Peter J. Orvetti is a political journalist living in Washington, D.C. He has been an Internet writer and editor since 1997, and has been published in many American newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Washington Times. His stories can be found at http://www.orvetti.com/alternate_history .

Frank Reynolds, ABC, March 30, 1981, 4:06 p.m.: "Sources at George Washington University Hospital now tell us the president seems to be in stable condition but likely to survive. Wait, wait. What's that? Let's get it nailed down! Somebody, let's find out! Let's get it straight so we can report this thing accurately! One minute he's fine, the next he's dead! Which is it?" Dan Rather, CBS, 4:08 p.m.: "From the hospital, news, apparently official. President Reagan died at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time, some 38 minutes ago. Vice President Bush is traveling in Texas where he was to address the state legislature. He is now en route back to Washington on Air Force Two."
As Rather spoke, Air Force Two became Air Force One, with George H.W. Bush sworn in as the 41st president somewhere in the air over the Lone Star State. Back at the White House, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, taking questions from the press, said, "Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state, in that order. As of now, I am in control here, and I am keeping in close touch with the new president until he is on the ground here in Washington." While Haig's choice of words would be questioned and criticized, he was generally praised for guiding a smooth transfer of power. Ronald Wilson Reagan died at age 70, on the 70th day of his presidency. It was the second-shortest in American history, outlasted even by that of another ultimately obscure assassinated president, James Garfield. Reagan's successor had crafted quite a resume over the course of his career, but had spent just four years in elected office as a two-term congressman a decade before. Bush had been Reagan's chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, and the two represented very different sectors of the party, with Bush the choice of the old moderate internationalist establishment, and Reagan the leader of the vibrant, committed New Right movement. Reagan had wanted ex-President Ford to be his running mate, but when negotiations collapsed, Reagan turned to the next available man at the last minute. For his part, Bush had said during the primary campaign that he would not want to run on a ticket with Reagan. But when the opportunity came for another notch on his resume, Bush renounced his pro-choice, pro-ERA views and embraced Reagan. Some of Reagan's advisers were troubled by the choice, given the presidential nominee's age. Though many expected Reagan to serve just one term, they feared death or incapacitation could put a moderate in the White House instead of one of their own. It came much sooner than they could have anticipated. Reagan had died in the operating room. Just before the ultimately futile surgery began, a nurse had asked him how he was feeling, leading to his last reported words: "All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."
During his press briefing, Haig had been asked if the assassination had been a conspiracy. He had answered, "We have no indication of anything like that now, and we are not going to say a word on that subject until the situation clarifies itself." But by the first full day of his presidency, Bush was on the defensive. Scott Hinckley, the brother of assassin John Hinckley, was reported to be an acquaintance of Bush's son Neil, and in fact the two had plans to dine together on the day Reagan was shot. Neil Bush told the Houston Post that he did not know if he had ever met John Hinckley. Neil's wife Sharon said, "I don't even know the brother. From what I know and I've heard, they are a very nice family and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign. I understand he was just the renegade brother in the family. They must feel awful." Far from experiencing a post-assassination honeymoon from the press and the public, the dark rumors of a Bush conspiracy to remove Reagan soured Bush's first weeks in office. While the ongoing investigation found the Bush-Hinckley connection to be nothing more than a sad coincidence, it dragged the new president down in the nation's estimation. Bush took over with the inflation rate at 10% and unemployment at 7.2%; and, following on years of war, assassinations, Watergate, and malaise, Reagan's death and the Hinckley story were just more blows to a badly wounded nation. The moderate Bush found himself beset on all sides. In February, Reagan had presented his Economic Tax Recovery Act, which included massive personal and corporate tax cuts and reductions in government spending. The program was rooted in the same supply-side theories Bush had called "voodoo economics" a year before during the primary campaign, and he now found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the plan. Moreover, Bush needed to select a vice president, a choice fraught with complications. Reagan's New Right acolytes were already buzzing about presenting a challenger to Bush in 1984, and Bush knew selecting a centrist would harden their resolve. But Bush also had to get a nominee through the Democratic Congress, which was in no mood to do the new president any favors. White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was appointed to the post by Reagan after running Bush's 1980 campaign, vetted the various candidates for Bush, ultimately suggesting New York congressman Jack Kemp, a Reaganite who was considered substantive enough, and amiable enough, to get through Congress. But Bush balked at the charismatic Kemp, fearing he would be overshadowed by him. Over Baker's objections, Bush instead selected right-winger Phil Crane, a five-term representative from Illinois who had been an also-ran in the 1980 primaries. The handsome Crane wanted to cut income taxes by a third, do away with several Cabinet agencies, and had little in common with Bush. While the pick thrilled the Right, it was widely considered a major blunder. House Democrats, led by Speaker Tip O'Neill, saw a chance to deliver a blow to the new president, and mobilized against the nomination. While House Republicans defended their colleague, the disappointed Kemp was reserved in his comments and seemed reluctant to step up for Crane. On June 3, 230 of the House's 242 Democrats voted against the Crane nomination. Despite the solid GOP vote, it was enough to defeat the nominee.
Grasping the opportunity to further humiliate Bush, O'Neill let it be known that he would have had no problems with Kemp. But when the White House reached out to the New York congressman following the Crane vote, Kemp demurred. His profile had increased markedly during the episode, and he did not want to be seen as the second choice. With the young Bush presidency already flailing, conservatives were talking up a Kemp presidential challenge in 1984. Trying a trick Reagan had failed, he felt out ex-President Gerald Ford about the vice presidency, but Ford, not surprisingly, again passed. Some of Bush's Texas friends suggested John Connally, but Bush was known to loathe the former governor and former Democrat. Another name floated was that of pharmaceutical company CEO Donald Rumsfeld, the former Defense Secretary and White House Chief of Staff who, like Bush, had been on Ford's short list when he was tasked with selecting a vice president in 1974. But as more Republicans offered more suggestions, the list got longer, not shorter. In addition to Kemp, several other candidates let it be known they did not want the nomination. As June dragged on, Bush began entertaining the idea of nominating a female candidate, but one who would be acceptable to the right. On the last day of the month, he announced the nomination of Marjorie Sewell Holt, a 60-year-old congresswoman from Maryland first elected in 1972 who had a solid conservative voting record. Holt, a close friend of Bush, was a firm advocate of a strong national defense, probably best known for her condemnation of the "new world order" in a 1975 debate over the establishment of international institutions. But she had the benefit of being popular with both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. This time, O'Neill did not intend to put up a fight. He privately called the move a "masterstroke" by Bush, who succeeded in impressing conservatives and women's rights advocates simultaneously. The poised, soft-spoken vice presidential nominee seemed to have the rare quality of being offensive to no one. She was easily confirmed by both chambers of Congress.
With the difficult nomination process behind him, Bush finally turned his focus toward setting his agenda. In the 1980 primaries, he had touted himself as "a president we won't have to train," and with the Crane mess now in the past, he was ready to prove it. Deciding to leave Reagan's budget package alone, he dispatched Vice President Holt to Capitol Hill as the Administration's semi-permanent liaison to the legislative branch. Following on Reagan's lead, he promoted a renewed military buildup, including development of the neutron bomb. While not calling for the abolition of the one-year-old Department of Education, he stressed that its focus should be in helping states and localities to develop their own education programs, not to impose federal rules. Similarly, he did not move to shut down the Department of Energy, created in 1977, but steered it toward the loosening of controls on fuel prices. As a former head of the CIA and ambassador, though, President Bush's real interest was in foreign policy. President Carter had all but shut down the CIA during his term, and Bush quickly began reinstating it as a central component. In September, in his first direct strike against a Reagan insider, Bush forced out CIA Director William Casey, replacing him with Vernon Walters, who had been Deputy Director during Bush's tenure. Bush's foreign policy mettle would soon be put to the test.
Stanislaw Kania, General Secretary of Poland's Communist Party, had had a difficult first year in power. Poland was in a state of economic near-collapse, and the Solidarity movement had skyrocketed in popularity. By the first of October, a full one-third of the membership of Poland's official Communist Party also belonged to some sort of independent union. Kania reacted by making offering unprecedented public admissions of the government's failures, past and present. With radicals inside Solidarity seeking direct action to destabilize the government, Kania developed a de facto working partnership with Solidarity Chairman Lech Walesa, who supported a more moderate course of reform through cooperation. Throughout the year, Bush had praised the Polish reformers regularly, meeting with Polish diplomats in Washington and promoting cultural exchanges and humanitarian aid funding. While Kania, a committed Communist, believed the party should remain in control of the state, he took steps, first tentative and then more overt, to assert independence from Moscow. The two leaders spoke by telephone several times during the summer, and Kania once referred to Bush as "my friend George" during a speech in Lodz.
Soviet tanks rolled into Poland on October 18, with other Warsaw Pact forces entering across the nation's other frontiers. In a repeat of the last hours of Czechoslovakia's 1968 "Prague Spring," Kania urged the public not to resist shortly before the Soviets took him, Walesa, and sympathetic members of the government into custody. Walesa pointedly declined to make a similar statement. Kania's predecessor, 10-year General Secretary Edward Gierek, was hastily installed as figurehead in Warsaw, with Defense Minister Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski -- who had led the Polish contingent during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia -- the real ruler behind the scenes. With Walesa gone, the militants in Solidarity urged their fellows to take to the streets. On October 22, Gierek stepped aside and Jaruzelski became the official leader of Poland. He immediately ordered martial law, replacing key civilian officials with military officers. All of Poland's universities and secondary schools were ordered closed "pending the end of the current emergency," and Warsaw Pact forces even began quartering themselves in the emptying college dormitories. But the closing of the schools boomeranged on Jaruzelski, as thousands of suddenly unoccupied, newly radicalized students joined the Solidarity rebels in the streets. The next day, October 23, happened to be an unhappy anniversary in the Soviet satellite states: on that date in 1956, exactly 25 years earlier, the Hungarian Revolution had begun. History was about to repeat itself in Poland. The rebellion was limited mainly to Poland's cities, primarily Warsaw, where the impact of the invasion and Jaruzelski's ascension was felt the most. Tens of thousands of demonstrators crowded the streets. As police moved in and began indiscriminately grabbing protestors for mass arrests, the originally peaceful demonstrators became more assertive, striking back with their fists and with whatever they could find. Kania's remonstrations against violence were being ignored. Polish army troops dispatched to the scene sent to the scene seemed reticent to fire on their own people, however, and some even stripped off their military insignia and joined the crowd. The first day of demonstrations closed with a tense standoff lasting into the night. Before dawn on the 24th, Jaruzelski ordered the crowds to disperse by 9:00 a.m., saying the troops would open fire at that time. While some demonstrators returned to their homes, others, emboldened by the lack of retaliation during the night, had joined the crowd. Official estimates, almost certainly low, put their numbers at 70,000 by sunrise. Unwilling to show any sign of wavering resolve, Jaruzelski followed through on his threat, ordering engagement at exactly 9:00. Some 144 demonstrators were killed in the first rounds of fire, and another 78 were killed in the panicked stampede of the crowd that ensued. A 24-hour curfew was declared in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and several other cities. By nightfall on the 24th, the number of dead across Poland exceeded 800, and more than 15,000 arrests had been made. The next day was a Sunday, and from the balcony at St. Peter's, Pope John Paul II issued a harsh rebuke against the Soviets and the Jaruzelski government. At Roman Catholic masses across the United States, priests read a letter from the Pope that urged the U.S. government to take a strong stand against the Soviet intervention and demand the resignation of Jaruzelski. In Washington, though, Bush dithered. It seemed clear that the rebellion was already waning, and NATO allies clearly expressed their uneasiness about taking a strong stance against a fait accompli. To Bush, the papal pressure was an unneeded strain. While he had gone on television Saturday night to denounce the crackdown, he could see little else to do. Angered by the Pope's words, and hoping the revolt would not drag on for weeks as the Hungarian rebellion had, Jaruzelski requested further Warsaw Pact intervention in order to keep the situation under thumb. Kania and Walesa were flown back to Warsaw and were subjected to nationally televised show trials on Wednesday the 27th, with both convicted and imprisoned. Two days later, the remnants of the Solidarity militancy conveyed their surrender to the government, and dozens of alleged ringleaders were also arrested.
On Sunday, November 1, as the Pope again denounced the strongman leader of his homeland, Jaruzelski appeared on television to declare that he was lifting the curfew, but that the state of emergency would remain in effect through the end of the year, when the Warsaw Pact forces would begin to withdraw. There were sporadic incidents of violence during the next two months, and nearly two thousand were arrested on Christmas Eve during a peaceful vigil in the Pope's birthplace of Wadowice, but after the December 31 withdrawal, a tense peace remained. While critics on the right carped about Bush's pragmatic handling of the Polish rebellion, faulting him for not taking a more aggressive stance, most knowledgeable observers said the U.S. had followed the most intelligent course. But as 1982 opened, with each report of a demonstrator beaten in Warsaw or a writer arrested in Krakow, the Reaganites who had never trusted Bush raised their voices again. The Polish situation was hurting Bush among the so-called Reagan Democrats as well. The Pope remained a loud voice against the Jaruzelski regime, and U.S. Catholic churches echoed the Pope's steadfast line. The implied weakness of Bush on the subject was costing him Catholic and working-class support he would need to win in 1984. Bush spent the first months of 1982 trying to look past the trials of the last few months and set the course for the next years of his term. Looking past the conservative critics, he prepared a more moderate budget than the Reagan plan that had squeezed through in 1981. He also began making plans for a series of summits with Leonid Brezhnev, Deng Xiaoping, and, perhaps most daunting of all, Margaret Thatcher, who had shown little but disdain for Bush in their few interactions since his assumption of the presidency.
But the foreign situation remained stormy, and Bush would have little respite. On March 4, the saint's day for Polish patron Saint Casimir, the Pope set off from Rome on a peaceful march toward Poland, with the intention of crossing in and ending in Krakow, where he had been archbishop, on Easter Sunday, April 11. In order to cover the huge distance, the Pope was forced to ride in his "popemobile" for some of the trek; but when he could, the athletic pontiff preferred to go on foot, with several thousand marchers joining him for various lengths of his walk. The Soviets began putting pressure on Austria to stop the march before it reached the Czechoslovakian frontier, where the Soviets would not be able to prevent a standoff. But the government of deeply Catholic Austria feared alienating its public and adopted a neutral stance. On Sunday, March 21, the Pope gave a special Mass at Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral. As he left the church, he was shot by an assassin in the pay of the Bulgarian Secret Service. While he would survive this assassination attempt as he had one 10 months earlier, it had the effect of stopping the march cold. Some of the more fervent followers pressed on to the Danube where they hoped to cross the Iron Curtain, and throughout Poland several more days of violence erupted. From his bed in Rome, the Pope pleaded with his supporters to cease their activities, which they reluctantly did. While the Communist role in this second attempt on the Pope's life was no more provable than the first had been, suspicions ran strong. Bush was decried as "soft on Communism" by many within his own party, and his seeming impotence against the Soviets was worrying many. His moderate budget had contained some slight defense spending increases, but these were seen as skimpy by his growing number of opponents on the right. Bush, the World War II naval aviator, needed to prove to his party, his country, and the Soviets that he could fight back.
On March 19, a small group of Argentine civilians established a camp on the island of South Georgia in the British Falklands, where residents say they raised the flag of Argentina. When a British official insisted they have their passports stamped, they refused. Several days later, the HMS Endurance, an Antarctic ice-breaker, was sent to remove the campers, but was forced to retreat by the Argentine Navy ship Guerrico. On the night of April 1, Argentina launched Operation Azul, invading the Falkland Islands with a small force and driving the British out of the territory they had held for a century and a half. On his way up the ramp to a departing ship, one British marine said to an Argentine soldier, "Don't make yourself too comfy, mate. We'll be back." Argentina planned only a fast, symbolic occupation as a means of snarling at the British and stirring up a patriotic fever at home. The military regime of Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri was under increasing pressure on human rights issues and over a faltering economy. Argentina knew it could not defeat the British in a full-scale fight, and most units were withdrawn just days after the attack, with just a small garrison left behind. Galtieri had badly miscalculated how Thatcher -- and Bush -- would respond.
The right-wing Argentine junta had many friends in Washington, and Galtieri had been counting on American non-intervention. But Bush, eager to show his stuff, build ties with Thatcher, and put on a show of U.S. muscle for the Soviets, immediately offered full support to the British. US Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick, who sympathized with Argentina, resigned in protest. Argentine forces quickly re-occupied the islands, just in time to begin taking hits from British and U.S. planes. While a British naval task force slowly crossed the Atlantic, and the allies' air forces continued their assault on the islands, Bush and Thatcher met at Camp David, making a public show of U.S.-U.K. unity and the "special relationship." The U.S. Air Force concentrated its attacks on the islands' three airfields, all but grounding the Argentine air force based there. On May 2, the British sunk the Argentine ship General Belgrano -- which had been sold to the nation by the U.S. some 30 years earlier. Capitulating to the inevitable, Galtieri announced the full surrender of the islands the next day. Two days after that, the junta removed Galtieri, replacing him with another indistinguishable general. The quick triumph against Argentina left Americans with no doubt about Bush's legitimacy. The president's popularity soared, and Bush began moving a series of moderate spending proposals and defense spending increases through Congress. In November, Democrats gained just 15 seats in the House, small by midterm election standards, and the GOP actually managed a net gain of one Senate seat when Rep. Millicent Fenwick defeated businessman Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey's open-seat race. Fenwick, who Bush had considered along with Holt for vice president, joined Nancy Kassebaum and Paula Hawkins as the Senate's third female member. With all three members of the GOP, the party began taking some effective pokes at Democratic claims to represent women. While Bush seemed a strong bet to win a term in his own right in 1984, Democrats began lining up to challenge him anyway. Former vice president Walter Mondale and Ohio Sen. John Glenn were the early favorites, with activist Jesse Jackson and Colorado Rep. Patricia Schroeder also drawing attention. A gaggle of other senators -- Joe Biden, Alan Cranston, and Gary Hart among them -- also entered the fray.
In another odd twist of fate, two years to the day after the Polish rebellion had begun, on October 23, 1983, a truck bomb obliterated the Beirut barracks housing the U.S. Marines participating in the Multinational Force in Lebanon, killing 241 American servicemen. A near-simultaneous attack on French barracks left 58 French servicemembers dead. Bush moved into action, meeting with French President Francois Mitterand in Montreal two days later. A joint U.S.-French team launched airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Beqaa Valley along the Lebanon-Syria border, then destroyed Iranian barracks in the Lebanese town of Baalbek. Recriminations flew back and forth, and the U.S. girded for a possible war. Bush then took an unexpected course. He withdrew the Marines to an offshore site where they could not easily be targeted, then addressed the United Nations, where he declared a unilateral cease-fire and urged the world to unite against Hezbollah and other state-sponsored terrorist organizations. He next flew to Moscow to meet with ailing Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to seek his support in the worldwide anti-terror effort. Tensions between the U.S. and USSR had been raised by the September downing of a Korean Air jetliner by Soviet fighters, and Andropov was pleased to be able to decrease the anxiety through a largely symbolic gesture. The two leaders made a public appearance at the Kremlin to denounce state sponsorship of terrorist organizations. When Andropov died in February 1984, Bush returned to Russia for his funeral -- an act that was greeted frostily by Bush's occasional friend Margaret Thatcher. Bush met briefly with Andropov's successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a month shy of his 53rd birthday. Gorbachev, an Andropov protégé, expressed interest in continuing the U.S.-Soviet thaw that had just started to begin during the previous few months.
While conservatives were not pleased by the opening with the Soviets, Bush's hard line in Lebanon and Argentina kept most of them in the fold. Political columnist and television personality Patrick Buchanan challenged Bush in several primaries in 1984, winning some support from anti-Communist voters. The Catholic Buchanan frequently brought up the Pope's trek toward Poland and Bush's circumspect response to the Soviet invasion. But after an initial bit of attention, Buchanan was trounced in the New Hampshire primary and his quixotic protest campaign faded away. On the Democratic side, the contest was over quickly as well. Patricia Schroeder ran a distant second to Walter Mondale in the Iowa caucuses, and a closer second in New Hampshire, pushing all the other contenders save Jesse Jackson from the race. Schroeder continued to run strong in the next few contests but failed to actually win any, and so she exited the race. At the Democratic convention in San Francisco, she became Mondale's running mate.
The general election campaign was a snoozer. Going out of the conventions, the Bush-Holt ticket held a lead of about 15 points in most polls, and little changed throughout the campaign season. Mondale managed to win just 44% of the vote, carrying only Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. Bush won the electoral vote 472 to 66. In January 1985, as Bush took the oath of office to begin the term he had won in his own right, there seemed to be many possibilities ahead. With Holt and Schroeder both established as major political figures, it seemed the United States might actually elect a female president in 1988. Bush and Gorbachev would meet in their first full summit that spring, where they would discuss decreasing the Soviet hold on Poland in exchange for a tacit U.S. commitment to leave Nicaragua alone. Arms control and stronger diplomatic ties were also on the table. And Bush had not forgotten the campaign against terror in the Middle East. Sanctions had been imposed against Iran, and Bush was making sure to keep Tehran in check by increasing U.S. military support to the hostile neighboring Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.



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