"I was never the obvious choice for the Presidency", President Seaton would write in his memoirs. Nevertheless, Seaton had been given a gift, and he chose not to waste it. The new President would base his vision of governance on that of his old boss, the aging former President Dewey--who he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Seaton had served as Interior Secretary from 1949 to 1951, and, though a minor cabinet position, he felt himself to now be the natural inheritor of the internationalist and progressive President. His cabinet would reflect this, as former Ambassador to the United Nations Nelson Rockefeller would return to his career of diplomacy as Secretary of State. Nevertheless, the new President made clear his determination to squelch the growth of international communism, appointing veteran and red-hunting Senator Richard Nixon to the post of Attorney General and Walter Judd to Secretary of Defense.
Major markers of the Seaton administration would be the decision to not only vigorously enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1950, but to sign off on the Civil Rights Act of 1962 and to pass a private sector-based universal health coverage program. Seaton would also buck Republican conventional wisdom in pushing for a trade deal with countries that had benefited from the Dewey Administration-funded reconstruction of Europe--a careful blend of diplomacy and economic policy. Attorney General Nixon, meanwhile, would be tasked with purging the civil service of "eight years of Humphrey" while Walter Judd's Pentagon would begin the deployment of missiles to nations the Humphrey administration had neglected to foster alliances with--this would sometimes be at the expense of human rights and other liberal concerns.
1964Joe Kennedy, Jr. would cement his place as one of the 20th Century's political geniuses in reviving the seemingly moribund New Deal Coalition. Nationwide regulations on school busing between districts--backed up by Supreme Court decisions--had caused middle class and suburban households from Massachusetts, to Illinois, to the Deep South to go into an uproar. Meanwhile, Seaton's internationalist policies had not only ballooned American overseas spending, it had alienated swaths of voters across the industrial Mid-West--a region that had, crucially, fallen to Seaton in 1960. Joey Kennedy, seeing this opening, had worked since 1961 to build a delegate coalition across the nation to take the nomination without contest on the first ballot. The decision of Republicans to campaign on "right-to-work" legislation in 1962 (to significant loss) would be key in Democratic electioneering. President Seaton, despite general prosperity and an impressive legislative record (especially in dealing with four years of Democratic majorities), faced significant backlash including a grassroots primary challenge from the right in the form of Senator John Bricker. Nevertheless, President Seaton and Vice President Morton would be renominated. In the general election, the Democratic campaign engineered a victory rooted in not only a re-energized labor, but a Southern United States that had rediscovered its roots.
Kennedy came into office promising middle- and lower-class tax cuts, greater development of America's atomic arsenal, the protection of labor and of American manufacturing, and a "return to normalcy" on civil rights in a nation on the verge of racial violence.
