republican primaries were little more than window dressing compared to the Democratic “Primary Day,” they showed the nature of the chaos. Bush carried New Hampshire by the skin of his teeth, then Wisconsin went for Mecham, then Pennsylvania for Biden, then Massachusetts for Bush, then Nebraska for Armey, and on and on it went. By the convention, Bush was in the lead, but only with a plurality. The delegates, for their part, could tell the party was doomed to a loss, and honestly they couldn’t be bothered to have strong feelings about any of the candidates. What did it matter when all four of them were polling at a double-digit deficit with the Democrats anyways? Once Bush came out announcing an agreement with Armey and Biden, it was all over but the shouting.
But the shouting didn’t seem to want to stop. Some of the Mecham delegates, hurt by their being “blacked out,” wanted to flex their muscles with the electorate. Their newfound organization, the Heritage Party, had been slapped together by James Dobson and Howard Phillips back in 1999 as a means of electoral pressure following Cheney’s repeal of PAVA. It hadn’t been projected to have much of an influence, but retired three-term Representative Larry Pratt of Virginia made clear his intention to stand for the party’s first presidential nomination following the debacle at the RNC. Pratt’s campaign, though gaining some traction in right-wing circles - and some controversy for its meetings with hardline anti-immigration groups, the controversial right-wing radio host Pat Buchanan, and Christian Identity churches - was routinely strapped for cash and shut out of the main race, with the major parties ignoring him as little more than a gadfly. No matter how much or how eloquently he complained or tried to draw controversy, not much changed. Everyone knew he wasn’t going to be the next president, and for that matter neither was Jeb Bush.
*****
Before, this room in Atlanta might have been smoke-filled. But cigars were going out of fashion - some studies, it seemed, talking about the harms of smoking and finally bringing Big Tobacco to heel. So instead, the room was just another meeting room, and the party bosses talked over Ethiopian takeout - the situation over there in the eighties and nineties was tragic, but at least the refugee communities made brilliant food. The topic was simple: times were changing, and the party seemed to need to change too.
Al From spoke up first. “I’ve been saying it since Fritz crashed and burned. Times are changing. The workingmans’ party doesn’t get a majority anymore. But another party does - the one that our good friend here in Atlanta, Governor Jackson’s, been talking about. A handful of others too - Tony Earl, John Kitzhaber, Ed Markey, Lu Hardin. Folks like that poll a hell of a lot better.”
Bob Shrum chuckled. “If Pat was here” - referring to the populistic pollster and strategist - “he’d be throttling you for suggesting that. He hates that kind of politics.”
“Pat’s not here, though, and frankly fuck ‘im. Smug sonuvabitch can rot for all I care. He got lucky twenty years ago and still thinks he can milk it like he’s some kinda prophet.” This one came from James Carville, the doomed leader of the Miller campaign.
“Oh, don’t pretend you’re above it Jim. Not like you did much better last year.” Dick Morris couldn’t help himself, even though he really should have.
“We did our jobs! That little shit Rove they’ve got workin’ comms for the White House could turn the Little Sisters of the Poor into a demon if he wanted! I told ‘em to hammer jobs, jobs, jobs, it was the number one issue for people, especially against such an insider ticket. We knew it’d work.” That last statement from Carville seemed more like personal denial than a rebuttal.
The room was silent for a minute. The folks talking about reforming the party towards the center, towards the professional classes and even some suburbanites swayed by Cohn and Cheney, they didn’t expect to get this bogged down. They were all here for that idea of reforming the party they loved - New Democracy, for the party that had once been called The Democracy - but when even the strategists and bosses had to fight like cats, what did it say about them?
“Enough of that crap, Jim, Dick, really. Doesn’t matter why your guys lost unless you can tell us how to fix it. Onto business.” This came from the House Minority Leader Gary Hart - he was poised to take the gavel at last in 1998. He had ideas, after all, for what New Democracy could genuinely look like.
*****
Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. was seen as a rising prospect for the party, and had been since his governorship began. But then again, he had always seemed destined for public service. His father Maynard Sr. had been a Baptist minister and civil rights activist in Dallas, leaving a lasting impression on his son. When Jackson was fifteen, his father died, and from that point his grandfather John Wesley Dobbs, an early civil rights leader in Georgia responsible for the end of the “white primary” in the state, became a primary influence on his grandson. A prodigious student, Jackson graduated from Morehouse College at the age of eighteen, then went on to graduate law school at Boston College in 1961, upon which he joined the National Labor Relations Board as a lawyer.
But Beltway life wasn’t for Jackson. He knew he was doing good work with the NLRB, but as civil rights increasingly dominated the national conversation, President Fulbright’s attempts at dodging and delaying only further weighed on his conscience. Furthermore, his native Georgia had descended into a sort of provincial authoritarianism under Jim Gray’s boot, what with MLK's continuing political imprisonment and repeated attempts at resisting any sort of federal or judicial influence over Georgian segregation. So Jackson returned home to fight the good fight on the local level. As fate would have it, Jackson the activist met a young state senator named James Earl Carter, altering the paths the two men would take. Jackson would prove an invaluable surrogate and advisor for Carter, and Carter would prove a powerful backer for the young lawyer hoping to break into politics in his own right.
The politics of civil rights in the 1970s made this difficult to say the least. As the main political processes yielded slow and often halfhearted progress (the 1969 Civil Rights Act being the best example of this, legally ending segregation even though litigation surrounding those refusing to comply continued throughout the 1970s), a significant number of civil rights organizations found other ways of applying pressure. The Black Panther Party won city council elections from Chicago to Los Angeles, even notably electing Bobby Seale as Mayor of Oakland until his removal and arrest on trumped-up terrorism charges. Civil rights marches throughout the country were commonplace, occasionally resulting in scuffles with police and counter-protesters. The NAACP’s litigation related to noncompliance with federal civil rights laws was as effective as it was reviled in those communities. Every bit of ground was hard-fought.
The final universal extension of the franchise to all Americans 18 and older in 1978 changed the calculus. Voting rights were accessible to Black southerners for the first time, and given that much of the radical segregationist energy had fallen to the wayside, replaced by slow-and-steady compromise with Washington and the glut of economic benefits, proposals for genuine obstruction of their access to the voting booths had largely been ignored or - in an extraordinary case by Mississippi’s Bill Waller - vetoed in their entirety. It seemed voting rights, at least practically, had been accepted by the populace.
This did not automatically mean large-scale minority participation in politics. In Waller’s case, his veto went a long way in reconciling the divide between the Loyalists and Regulars in the split Mississippi Democratic Party, but the party was still fundamentally dominated by the crop of white populist that had come up as the energy behind strident segregationist politics tired itself out. Critics, especially in Black activist and academic circles, were the first to note that the idea of the “raceless populist” that so many southern Democrats used almost exclusively campaigned to white voters, as if to convince them that civil rights passing wouldn’t lessen their favoritism. This is not to imply the situation was better outside of the post-segregation south. The momentum of Black radicalism throughout the 1970s had largely waned, but as municipal politics in highly nonwhite cities began to trend more towards electing leadership more reflective of its community, those leaders often faced significant hurdles. A conflict-riddled Philadelphia was dubbed "Beirut on the Delaware" in the 1980s as Mayor Lucien Blackwell was routinely stonewalled by white Democrats aligned with ex-mayor Frank Rizzo on the city council. Countless others, from New York’s Percy Sutton to Detroit’s Kenneth Cockrel, faced intimidation and outright violence over hot-button issues like busing and housing integration as they sought to lead the way.
All of this was ongoing as Maynard Jackson was simply a man of Jimmy Carter’s inner circle, now a State Representative from Atlanta. Jackson had made a name for himself within his community for strong local services, often overlooked by statewide press but well-regarded in Atlanta. To him, this local strength in the state’s largest city was the perfect launchpad for a run for the state governorship in 1978, after Carter made clear his intent to return home to Plains (even though he would return to serve as the inaugural Secretary of Energy in 1981). Though he ultimately lost to Carter’s chosen successor Bert Lance, he won the entirety of Atlanta in the primary, which was notable in its own right. Jackson’s profile from that run paved the way for his 1981 bid for Atlanta’s mayorship, having made significant inroads in his time out of office. His victory received attention from the national press, as it seemed too perfect - the 26th Amendment had passed months prior, and now here was the first Black mayor of a major southern city. It seemed a sign of true progress and healing.
Mayor Jackson was many things to many people. His agenda seemed to eschew the historic nature of his election, for better or worse. His marquee public works projects both related to transportation in the form of a major expansion of the MARTA rapid-transit rail system and the groundbreaking on the Atlanta International Airport (later dubbed Jackson-Carter), both of which helped to draw public investment to Atlanta. A model vision for equitable distribution of other infrastructure funds helped to keep thriving minority communities together instead of paved over by freeways. Heavy lobbying with President Collins even led to BMW granting its planned first assembly facility in the United States to Atlanta, a major accomplishment for both Collins and Jackson. Jackson’s hiring of the first Black police chief in 1983 drew some initial controversy from white Atlantans, exacerbated when his choice was revealed to have been complicit in a police exam cheating scandal. Some tend to view this - and his selection’s subsequent firing - as the start of Jackson’s “overcompensation” on crime, though the truth is always more complicated. By 1982, Atlanta had the highest murder rate of any city in America, and the clamor for a crackdown was simply unavoidable. Regardless, Jackson’s personal oversight of the Atlanta Child Murders cases helped to allay tensions and build his reputation as a tough-on-crime leader, even personally overseeing convicted suspect Wayne Williams’ execution. Come 1989, Jackson’s second term as mayor had come to a close. He had attained a relatively strong profile as the man who turned Atlanta, once seen as a hotbed of crime and racial resentment, into a city that lived up to its motto of “too busy to hate.”
Jackson, naturally, saw this as a launchpad, and in his last year in office made clear his intent to run for the governorship. To a number of those in Democratic circles in the state, this was met with incredulity. Jackson had been a swell mayor, there was no denying that, but the idea of a Black man as governor of the whole state? It seemed unthinkable. There were still Gray supporters in the state legislature, for chrissakes! The people just weren’t ready for that yet - hell, a decent chunk of the suburbs of his own city had voted for Cohn, and that trend didn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. But Jackson hardly cared. He knew that in Atlanta itself, it was a different story - he could win virtually any Democratic primary in the city. Furthermore, the bloc of enfranchised Black voters had hardly been seized upon in primary campaigns, and Jackson reasoned that high Black turnout plus a sizable minority of white Georgians would put him over the top. Former Governor Carter and former President Collins’ endorsements went a long way too, as Carter was perhaps the best-respected governor of Georgia in living memory and Collins no slouch in Democratic politics despite her failed impeachment. A slate of strong campaigns around how Jackson had made job growth go up and violent crime rates go down resonated deeply with a number of white liberals and populists. Despite a deeply split primary between Jackson, Governor Mike Bowers’ handpicked successor Ham Jordan, and flamboyant state Attorney General McCracken Poston, Jackson’s dominance in the state’s largest cities combined with a non-trivial performance in rural southern Georgia handed him the victory. Though his campaign against Representative Paul Coverdell in the general was the closest it had been statewide in Georgia in decades, the Democrats’ dominance combined with Roy Cohn’s brief unpopularity in the south lent Jackson an expected history-making victory.
Governor Jackson, now the subject of national attention as the first Black governor of a formerly segregated state (though New Jersey’s Ken Gibson was the first Black governor overall), sought to make good on his promises, reasoning that potential backlash could be mitigated the same way he had largely done so in Atlanta. True to form, proposals focused on public investment and new industries in Atlanta - hoping to create a localized version of the “Silicon Lakes,” as the tech hubs stretching from Minneapolis to Buffalo were dubbed - flew through the legislature and were earnestly touted by Jackson. A measured crackdown on crime - including a focus on harsh penalties for drug dealers and repeat offenses - had its expected supporters and detractors, but in the environment of the Cohn years it seemed a welcome alternative to the overarching view of Democrats as “weak on crime.”
But it wasn’t those issues that propelled his national star. It first came to note when Jackson offered his official apologies on behalf of the state of Georgia to Martin Luther King. The father of the civil rights movement would die of a heart attack in 1997, and as he lay in state in Georgia the national press took note of just how far the nation had come that a man once held as a political prisoner in a state could now lie in its capital. Jackson’s eulogy of the deceased icon as a time not just for reflection on a great man’s life but how the nation can honor his memory earned him high praise, and his steps in the immediate aftermath seemed like earnestly following through on this. His call for the redesign of the state’s 1956 flag - one of the Deep Southern flags to incorporate the Stars and Bars - led to a major picketing by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a serious controversy. Jackson’s talk of reconciliation, how the flag doesn’t represent all the people of Georgia and how it’s time for the state to move on to a brighter future, didn’t necessarily quell the firestorm but certainly showed him as a calm and thoughtful leader through it all. An odd alliance of urban Democrats and moderate Republicans against suburban Republicans and rural Democrats ultimately narrowly passed the change, reverting the state flag to the pre-1956 one and cementing the idea of Atlanta as the capital of progress in the South. As Jackson also became the first Georgia governor to run for a third term since Jim Gray’s ill-fated attempt, plenty worried about whether the cultural issues and true national profile afforded to Jackson would doom him, but these were ultimately unfounded, even as former Governor Mike Bowers attempted to launch an ill-fated primary off of supposed Democratic discontent (derailed by revelations of an extramarital affair he had been conducting). It seemed the Jackson treatment had been vindicated by the people after all.
Now with the national spotlight on him and an unpopular incumbent, Maynard Jackson was determined to keep the narrative. Privately, he hadn’t been so sure about the presidency, but the Cheney years and the resounding success of the multicultural coalition in breaking the Republican stranglehold on the west was proof enough to him. So, in 1999, Jackson announced his intent to contest the Democratic nomination. Paradoxically, while party insiders were antsy about the dynamics of nominating a Black candidate, the media couldn’t get enough of the idea of the “first serious Black candidate” - a phrase that surely made Adam Clayton Powell turn over in his grave. Jackson blitzed his way through the news shows and late-night talk shows, coolly explaining his pitch towards a focus on the domestic instead of causing far-off scandals. While he fielded some awkward questions, most infamously “do you think America is ready for a Black man as its president?” (to which he responded by saying “I think Americans care more about whether their president cares about them than whether they’re Black or white. They want a president who fights for good-paying jobs, safer streets, and better schools for their kids - which our current president has not”), overall Jackson’s empathetic pitch seemed to resonate with a public who knew Dick Cheney didn’t have an excess of empathy.
The factionalism in the Democratic Party was another story. Tom Hayden’s crushing loss had vindicated the idea of going rightwards to many - Alabama hadn’t voted Republican in eons, and yet it broke because of him! But even then, Zell Miller’s attempt at doubling down on the sort of workingmans’ populism that had crossed the Democratic South hadn’t done much good either. The party’s roots, both in radical reformism and appeals to the common man, hadn’t seemed to go much of anywhere in Roy Cohn’s America. A new sort, the “New Democracy” as it were since their formation in 1991, seemed to have a different view of where it needed to go. In their eyes, the view of the Democratic Party as one of bloated inefficient government and out-of-touch social politics was damaging the party. Jackson had affiliated himself with this strain, as had countless others vying for the nomination in 2000. Speaking directly to a conference for the New Democracy, Jackson laid bare his plans for “a party of the center-left” - one of reasonable reformism, efficiency, and largely accepting of certain Cohnite doctrines. After all, what had he done in Georgia if not followed their agenda? To the rest of the DNC leadership in attendance watching him speak, it was clear that Jackson was no radical, and they could rest easy.
All of this combined with an energetic campaign and his high profile led Jackson to a solid victory on Primary Day. He had always been the most high-profile candidate, but by no means was assured victory, and while securing just over 50% of the vote was strong, it still only meant about a quarter of the delegates were pledged. To this end, he pursued the second-place candidate - a similar New Democracy supporter, but one of a different persuasion and demeanor - and fashioned an agreement. Announcing his vice-presidential pick before the convention was relatively gutsy, but given his victory it helped to solidify the idea that Jackson was the frontrunner, nevermind securing the delegates of the runner-up - and the only person who seemed reasonably close to him as a challenger - behind him. The party also saw this as proof that he’d be ultimately reasonable, and as such effectively nominated him by acclamation.
Now in the general election, Jackson chose to ape Adlai Stevenson and go abroad soon. Positive headlines of his meetings spanning multiple continents, whether it be with Argentine opposition politician and future president José Octavio Bordón, Italian President Walter Veltroni, Australian Prime Minister Geoff Gallop, Iranian President Muhammad Khatami, or in the most publicized instance, an extremely thoughtful discussion with Nelson Mandela. Mandela had come to be regarded as an icon of anti-apartheid while also being deeply critical of the SACP’s anti-democratic turn, so much so that his work as a continental figure for human rights seemed almost a form of unofficial exile. Jackson being seen with Mandela on clearly good terms seemed to only reinforce the idea that he was committed to the same sort of foreign policy of human rights, and he returned home with a boosted profile and his face on the front of newspapers from Brasilia to Bonn.
While the Bush campaign tried to keep up, presenting Jeb as a strong defender of American values, it simply couldn’t keep up. Jeb was an awkward campaigner, prone to tripping over his sentences when he got fired up. While he hadn’t been implicated in the MILF Scandal, enough voters were upset about it to bring Republican enthusiasm dangerously low compared to the high marks on integrity that Jackson got. Matters were made worse when Hurricane Gregory made landfall in Florida and southern Georgia, flooding the region and causing significant damage. At first, as Jeb Bush met with Governor Tom Feeney to deal with the flooding in Tallahassee, it seemed a moment of genuine compassion and active leadership from the Vice President. Unfortunately, Bush was photographed laughing boyishly at a joke cracked by one of the other state government leaders, and the picture’s circulation only seemed further proof that Bush didn’t care much about Americans at home. Jackson largely declined to comment, knowing the damage was done for Bush and withdrawal from campaigning to focus on the damages in Georgia was getting him enough good comparisons in the press anyways. Debates came and went, with Jackson seeming like an eminently reasonable and compassionate leader next to, as Jeb was unfairly branded by left-leaning pundits, a stuttering dork. An infamous moment in the vice-presidential debate where John Andrews, Colorado Senator and Bush’s running mate, branded allowing women and GSM people to serve in the military as “fundamentally at odds with American values” earned immense controversy in its own right, even if it had the side effect of cutting Heritage’s momentum and denying them the 5% needed for federal funds. Even with all of this, plenty were still surprised at the scale of Jackson’s victory.
*****
I, Maynard Holbrook Jackson, do solemnly swear…
…that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States…
He had been invested early on in the campaign. Though he was just a professor at the University of Chicago, he had still donated, gotten involved in the local chapters of Jackson for President. The idea of bringing all the people out of the shadows, showing America as the tapestry of people of all colors and creeds that it was, the idea was alluring to him. It had been to countless others, too - not many primary campaigns have little room for a connected professor, but the Jackson campaign was stuffed to the gills.
…and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…
Some said it was because they were friendlier with big money than the Democrats of yore. It might be true, even. But even then, the focus on young professionals - like that professor - was one that bore fruit, and it was something he deeply appreciated. After all, plenty of people had come from little like him and come out in a solid spot, yet still felt second-class in the America of old. Maynard Jackson had seemed the first politician to truly speak to it, to speak to skinny kids with funny names like the professor in God knows how long.
…so help you God?
Even that wasn’t really why he was there, though. Nobody liked thinking of their identity as an obligation, but if he was being honest, Barack Obama just knew he was supposed to be at this kind of historic inauguration.
So help me God.
*****
*****
Now firmly in office and with sizable - though unfortunately smaller than expected - majorities behind him in Congress, President Jackson could set to work in earnest. While some commentators gripe about the missed opportunity for sweeping change, often-moderate congressional leadership embodied by Speaker Gary Hart and Senate Majority Leader Cliff Finch knew their caucus simply wouldn’t support such proposals. Jackson himself was inclined to agree - he and his running mate had been elected as staunch New Democracy believers, and that’s exactly what they were. They had explicitly rejected sweeping state controls in favor of a more regulatory approach, one with government as guidance. So, while proposals to re-nationalize the TVA and universalize free higher education were little more than fodder for left-wingers’ meetings, the administration pursued other means. GSM activists cheered when the ban on homosexuality in the military was lifted by the Milk-Biden Act, passing with a respectable amount of bipartisan support. Education funds were significantly increased to focus on “low-access communities,” ranging from the Rio Grande Valley to working-class towns in the Steel Belt to poor inner city neighborhoods and helping to send a new generation of kids to college. Similar small mercies in the grand scheme of things came through in that mythic first Hundred Days.
The big proposal was a natural focus - immigration. It was, after all, the multicultural coalition that won 1998 and 2000 for the Democrats, and it was Chicano activists who the party had to thank for its breakthrough in the west. Plus, immigration reforms had been a mainstay of left-wing circles ever since the glaring inequities of the farm-work system had become clear. Now seemed as good a time as any to finally help to lay the issue to rest. After weeks of deliberation, the end proposal - the Immigration Reform Act, or Anaya Bill for the New Mexican Senator behind it - would be a genuine revolution. Those admitted for short-term work visas would have a path to citizenship, with the option to bring immediate family with them if they so wished. Labor and minimum wage laws would also be extended to cover short-term contract workers in their entirety with actual teeth, helping to prevent the cycle of abusive working situations for meager pay that was seemingly inherent to the Bracero Program. Furthermore, in a direct sop to the Sanctuary Movement, points of high entry would enter into a sanctuary program as places of first resettlement and processing for refugees, with willing support from previous sanctuary institutions. It was the type of bill President Jackson took to the Rose Garden to announce, something that’d “let all colors shine brightly in our great American rainbow.”
The IRA’s resistance was extremely stiff, unexpectedly so. Big agribusinesses out west did not take kindly to the massive costs and ran an ad campaign focused on exaggerations of ways the IRA would pass costs onto the consumer, with one notable ad showing a couple despairing as they read off their receipt for a meager amount of food. Furthermore, anti-refugee pressure groups like American Citizens for Legal Entry sprouted up with huge funding, platformed by STN - now the SKY Network - and the rest of the Murdoch empire. Bombastic right-wing performers grew in the public consciousness as the IRA seemed a perfect proposal to channel latent anxieties surrounding not just the race of the president but further access for non-white people to American society as equals. The White House panicked when a special Senate election in bright-yellow West Virginia yielded a narrow victory for Republican businessman John Raese off the backs of white anxiety. Even stripping the Sanctuary proposals, in no small part due to the intransigence of populist southern Democrats demoralized by the West Virginia results, couldn’t save the IRA as it was reluctantly scrapped following its failure in the Senate in late 2001.
Even though the immigration debacle had blown up in Jackson’s face, there was far too much to consider on the global scale. The Asian Spring, as it was broadly dubbed, was a collection of floating issues from Taipei to Bangkok. In short, a number of authoritarian governments had simply run out of time, and combined with a regional economic slump, their transition to the new millennium was far rockier. This naturally led to a new wave of refugees reaching the shores of everywhere from Australia to India to even the United States and significant headaches for the authoritarians’ patrons in Washington.
In South Vietnam, though mass protest could not force Nguyễn Cao Kỳ from office, a palace assassination certainly did so, destabilizing the country significantly as the knife-fighting between lower-level cronies turned into a distinct lack of succession. The stickier issue came when the new ramshackle civilian government seemed set to elect the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the left-wing nationalist association of former Viet Cong fighters, as the new government. The tense standoff between Ky-supporting military elements and President-Elect Trương Như Tảng ended in a forty-four hour military government followed by a daring Viet Cong rescue of Tảng from the Saigon prison he had been taken to, allowing him to take power in earnest. Privately, an order to stand down from Langley helped significantly in ensuring a peaceful transfer, though a North highly comfortable in the status quo didn’t quite know what to make of it.
Taiwan was a similar story, as the “Green Revolution” coursed through the streets and brought the KMT down at long last. Though Chiang Wei-kuo would flee the country before facing justice, his compatriots were largely able to stand trial for their actions as the new longtime-opposition DPP government of Hsu Hsin-liang focused on reconciliation and peace for the fraught people of Taiwan. Talk of gradual denuclearization was welcome, but also deeply contentious within the Taiwanese public - especially with conservatives who still backed the KMT and those who felt reconciliation across the straits was an unworthy goal with the current Mao Yuanxin regime’s sheer revolutionary fervor.
In Indonesia, one of the largest countries on earth, the addled and aging General Nasution had finally passed away in his sleep, leaving the nation at a crossroads for the first time in decades. All sects of the populace seemed to have a vendetta, whether it be the peasant militias who had suffered the general’s “Shock Therapy,” Islamists who saw the pro-western leanings of the general’s Indonesia as a betrayal, regionalists who had felt the neglect all too keenly, or even nationalists who had tired of his facade of a true Indonesian patriot. As one, the people of Indonesia rose in their demand for change, and even through the anti-dictatorship movement’s deep divides they found one woman to agree upon: Megawati Sukarnoputri, a sanctioned opposition figure due to her notoriety as the daughter of the beloved Sukarno, whom Nasution had overthrown with US support all those years ago. Though Indonesia would descend into chaos in a matter of years during its transition for all of the exacerbated divides in its society, as the rats fled the sinking ship Sukarnoputri’s indirect election to the presidency seemed the start of a new era.
And of course, there was Cheney’s folly in the Philippines. The collapse of the Singson government had, at first, seemed cause for relief, but as the ensuing government seemed woefully unequipped to deal with the rising tensions in Mindanao. Come the next election in 2002, the election of Raul Roco to the presidency terrified hardliners in the military, who saw Roco as a reformist who’d give it all away to MILF. Quickly, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces engineered a pre-emptive coup against President-Elect Roco. As Roco fled to Cambodia, newly sworn in military President Angelo Reyes declared “a total war on MILF” in his first address. It seemed that, as Cheney sowed the wind, the people of the Philippines were the ones who would reap the whirlwind.
For the United States, this posed a much larger problem. A new wave of Asian refugees, especially from the Philippines and Thailand, quickly became a tough political football. Many long nights in Washington were spent agonizing how best to handle the situation given the political circumstances post-IRA. Eventually, though, the decision was simple: it was a moral imperative to help. Jackson made clear in a primetime address that the United States was committed to building a framework with local nations to take in the refugees, as well as taking a number into the United States. If the IRA had infuriated many, then the United States aiding a wave of refugees practically revived Yellow Peril rhetoric. Right-wing fury turned towards strain on our welfare systems, housing capabilities, and virtually every social service they could use as a cudgel. Canada’s Prime Minister Stockwell Day became a darling of American conservatives for his tough negotiation to reduce his nation’s commitments, though it did little to improve Day’s standing at home. Republican candidates for the midterms added the new refugee wave to the list of Jackson’s sins, alongside high taxes and the disastrous rollout of the IRA.
In the end, those Republican candidates came out ahead. Robert S. Walker’s “Radicals,” new to House leadership given the Pennsylvanian’s acerbic style, emerged from that November with a number of high-profile Democratic scalps, reversing in an instant many Democratic gains in the west and cutting into the southern suburbs to a level not seen since Roy Cohn’s peak. Now-Speaker Walker - with Gary Hart’s caucus firmly pushed to the minority after a staggering fifty-eight seat loss - could run the House as he saw fit. Though the Senate narrowly stayed in Democratic hands, to many the House results alone seemed a stinging rebuke for the White House.
Even with the domestic agenda mostly halted, the Jackson administration’s real prize had finally come in 2003. It was to be a historic moment, the type of thing that presidents salivate over as a chance to carve their legacy in stone. Back in 2000, Valentina Tereshkova - the Iron Lady herself - had announced her intent to retire from the leadership of the Soviet Union. Though many of the old men of her decade and a half of power vied for the top role, she made clear that her successor was to be a similarly radical departure - Grigory Yavlinsky. The young Ukrainian Finance Minister was perhaps the most radical reformist in Moscow, a rare case of a Soviet official challenging bureaucratic inefficiencies and winning. His reforms had been instrumental in the USSR’s transition towards what proponents called “market socialism” and more orthodox communists sneered at as “state capitalism,” but relative economic prosperity had certainly helped to smooth over many of the tensions and contradictions of the Union. Yavlinsky had his eye on more, though. He wanted the Soviet Union as a genuine player in the global economic system.
The Cheney administration, at its tail end and hampered by the MILF Scandal, largely ignored these overtures. Jackson and his team - especially Secretary of State Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of the Treasury Bradford DeLong - saw the idea, and thought it was good. Damn good, even. Opening trade with the Eastern Bloc had long been a point of anti-communist rhetoric, and trade with the Soviets was seen as beneficial to all sides in the free-market mentality of many of the economic minds of the center-left. So they moved cautiously at first - an aside here, an unofficial ambassador sent to the other nation there - but once it was abundantly clear that both sides were damned serious, the plans for something greater began. A summit aimed at finally winning the peace.
Plenty of moments have been pointed to as turning points away from a bipolar Cold War. The UNPROFOR situation in the Levantine Wars was certainly an unprecedented kind of cooperation between Washington and Moscow. The rise of the Usenet had similarly helped to connect people across the globe, making it easier to see the opposing side as people and not a ravenous enemy. There were other moments, too - India’s intervention in Burma during Saw Maung’s attempted crackdown on mass demonstrators against his repression, including a battleship at the mouth of the Yangon River, seemed like the type of power exertion that only one of the two global superpowers could carry out. Ghanaian President Kofi Annan famously proclaimed the 21st century “the African New Millennium” in a speech to the United Nations, and as the leader of one of the “Lion Economies” of Africa he certainly seemed to have weight to throw around behind that. Times certainly seemed to be changing. There was no denying, though, that the Cold War definitively ended in Stockholm in 2003.
Stockholm was only the natural choice, after all. Ion Iliescu over in Romania called his reformist independent line “the Sweden Model,” and meeting as the aggressively democratic-socialist Prime Minister Bosse Ringholm’s guests seemed symbolic of that sort of future of genuine reform. The first round of talks, just between Jackson and Yavlinsky, seemed the type of moment pop historians were waiting for to declare the conflict between East and West dead and buried. On February 11th, 2003 - chosen specifically as the end of the Yalta Conference in 1945 - President Jackson and Premier Yavlinsky left Stockholm with an agreement allowing Warsaw Pact accession to the global economic order, a change that seemed all but certain in September with the first meetings announced for the negotiation of the “Arctic Nations Trade Agreement” between the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the Soviet Union.
Conservatives in both countries howled, naturally. The American right stoked anxieties about the trustworthiness of the Soviets as a negotiating partner, currency manipulation, and continuing imperial domination of Eastern Europe. Former New York Representative turned SKY host Gordon Liddy made headlines when he controversially outright accused President Jackson of being a KGB agent, seeming like a callback to the usual trope of calling civil rights movement leaders communist assets. The Soviet right, focusing similarly about bowing to the capitalist hegemony and tossing final revolutionary victory (with them at the helm, naturally) overboard, immediately began machinations to attempt to dislodge Yavlinsky at the time in 2005 when his term as Premier was to be renewed, as while his kulturny-laden approach to government was popular with urban professionals and younger people, plenty of ardent communists saw him as an outright traitor. One young deputy - Vladimir Zhirinovsky from the Kazakh SSR - went into an antisemitic rant about the Jewish Yavlinsky on the floor of the Supreme Soviet, leading to a highly coerced resignation from his post. “You’d think they want us to not acknowledge that the sky is blue if Moscow said so,” groused Treasury Secretary Brad DeLong in an interview about his role in the groundbreaking agreement.
The idea the Cold War was over did seem about as obvious as the color of the sky outside of the big two superpowers and their closest allies, though. Other blocs had been proliferating for some time. The second UAR seemed perhaps the most potent example of this as a direct integration of multiple aligned regionalists, especially when more pro-western governments in the region - Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, and a smattering of petromonarchies - formed their own strategic pact seemingly specifically in opposition to its growing influence. The EEC grappled with the accession of neutral nations like Austria and Sweden, as well as the idea of a hypothetical application by Warsaw Pact reformists and even Yugoslavia. The Indian-led South Asian Community had slowly begun to absorb democratizing states from New Delhi to Saigon, especially as the new democrats wished to reject the legacy of American-backed dictatorship. OAS summits grew in profile as whispers of Pan-American integration spread through the hemisphere, with the New Democracy and Cohnite Republicans dreaming of a bicontinental trade zone alike, with both left-populist and far-right opposition. Beijing had founded the “Fifth International” fully intending to thumb their nose at the Soviets for their increasing pragmatism, drawing in a motley crew of third worldists and bankrolling a number of revolutionaries in the Global South. Africa was not to be dominated again, though - ECOWAS stretching from Senegambia to Biafra and the DRC-driven African Development Union both sought to find a way to hang together instead of letting African nations hang separately. The world had already seemingly changed, blocs had fractured and become more complicated. International theorists spoke of multipolarization, of the end of the simple distinctions between Capitalist, Communist, and Other that had driven the field for so long.
What, then, would American foreign policy look like in a changed world? To the Jackson administration, that question was answered as Rwanda burned. The country’s simmering tensions had boiled over with the assassination of its president, and as the Hutu military government sought to exact its revenge in blood, the Jackson administration saw the situation as deeply untenable. So, in a well-remembered address to the United Nations, President Jackson laid out a new foreign policy doctrine. The rising standards professed by Adlai Stevenson returned in full force, with American guns behind them. Genocidaires - like those of Rwanda - would not be tolerated. The move was broadly popular within that broad center of American politics Jackson had kept to - signing onto a Republican banking deregulation proposal to avert government funding drying up - but for very different reasons. Regardless, on October 1st, 2003, President Jackson signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Rwanda, officially entering into a peacekeeping anti-genocide operation.
But Maynard Jackson would not be the one to deal with a changing world in a new millennium. Nor would he be the one to preside over the growing talks after South Korea’s President Choo Mi-ae traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Yon Hyong-muk, an unprecedented step on the Korean peninsula. Nor would he be there in Northern Ireland as Prime Minister Michael Howard sought to make good on the mandate his argument for greater security had given him over David Owen. He wouldn’t even be the one to touch on the rising issues of big technological firms, early science pointing to pollution as an existential crisis, and further social reform. Just two weeks after signing the AUMF, President Maynard Jackson suffered a near-fatal heart attack en route to meet with soldiers flying out to Rwanda. He was promptly rushed to Walter Reed, where expectations of a full recovery within a matter of days were dashed by a second heart attack, this one fatal.
Maynard Jackson, being so close to living memory, remains somewhat controversial. Proponents point to “victory” in the Cold War, while opponents ask what that victory cost. Plenty of mainline Democrats espouse his less class-oriented multicultural coalition as the path forward for the left-of-center in the United States, though leftist-minded figures and southern populists - whose discomfort is, oddly enough, never specified much - grouse about missed opportunities and the eschewing of the class politics that built the New Deal Consensus. Republicans see much more of what he did as the undermining of America’s position and the end result of the politics of human rights over realpolitik. Regardless of the brevity of his tenure, Jackson remains iconic in his own right. The idea of a Black President in America - once a curiosity for television, such as Avery Brooks’ portrayal of Benjamin Marshall on Aaron Sorkin’s The American President - now seemed like a sign of changing times, both in a more diverse nation and in a world whose orientation was increasingly shifting towards the Global South.
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