Age of Confusion

After all the political infighting, the 1972 Presidential race finally comes down to the clash of the titans: Ronald Reagan on the Republican side vs. Robert F. Kennedy on the Democratic side. The main issues are peace, rapport with the Soviets, and an end to the Cold War. But with the political winds constantly shifting and the X factor of anti-busing racist Governor George Wallace in the mix (yet again), nothing can be counted on. The fate of the world hangs in the balance as two ultra-charismatic candidates battle it out for the heart and soul of America, and possibly the fate of the human species.

Length: 21:59

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: Date Uncertain; Early 2022

As the 1972 primary season heats up, California Governor Ronald Reagan has his sights set on the White House, but he has to slay numerous dragons before he gets there: Richard Nixon, George Wallace and the sitting President of the United States, George Romney, not to mention the Democratic heir-apparent, Robert Kennedy. Will Nixon run? How will Wallace, running an insurgent racist campaign from the sidelines, affect the race? Who is bugging who, and why? Will the explosive matter of busing in Boston be the decisive issue? A long chain of political intrigues and scandals leads up to a fateful White House meeting that may decide the election--and America's future.

Length: 28:48

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: December 5, 2021

Lawrence McEnery, an emergency room doctor from Atlanta and passionate advocate for the ferociously anti-Communist John Birch Society, begins his career and life trajectory with an air crash in 1956, a political awakening in the early 1960s and eventually nascent aspirations for public office. A chance meeting with Ronald Reagan in an L.A. hotel room launches his political career. McEnery's anti-Communist fervor and his unlikely involvement with the rock band Refraction (discussed in Episode 13) inject new uncertainty into the political landscape for the upcoming 1972 Presidential election, and the future of American politics.

Length: 24:02

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: November 21, 2021

In the aftermath of the nuclear war scare, President George Romney decides his highest calling--and his key to reelection in 1972--is to make peace with the Russians and end the Cold War. But will Soviet leader Shelepin play ball? As the clock ticks down to major political shenanigans at home, and both Senators Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy position themselves for the game, Romney throws the dice on a high-stakes summit in Oslo with Shelepin to discuss a comprehensive peace treaty. It could be a new dawn for humanity...or another craven trick by the Stalinist Soviet leader.

Length: 22:10

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: November 7, 2021

Soviet leader Alexander Shelepin backs a bold move by Warsaw Pact forces to take over East Berlin as a final solution to the Communist bloc's long-simmering dispute with the West over the city. The move takes U.S. President George Romney by surprise, but immediately sets up the tensest moment of the entire Cold War. The world goes to the brink of nuclear annihilation, even closer than the Cuban Missile Crisis. All of humanity awaits a single decision, made by one man in a small chapel in the West Wing of the White House: will Romney launch the missiles or won't he?

Length: 22:17

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: October 24, 2021

In this bonus episode, we'll do a brief recap of Episodes 11 through 15 (the first half of Season 2) as well as some thoughts on the real history that it's based on. The purpose of this episode is to bring listeners up to speed on the storyline, if they did not start with Episode 1, and also put the story in the context of actual history.

These bonus episodes will come out twice a season: once at mid-season, and again in the gap between seasons.

Length: 12:24

Next Episode: October 10, 2021

We turn for the first time to events in the People's Republic of China. Mao Zedong, the aging revolutionary and leader of the PRC, launches a last-ditch effort to ensure his continued relevance in a fractious governing party: the Cultural Revolution. Millions of people, mostly young, fan out through the cities and countryside enforcing the tenets of "Mao Zedong Thought," while other Communist leaders, like Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai, try their best to rein in the chaos from behind the scenes without risking their own necks. The result is years of political and cultural chaos and millions of deaths.

Length: 18:01

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode (Bonus, Recap & Explainer): October 3, 2021

Next Regular Episode: October 10, 2021

This episode shines a light on what's happening behind the Iron Curtain from the years 1964 to 1970, shortly after new Soviet leader Alexander Shelepin takes power in the USSR after deposing Khrushchev (episode 5). While at first it looks as if Shelepin, neo-Stalinist though he is, will not be as repressive or heavy-handed as his idol, an early spate of high-level executions of former Soviet leaders indicates otherwise. This proves to be only the beginning of an entirely new set of purges in which hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens are executed, sent to gulags or vanish into mental hospitals. Shelepin is obviously preparing for something...but what?

Length: 21:10

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: September 26, 2021

The culture and fabric of American life is changing rapidly in the late 1960s. A rock band called Refraction becomes bigger than the Beatles, and helps launch a popular movie, based on a classic of Beat literature, that becomes a cultural sensation. A host of new religious movements begin to challenge the orthodoxy of conservative American religious life; one of them, Scientology, benefits from the involvement of one of the highest-profile celebrities in the world. Meanwhile the Soviets beat the U.S. to the moon, which becomes just one more disillusionment in a confusing decade whose promise of change and renewal seems to be continually thwarted by depressing events.

Length: 22:07

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: September 12, 2021

In 1969, as Arab states decline in prestige--and start to run out of water--a conflict brews between Israel and its deadliest enemy, the Egypt of Pan-Arabist General Nasser. When the water dispute explodes into a full-scale war, Soviet leader Alexander Shelepin uses the crisis to make his first major test of new U.S. President George Romney. What results is not merely a hot war in the Sinai desert, but a tense confrontation between the Cold War superpowers that threatens to trigger nuclear war if one or the other of Romney and Shelepin lose their cool. Are they up to the challenge?

Length: 23:33

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: August 29, 2021

The new U.S. President George Romney, elected by a razor-thin margin in 1968, takes office in early 1969 amidst a welter of problems. The economy is tanking, his own party hates him, and the Soviets won't talk about anything. Romney struggles to find his footing as President in the midst of these challenges, but his own legislative priorities and political missteps begin to suggest he's in over his head. Will he get on track, or will the country continue to decline?

Length: 21:36

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: August 15, 2021

In this bonus episode, I'll recap the story from Episodes 6 through 10, and also say a few words on the real history that is the basis of the story. The purpose of this episode is to bring listeners up to speed on the storyline, if they did not start with Episode 1, and also put the story in the context of actual history.

These bonus episodes will come out twice a season: once at mid-season (between episodes 5 and 6), and again in the gap between seasons.

Length: 16:01

Next Episode: August 1, 2021

With Vietnam over but many conditions worsening in America, the Presidential election season of 1968 gets off to an uneasy start. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson thinks he's got the Democratic nomination--and possibly the election--sewn up as a messy fight develops on the Republican side between moderates and conservatives. But the real X factor is the resentful politics of racist segregationists, now leaving the Democratic Party in droves over their concessions to civil rights. As the various dramas of the '60s come to a head, a tragedy on a Florida launch pad may sway the result one way or another.

Length: 26:19

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode (Bonus, Recap & Explainer): July 19, 2021

Next Regular Episode: August 1, 2021

Coming to the end of his term, President John F. Kennedy finally moves to bring an end to American involvement in the now-unpopular war in Vietnam. Even as negotiations with the North Vietnamese lead nowhere and the U.S. military begins harboring resentment about JFK's handling of the conflict, Kennedy, with an eye toward securing his historical legacy, and battered by the doctors' scandal, begins troop withdrawals. But to secure his legacy politically and to help his likely successor Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy proposes a "Saigon Declaration" which, though politically expedient, may eventually result in unintended consequences.

Length: 21:23

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: June 20, 2021

Though carefully hidden for years with the willing complicity of the press, the seriousness of President John F. Kennedy's health problems becomes a serious public issue at about the same time as the concerted push to pass the Comprehensive Civil Rights Act gets going. Questions about cover-ups and wrongdoing in concealing JFK's potentially debilitating health conditions begin to damage his credibility and trustworthiness with the public. In the meantime, disastrous Congressional elections in 1966 and the increasing intransigence of the Soviets make the prospects for the end of Kennedy's second term bleak.

Length: 22:25

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: June 6, 2021

Outbreaks of racial violence in the summer of 1965 force a further evolution of the civil rights movement as the African-American liberation struggle reaches a crucial phase. President Kennedy, realizing that civil rights must be his legacy, increasingly begins to view the ongoing war in Vietnam as a distraction he can no longer afford--but ending the conflict proves more difficult than anyone anticipated. In the summer of 1966, Kennedy suffers a terrible personal tragedy that crystallizes his priorities for the remainder of his term in the White House.

Content Warning: this episode contains a brief discussion of racially-motivated violence.

Length: 27:23

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: May 23, 2021

President John F. Kennedy, re-elected with a narrower margin of victory than he expected in 1964, has spent most of the last year deferring the big decision on policy in Southeast Asia: commit U.S. forces directly, which seems to be the only way to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, or give up and go home. In spring 1965 he finally makes a decision. As American combat boots start to touch the soil of Vietnam, Kennedy finds himself boxed in by further difficulties on civil rights and the dissatisfaction of his most trusted adviser: his own brother.

Length: 25:01

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: May 9, 2021

In this bonus episode, we provide a brief recap of the story from Episodes 1 through 5, as well as some commentary on the real history it departs from and is based on. The purpose of this episode is to bring listeners up to speed on the storyline, if they did not start with Episode 1, and also put the story in the context of actual history.

These bonus episodes will come out twice a season: once at mid-season (between episodes 5 and 6), and again in the gap between seasons.

Length: 13:29

Next Episode: April 25, 2021

In this episode, the focus shifts to Moscow and a look at changes in the Communist world. Nikita Khrushchev, reviled in the Soviet Communist Party for buckling under to Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, is blissfully unaware of the threat to his power bubbling up in the ranks of the Party leadership. A coup is clearly afoot, but the competition for which bureaucratic apparatchik will replace him—Brezhnev, Suslov, Malenkov of somebody else—becomes unexpectedly fierce. Waiting in the shadows, Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB, is sitting on a “dictatorship coach” and a cache of secret documents that he hopes will give him the edge in the power struggle that breaks out in the Kremlin in the fall of 1964.

Length: 26:02

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode (Bonus, Recap & Explainer): April 18, 2021

Next Regular Episode: April 25, 2021

As Kennedy’s re-election campaign gets going in earnest, three main challengers on the Republican side duel each other, with varying degrees of commitment, for the nomination to oppose him. Each of them—Rockefeller, Goldwater and Lodge—is hobbled by a different problem that makes them unattractive to a crucial segment of the Republican party they need to win. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s serious health issues begin to impinge on the campaign, and civil rights leaders, disillusioned by his lack of leadership on advancing their goals, fall out with one another, with some wondering if traditional politics has reached the limits of its effectiveness.

Length: 21:31

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: April 11, 2021