riverside edit   kevin kevin's studio: July 21, 1965, Washington, D.C. President Lyndon Johnson is 56 years old and about to walk into the cabinet room, where his top advisors have spent almost an hour talking about Vietnam. South Vietnam's government is losing a civil war to communist guerrilla fighters called the Viet Cong, who have the North Vietnamese government's backing. The United States currently has 75,000 troops there fighting the North, but the South keeps losing. Robert McNamara, Johnson's Secretary of Defense, tells the president that holding its 75,000 troops only makes America's position weaker. His solution is to send 100,000 more troops by October. Johnson asks if anyone in the room disagrees, and George Ball, the number two man at the State Department, raises his hand. President Johnson gives him the afternoon to make his case. When the meeting picks back up, Ball tells the president simply, we can't win. He says the least painful way out in terms of American reputation is for South Vietnam's own government to ask the Americans to leave. Ball fully admits the communists will win the war once that happens. So Johnson has two choices: expand the war effort like McNamara wants, or hold at 75,000 troops and let Ball negotiate a way out. A week later, in a nationally televised address, President Johnson tells the country that three presidents have promised to defend South Vietnam. And that America cannot break its word. He sides with McNamara and orders an immediate 50,000 more troops with more to follow. He also raises the draft from 17,000 to 35,000 men per month. But what if Johnson doesn't listen to McNamara? What if he sides with George Ball and starts negotiating a way out of Vietnam? Let's hit Control-Z. Welcome to Control-Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision, we try it the other way, and see what changes. November of 1964, Lyndon Johnson wins the presidency in an historic landslide, and Democrats flip 38 seats in the House of Representatives. He's spending the summer of 1965 using his congressional majority to pass a set of programs he calls the Great Society. The Great Society includes the creation of Medicare, government-run health insurance for Americans 65 and older. It also includes a law protecting the right of black Southerners to vote, and the creation of Head Start. A preschool program for children in poor areas. In July, Medicare and the Voting Law are both within three weeks of Johnson's signature. But Vietnam is a threat to the entire program. Johnson is aware of this because his own vice president warned him about it. Back in February, Hubert Humphrey sent Johnson a private memo cautioning that a full scale war would pull money away from the Great Society. Humphrey also wrote that 1965 was the year of minimum political risk, meaning Johnson had just won so big and had enough political capital that he could afford to cut his losses. Johnson was furious, and as a result, he shut Humphrey out of the Vietnam decisions for the rest of the year. George Ball is taking the same risk a few weeks before the cabinet meeting. He sends the White House a paper that opens by saying the South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong. Ball doubts American soldiers can change that. He points to a recent raid on the airbase at Danang, where North Vietnamese guerrillas got through a perimeter guarded by 9,000 Marines. Ball's plan is to hold at 72,000 troops and keep them out of any big battles. He wants to then open quiet talks with Mai Van Bo, North Vietnam's representative in Paris, and have the Soviet Union help guarantee whatever deal comes out of them. Ball warns that once American casualties begin to grow, Leaving Vietnam without a victory becomes an international humiliation. Then comes the cabinet meeting on July 21st, and the afternoon President Johnson gives Ball to make his case. Johnson's own objection is the promise three successive presidents made to South Vietnam. He asks Ball if other countries will call America a paper tiger for breaking it, meaning a power that looks strong but then backs down. Ball's answer is that it would be worse for the mightiest power in the world to fight poorly armed guerrillas and lose. He's the only advisor at the table who argues against sending the troops. Johnson believes he loses either way. A few years later, he told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin that he knew from the start he'd be crucified whichever direction he moved. Johnson referred to the Great Society as the woman he really loved, and Vietnam as the That bitch of war on the other side of the world. He said that leaving one for the other would cost him everything at home. But Johnson also said that if he let the communists take South Vietnam, he'd be seen as a coward. He remembered that President Harry Truman's effectiveness ended the day the communists took over China in 1949, and he expected the same treatment. He also pictured Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against him. Kennedy was a senator from New York. The younger brother of the assassinated president whose job Johnson now held, and perhaps most importantly, Johnson's chief rival in a potential reelection bid. The president expected Kennedy to say that the commitment to South Vietnam was his brother's and that the new president had betrayed it. Johnson gets one more warning on july twenty fifth at Camp David. Clark Clifford, a Washington lawyer who advises him unofficially, says he doesn't believe America can win, and he predicts a Five years of fighting, billions of dollars wasted, and 50,000 dead Americans. Clifford tells Johnson he can't see anything but catastrophe for the country. On the evening of July 27th, Johnson lays out five options for his National Security Council. The first two are full-scale war or withdrawal, and he admits that very few people want either one of those, himself included. The third is to keep the force where it is. Johnson calls that a way to hunker up and he says none of his advisors wants it. The fourth choice is to declare a state of emergency and ask Congress for everything the generals want, including billions of dollars in funding. And the fifth and final option is to give the generals their men and say as little about it as possible. Johnson's pick is the fifth option. One of his national security advisors, a man named McGeorge Bundy, Later wrote that Johnson's unspoken goal in choosing the quiet version was to protect the Great Society bills that were still moving through Congress. The next day, Johnson announces the troop increase at a midday press conference but says he isn't calling up the reserves. Two days later, he's in Independence, Missouri signing Medicare into law with former President Truman standing right beside him. One week later, he signs the Voting Rights Act, with his friend Dr. Martin Luther King beside him at the ceremony. Dr. King is the country's most famous civil rights leader and Johnson's partner on that law, but he's already uneasy about Vietnam, and he said so publicly. At the start of July, King told a convention of his own civil rights organization in Virginia that the war had to be settled by negotiation. He called the White House five days later to explain himself, and Johnson used the opportunity to describe his own dilemma. The troops Johnson is sending include the Army's new helicopter division, 16,000 soldiers from Fort Benning, Georgia. In November, that division fights the war's first big battle in Highland Valley called Iadrang, and 234 of them are killed in the fighting. American deaths in Vietnam go from just over 1900 in 1965 to over 6,000 the following year and 17,000 in 1968 alone. To replenish the ranks, The draft takes 382,000 men in 1966, more than three times the number from just two years earlier. Remember, Johnson expected Robert Kennedy to attack him for abandoning South Vietnam. But in February of 1966, Kennedy does the opposite and says the Viet Cong should get a share of power there. In the November midterms later that year, Democrats lose 47 seats in the House, including All 38 of the seats they had flipped just two years earlier. Voters are unhappy about the war. They're unhappy about riots in the cities. And they're unhappy about great society spending. Dr. King breaks with President Johnson the following spring. Speaking to 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York, King says the war is taking money and attention away from programs for the poor. The speech puts him in direct conflict with President Johnson and their partnership. Falls apart. At the end of January 1968, the North Vietnamese successfully launch a massive surprise-coordinated attack on cities all across South Vietnam called the Tet Offensive, named for the Vietnamese New Year. As a result, Johnson's approval ratings plummet to below 30%. And in March, Robert Kennedy enters the presidential race, running against Johnson's war. Kennedy is finally out in front leading the fight. Just as Johnson had feared, except the charge isn't that Johnson wouldn't go through with JFK's promise to the South Vietnamese. It's that the president refuses to end the unpopular war. On March 31st, President Johnson goes on television and announces he's withdrawing from the presidential primaries and that he'll serve out his term that ends on January 20th, 1969. That June, Johnson signs a tax increase to pay for the fighting, which also forces him to cut $6 billion from the budget, bringing a renewed focus to the now assassinated Dr. King's public criticism that the war was taking money from the poor. That same month, a gunman murders Robert Kennedy, at that point the clear frontrunner for both the nomination and the presidency, in a Los Angeles hotel on the night he wins the California primary. In November, Republican Richard Nixon ekes out a victory over Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, by less than one percentage point. The four more years Johnson was counting on to fully realize his domestic agenda now go to Richard Nixon. In 1971, Nixon vetoes a bill that would have set up federally funded childcare centers across the country. He also puts four justices on the Supreme Court, and every one of them votes with the majority in two landmark rulings. Each decided by a single vote. The first, in nineteen seventy-three, says the Constitution doesn't require a state to spend equally on schools in rich and poor districts. The second, a year later, stops the courts from ordering Detroit and its suburbs to desegregate their schools together. Lyndon Johnson dies of a massive heart attack at his Texas ranch on January 22nd, 1973, five days before the United States signs the peace agreement that ends its part in the war. And two days after what would have been the end of his second full term in office, North Vietnam's army takes Saigon, the southern capital, two years later, and the communists officially rule the whole country. But the fighting didn't stay confined to Vietnam. Next door in Cambodia, their own communist guerrillas called the Khmer Rouge, take power in 1975 and kill between 1.5 and 2 million of their own people over the next four years. Their rise to power was a direct consequence of the increased fighting in Vietnam, as they were a small force until 1970 when that war crossed the border. Lyndon Johnson chose what he thought would be a quiet war in order to protect both the Great Society and America's international reputation. But the war ended up cutting his domestic budget and driving him out of office. It also kills 60,000 Americans and ends up being a losing effort anyway. just as George Ball said it would. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. From here on, unless otherwise noted, everything I describe is the alternate timeline. We're back in the cabinet room on July 27, 1965, and Lyndon Johnson has just read his five options to the National Security Council. This time, he picks option number three, where the fighting force in Vietnam stays at its current level. President Johnson has spent the week since George Ball made his case weighing which he's more afraid of: losing the Great Society to a long war. Or being called a coward for leaving. He decides that the war will do more damage to those programs than a retreat will do to him. He tells Sekdef McNamara that the 75,000 troops in South Vietnam will stay close to their bases on the coast and that the Army's new helicopter division will stay at Fort Benning. Then he hands George Ball the job of opening talks with Mai Von Bo, North Vietnam's representative in Paris. Johnson also tells Ball He won't be the president who ran out on an ally. So the request to leave has to come from South Vietnam's own government, the way Ball described it in a room a week earlier. Less than an hour later, leaders from Congress walk in. Mike Mansfield, the Democrat who took over Johnson's old job as Senate Majority Leader, has brought a written statement about the worry he's hearing over Vietnam. He reads it to Johnson, who now agrees with him, and Mansfield promises the president his support. But the decision has opponents in both parties. John McCormick, the Democratic Speaker of the House, warns Johnson that backing down to the communists is what leads to war. Republican Senator Bork Hippenlooper says a negotiated peace without a dependable buffer against communism would merely compound the problem, making a bad situation worse. At a press conference two weeks earlier, President Johnson had told reporters that Robert McNamara was flying to Saigon. And that new and serious decisions on Vietnam were likely once the trip was over. Reporters asked him that day whether he planned to call up the reserves or raise the draft, and they've been waiting ever since to find out his answer. So the day after he makes his decision, Johnson calls another press conference and announces that the force in Vietnam will hold at 75,000 troops. He reminds voters that during his 1964 campaign, He promised not to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what the Vietnamese ought to be doing for themselves. George Ball's first move is to send retired ambassador Edmund Goulian to Paris. Gullien knows Vietnam from his time as the number two man at the American Embassy in Saigon. In August, Gullian starts meeting with Mai Von Bo. Johnson can't be seen asking the communists for a way out. So Gullian goes as a private citizen with no official title. Only a handful of people in Washington know about the talks, and even the government's own cables use code names, calling Gullian X and Bo Rupert. That spring, North Vietnam had announced its conditions for ending the war, which include the Americans leaving and the Vietnamese being left alone to decide whether to reunite as one country. It also wants South Vietnam run according to the program of the National Liberation Front, the political organization behind the Viet Cong. For the United States, that last condition is the hardest to accept because it means letting the communists help govern the South. Through Gulian, Ball offers to negotiate on all of those conditions, including the last one. In September, he flies to Paris to make that offer directly to Beau in person. So North Vietnam knows it comes from President Johnson. But North Vietnam keeps fighting while it talks. That October, its regiments come out of bases in Cambodia and attack a military camp called Tle Me, about thirty five miles south of the highland town of Pleku. The plan is to drive from the mountains to the ocean and cut South Vietnam in half. Because President Johnson has kept American troops near their bases on the coast, South Vietnam's army has to fight this battle alone. It loses badly, and Play Khu falls to the North Vietnamese before the end of 1965. Robert McNamara had warned that holding at 75,000 would only make America's position weaker. And now he's being proven right. The generals who run South Vietnam can see that the Americans aren't coming to save them. The general in charge is Nguyen Kau Qi, an Air Force officer who has been premier since the summer. Qi stays in power only as long as the four generals who command the country's military regions support him. And the one he trusts least is Nguyen Chan Ti, who runs the northern provinces. Ti is a devout Buddhist who is popular in those provinces, and he supports a negotiated settlement with the National Liberation Front. With Plei Khu lost and the Americans staying on their bases, A lot of South Vietnamese now agree with him, which makes him a threat to Qi. The following March, Qi fires him, and the people of the northern provinces rise up in protest. Thousands of Buddhists demonstrate in the cities of Da Nang and Hui, and a general strike shuts them down for days. Protesters take over the radio stations, and soldiers from Ti's old command join them. Qi announces that Denang is in communist hands and vows to take it back. His loyal Marines are in Saigon, so he asks the Americans for transport planes to fly three battalions north. George Ball tells President Johnson to refuse the request, because a government that has to borrow American planes to fight its own army can't win the war. He also argues that Key will fall without that help, and that whoever replaces him will want to end the fighting. President Johnson takes Ball's advice and refuses Key's request. He orders General Louis Walt, who commands the American Marines in Da Nang, not to let any of his aircraft carry Key's troops. Without that airlift, Key can't reach Da Nang, and the other regional commanders can see that Washington has stopped backing him. They force Key to resign within the month. The generals need a replacement the Buddhists will accept. And the man they want is General Zung Van Minh, who is living in Thailand. The Americans call him Big Min. Min led the coup that overthrew South Vietnam's president in 1963 and then lost power himself three months later. Since then, he's lived in Thailand, raising orchids and playing tennis. Min favors a compromise with the communists, and the Buddhists respect him. He actually tried to fly home a year earlier, but his plane wasn't allowed to land in Saigon. Now, the generals invite him back, and in April, he returns to lead the government. He calls a ceasefire and invites the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong's political organization, to share power with him in a coalition government. The front's chairman, a Saigon lawyer named Nguyen Hu Tao, becomes his vice president. Then, Min's government formally asks the United States to withdraw its troops, just as George Ball had hoped when he told President Johnson this was the least painful way out. In the summer of 1966, Negotiators from all sides turn that request into a written agreement, and George Ball signs for the United States in Geneva. Under the agreement, the ceasefire stays in place, and the Americans have until the end of the year to leave. The Soviet foreign minister, a man named Andrei Gromyko, signs at two, so both superpowers are now promising to make the deal stick, just as Ball proposed in his paper the summer before. The deal also includes a clause that allows any South Vietnamese citizen to leave with the Americans. Hundreds of thousands take the offer. When Vietnam was divided in 1954, the US Navy carried over 300,000 people, roughly 80% of whom were Catholic, out of the Communist North and down to the South. Now, many of those same families are running from the communists for the second time. In the fall of 1966, with the withdrawal deal signed, the Navy comes back for another 300,000 South Vietnamese, this time taking them out of the country entirely. The refugees include Army officers, government officials, Catholic families, and Nguyen Kao Qi, the premier of the generals for Stout. By 1967, those same refugees are forming the first Vietnamese neighborhoods in American cities. The last American troops sail out of Denang in December of nineteen sixty six, only twenty one months after the first Marines landed there. With the Americans gone, the National Liberation Front and its backers in the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi take over the coalition government one ministry at a time, until Zung van Min is president in name only. Meanwhile, next door in Laos, the Communist Army called the Patet Lao takes the capital in that same stretch. But the communists get no farther than Laos. George Ball had predicted in his paper that Thailand could be held even if South Vietnam was lost, and just as he said, the Thai government stays allied with the United States. On September 2nd, 1968, Ho Chi Minh, the 78-year-old founder of the Communist North, announces in Hanoi that Vietnam is officially one country again. He picks that date specifically. Because it's the twenty-third anniversary of the day he declared independence from France. The new rulers send officers and officials of the old Saigon government to prison camps, just as the 300,000 people who left on the Navy ships had feared. By the fall of nineteen sixty-eight, Vietnam has officially fallen to the communists, along with their neighbor Laos. And on the home front, every American soldier has been home for almost two years. Let's go back to the week President Johnson decided to hold at 75,000 troops. While George Ball heads to Paris to negotiate America's way out of Vietnam, Johnson stays in Washington with the Great Society, the set of programs he called the woman he really loved. His vice president Hubert Humphrey had warned him that a full-scale war would pull money away from those programs. But because in this alternate timeline the force holds at 75,000 troops before leaving Vietnam altogether, Johnson can keep spending that money at home. The man Johnson picked to design and run his programs for the poor is Sergeant Shriver, who is married to Senator Robert Kennedy's sister, Eunice. Shriver is being charged to spend a lot of the money that otherwise would have gone to the Vietnam War effort on programs like Head Start and the Job Corps, which trains young people for work. Johnson's one rule for Shriver is no dolls, meaning the government pays for schooling and job training, but it doesn't hand out cash. Shriver believes poverty in America can be ended by 1976, and Johnson is giving him the budget to try. With the voting law signed, Dr. Martin Luther King takes his campaign north to Chicago at the start of 1966 to go after the way black families are kept out of white neighborhoods. That April, He meets with the president in the cabinet room to plan a housing bill that would make it illegal to discriminate in the sale or rental of a home. As part of that campaign, Dr. King leads 700 marchers that August into Marquette Park, an all white neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side. A crowd of thousands throws bottles and bricks at them, and someone hits Dr. King in the head with a rock. He says afterward that the crowds he faced in the South weren't this hateful. Many white voters turn against the housing bill after the Chicago marches, and within weeks, senators who oppose it use a filibuster to keep it from coming to a vote. Richard Nixon, the former Republican vice president, spends that fall campaigning for his party's candidates and asking who lost Vietnam. Johnson has dreaded that question since the day he decided to go with George Ball over Robert McNamara. But the Marines are packing to come home. So voters care more about what's happening in their own neighborhoods than they do about Vietnam. Remember, Johnson also expected Robert Kennedy to attack him for abandoning South Vietnam. But Senator Kennedy wants the war settled by negotiation too. When George Ball signed the agreement in Geneva that summer, Kennedy publicly stated his support, putting Johnson's chief rival in the party on his side going into the election. Despite all this, Republicans still gained 35 seats in the House in the 1966 midterms. The winning issues for them are the housing fight, increasing crime, and the riots that have begun to hit black neighborhoods since the one in Watts in Los Angeles the summer prior. But Democrats still control Congress, so Johnson can keep pushing his Great Society agenda. One of the Republican winners that November is a former actor named Ronald Reagan, who was elected governor of California. He ran on a promise to send what he calls the welfare bums back to work and to clean up the mess at Berkeley, the university where students have been protesting. By beating the Democratic governor Pat Brown, Reagan becomes a national leader of the conservative movement overnight. With the troops now home from Vietnam, the military only needs to draft about a hundred thousand men per year out of the millions who are eligible. Local draft boards decide which of those men have to go, and they don't all follow the same rules. President Johnson thinks that's unfair when only a small share of men are chosen. So the next year he gets Congress to replace that system with a lottery, where names are drawn at random. While conservatives gain ground, Dr. King is pushing the president to do more for the poor. And early in 1968, he asks the president to spend $30 billion a year fighting poverty. The equivalent of $248 billion in 2026. Dr. King wants a job for everyone who needs one and 500,000 new low-cost homes built every year. He also wants a guaranteed basic income for any family that earns below a set amount. President Johnson is willing to pay for the jobs and the homes, but a guaranteed income breaks his no dolls rule, so he flatly refuses. Dr. King keeps coming to the White House to argue for it. But the two men remain friends and allies. With the war over, Johnson also has the money to get Congress to pass the Child Health Act that year, which has the federal government pay for a doctor's care for every poor mother and her baby. The care starts during pregnancy and runs through the child's first year. That April, Dr. King is in Memphis supporting a strike by the city's garbage workers when a gunman shoots and kills him on the balcony of his motel. Riots break out in cities across the country as soon as the news spreads. Opponents in the House of Representatives have been blocking a new version of the housing bill since the Senate passed it in March. But the day after the murder, President Johnson asks Speaker John McCormick to bring it to a vote, and within a week, the President signs it into law. The bill bans discrimination in the sale and rental of about 80% of American housing, just as President Johnson and Dr. King had planned in the cabinet. Two years earlier. With the war over and his programs funded, President Johnson runs for a second full term in 1968. He easily wins renomination at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August, a convention that passes without incident in this alternate timeline. And because the president ended the war in a timely fashion, Senator Robert Kennedy spends the fall giving speeches in support of the Johnson Humphrey ticket. Many white Southerners who used to vote Democratic are angry about Johnson's civil rights laws. That fall, they vote for George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama, who runs as a third-party candidate and carries five states in the Deep South. With those voters gone, President Johnson only narrowly beats the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Back in the summer of 1965, Johnson had talked Arthur Goldberg into giving up his seat on the Supreme Court to become ambassador to the United Nations. Goldberg took the UN post, expecting to get back on the court someday. So when Earl Warren retires as Chief Justice five months into Johnson's second term, the president gives that job to Goldberg. When justices Hugo Black and John Harlan retire two years later in 1971, President Johnson appoints their successors as well. In his first term as president, Johnson had named two justices, Abe Fortas and Thurgood Marshall. By the end of his second term, five of the nine justices on the highest court in the land are Johnson appointees, ensuring his presidency shapes the country for years and decades to come. Johnson has always wanted the government to help people work rather than simply hand them cash. When he signed his anti-poverty law in 1964, he said he wanted to offer poor Americans, quote, Opportunity and not dolls. So in December of nineteen seventy-one, he signs a bill that sets up childcare centers across the country, funded by an allocation of two billion dollars for the first-year pilot program. A Democratic senator from Minnesota named Walter Mondale wrote it with John Bretimus, a congressman from Indiana. They want a single parent to be able to hold a job without worrying about who is looking after their kids. Cities, counties, states, And local nonprofit groups share responsibility for running the centers, which offer health services and schooling along with the daycare. Any three or four-year-old can enroll. Some centers even stay open at night for parents who work late. A family that makes under $4,300 a year or $40,000 today can use them for free, while everyone above that line pays a fee based on their income. Johnson is termed out in 1972. So he throws his political weight behind his longtime vice president Hubert Humphrey, helping him become the Democratic nominee for president. On the other side, Ronald Reagan, now in his second term as governor of California, wins the Republican nomination on the same promise that put him in the governor's mansion to begin with, putting people on welfare back to work. Voter fatigue from twelve years of successive Democratic presidencies, coupled with Ronald Reagan's charismatic personality and speaking ability, wins Reagan the White House by a comfortable margin. Lyndon Baines Johnson leaves office on January 20th, 1973, at 64 years old, having served as president for longer than anyone outside of Franklin Roosevelt. He retires to his ranch in Texas, but he only gets two days there. A heavy smoker for most of his adult life, Johnson suffers a fatal heart attack while sitting in his bedroom. Despite dying at a relatively young age, Johnson leaves behind a substantial legacy, including the creation of Medicare. Fair Housing Law, child care centers opening across country, and a majority on the Supreme Court. When Ronald Reagan becomes president in 1973, the childcare centers Johnson created have been open for a year. President Reagan thinks raising small children is a family's job, and that Washington should stay out of it. So in his first budget, he attempts to cut funding for the program. But Democrats still run Congress, and the program is popular. So Reagan is ultimately unsuccessful at cutting its budget. Packed with Johnson appointees, the Supreme Court Is about to flex its muscle as well. In 1968, a sheet metal worker from San Antonio named Demetrio Rodriguez joined a group of parents in suing the state of Texas over the way it allocates money for public schools. They argued that the system gives schools in poor neighborhoods far less money than the ones in wealthy areas. Rodriguez's sons went to Edgewood Elementary, which had a leaky roof, a shortage of textbooks, and a lot of teachers who weren't fully certified. Texas law let each school district raise money by taxing the property inside its borders. Since property values in Edgewood were low, the district charged the highest tax rate in the San Antonio area and still only raised $26 per year per student. Conversely, Alamo Heights, one of the wealthiest districts nearby, charged a lower rate and raised $333 per student, more than twelve times as much. Rodriguez and the other parents had asked a federal court to throw that system out. In 1971, it agreed, and the state took the case to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rules for them two months after Reagan takes office in a 5-4 decision, with the five justices Johnson appointed making up the entire majority. Writing for the majority opinion, Chief Justice Arthur Goldberg says that a state can't let the money for a child school depend on how wealthy the neighborhood around it is. As a result of the ruling, every legislature in the country has to rewrite the way it pays for education. Most of them end up collecting the taxes statewide and sending each district the same amount per student. In Texas, this puts Edgewood level with Alamo Heights. The NAACP has a schools case of its own headed for the court. Back in 1970, the civil rights group sued Michigan to desegregate the public schools in Detroit. Federal judge Stephen Roth found that the schools had been segregated on purpose and that they couldn't be integrated inside the city limits because so many white families had already moved to the suburbs. So he ordered a single plan for Detroit and its 53 suburban school districts, with buses carrying students across the city line in both directions. The Supreme Court gives the go ahead for that plan in the summer of 1974, again, with Johnson's appointees making up the majority decision. That busing order is the largest in American history, and it's deeply unpopular in the suburbs, where many white families decide to move beyond the 53 impacted districts or switch to private schools. While the justices are rewriting the rules for the country's school system, President Reagan faces his first international crisis. In October of 1973, Egypt and Syria launch a surprise attack on Israel. Back in 1967, Israel had launched a preemptive attack after Egypt expelled UN peacekeeping forces and began amassing troops on the Israeli border. Egypt lost that war and significant amounts of territory and had been plotting to take it back in the years since. The Soviet Union at this time is sending weapons to Egypt and Syria, and since Israel is a close American ally, President Reagan flies in American weapons to replace what the Israeli army is losing in the fighting. In response, Arab oil producers cut off sales to the United States. With those American weapons arriving, the fighting quickly turns against Egypt and Syria. Israeli forces cross the Suez Canal into Egypt, and the war ends in a ceasefire on october twenty fifth. But the oil embargo outlasts the war. By the time it's lifted in March of nineteen seventy four, the price of oil has quadrupled, pushing the United States deep into an economic recession. Voters place the blame squarely on President Reagan, and his approval ratings plummet. The United States only sent weapons to Israel, not soldiers, so the country officially remains at peace just as it has been since the last troops left Vietnam in 1966. Even so, the military is still drafting about a hundred thousand men a year through the lottery Johnson started. Reagan believes a free country shouldn't make men serve when it isn't at war. So in nineteen seventy four he ends the draft. And turns the military into an all-volunteer force. By 1976, voters have lived through three years of expensive gas and mass corporate layoffs, putting President Reagan in serious trouble as he runs for re-election. Then, the Democrats nominate Robert Kennedy, the 50-year-old senator from New York who has been the party's best-known name since Johnson left office. Has spent the decades since Johnson's decision on Vietnam working on poverty in the cities. In Bedford Stuyvesant, a poor black neighborhood in Brooklyn, he helped set up a corporation that fixes up housing and brings in jobs. The program is a success, and Kennedy runs for president on a promise to start more of them. He beats Reagan in a landslide victory that November. Robert Kennedy is finally out in front, just as Johnson once pictured him. Except the fight he's leading is for Johnson's great society programs. President Kennedy takes office in January of 1977, with voters still angry about layoffs and the price of gas, so fixing the economy is his first order of business. Like Lyndon Johnson with his no-dolls rule, Kennedy doesn't believe in simply handing people a check. He wants every American who is able to work to have a decent job at decent pay. Taking advantage of a Democratic-controlled Congress, he signs a jobs bill based on an idea he first proposed as a senator in 1967, where the federal government partners with private companies to build plants and hire workers in the places hit hardest by the recession. To pay for it, he closes tax loopholes used by some of the wealthiest Americans. Back when he was a senator, Kennedy had also teamed up with the other senator from New York, a Republican named Jacob Javits. To change the law behind Johnson's poverty programs so that federal money could pay for corporations like the one in Bedsty. That corporation is run by a board of people from the neighborhood working alongside a second board of business executives that includes the heads of IBM and CBS. Early on, it fixed up 400 brownstones and tenements and got 65 banks to pool their money for home loans in the neighborhood. IBM even opened a plant there. Bringing 300 new jobs with it. As president, Kennedy uses that federal money to start corporations just like it in poor neighborhoods across the country. With people going back to work and new corporations opening in one city after another, voters reelect President Kennedy to a second term in 1980. While Kennedy is putting Americans back to work, the part of the world Lyndon Johnson walked away from has stayed at peace. Back in 1969, the year after Vietnam became one country, Johnson had opened an American embassy in Hanoi so the two governments could deal with each other directly. Ronald Reagan was no friend of the communists, but closing that embassy would have cut off the 300,000 South Vietnamese refugees now living in the United States from the relatives they left behind. So Reagan kept it open, and President Kennedy does the same. Next door in Cambodia, Prince Norodom Sionuk is still in charge, and he's still keeping his country neutral, meaning they are siding with neither the communists nor the Americans. Remember, Cambodia has its own communist guerrillas called the Khmer Rouge. But because the war in Vietnam ended back in 1966, the fighting never crosses the border. So the Khmer Rouge never get the chaos they need to grow. They remain a small force in the countryside, and Cambodia stays at peace. For decades. Jump ahead to 2026. And Vietnam is still one country under the Communist Party within an American embassy that has been open in Hanoi for 57 years. The 300,000 South Vietnamese who left on Navy ships in 1966 never went back. And today, their grandchildren live in the neighborhoods those families started in American cities. Here at home, the military is still an all-volunteer force. Just as President Reagan left it in 1974. And every president since Robert Kennedy, Republican or Democrat, has kept Johnson's child care centers open because too many working parents depend on them to ever shut them down. Those centers are now 54 years old and they still take any three or four-year-old in the country free of charge for the poorest families. The two school rulings from the Supreme Court that Johnson built are still the law of the land. States still divide their education money evenly among districts, so what a school can spend doesn't depend on what the homes around it are worth. And in Michigan, school buses still cross the Detroit line every weekday morning under the plan Judge Roth drew up for the city and its 53 suburbs. Back in the real world, President Johnson sided with his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and expanded the Vietnam War. Johnson told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin that he knew he'd be crucified either way, but in the alternate timeline, he chooses to leave Vietnam and still wins a second term. Vietnam usually gets taught as a war America stumbled into without knowing the cost. But in July of 1965, George Ball told Johnson to his face. That America couldn't win. Clark Clifford, the Washington lawyer who advised President Johnson, predicted five years of fighting and 50,000 dead, which turned out to be too low. Johnson and nearly everyone around him assumed that whoever lost Vietnam was Finnish, just as Harry Truman had been after the Communists took China. The war was also popular when Johnson chose it. In August of 1965, 61% of Americans told the Gallup poll that sending troops wasn't a mistake. With the war going, the real Lyndon Johnson's party lost 47 seats in the House in 1966. But in the alternate timeline, Democrats only lose 35, mostly over concerns about housing and riots, allowing them to keep control of Congress. The second term Johnson never got went to Richard Nixon, who vetoed the child care bill. And as a result, American families still pay for daycare on their own at an average cost of over $13,000 a year, a third of what a typical single parent earns. The four justices appointed by Nixon in the real timeline also decided both school cases against the families who brought them. So the law still lets a state fund each school by the wealth of its neighborhood, and it still keeps courts from ordering a city and its suburbs to desegregate together. In 2019, Edbuild, a nonprofit that studied education funding, found that school districts with mostly non-white students get $23 billion a year less than largely white districts, even when you control for the same number of kids. In the alternate timeline, the war ends before it can spread into Cambodia. But in our real one, it spread there in 1970, which let the Khmer Rouge take power five years later and kill up to 2 million Cambodians. George Ball warned Johnson that the worst outcome was the mightiest power in the world fighting poorly armed guerrillas and losing. In the alternate timeline, the Communists take South Vietnam two years after the United States leaves. In ours, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. lists the names of more than 58,000 Americans who died in that war. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. And if you really like it, tell a friend or two. And if you don't, please do not rate or subscribe. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control-Z with me. Control-Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on Patreon. That's C T R L Z Rewritten, all one word. And leave it in the comments.