Age of Confusion

Episode 20 (Season 2, Episode 10): Click to Play! 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 the 1964 election season begins to heat up, the Kennedy administration's "limited" involvement in propping up the repressive government of Vietnam becomes increasingly unglued, undermined by coups within the Vietnamese military and pressure by North Vietnam and its Communist allies, Russia and China. Kennedy dithers on a decision to begin involving American forces directly, but finally acts in response to domestic political concerns. Whether his actions will backfire very much remains to be seen. Length: 19:25 Show Notes For This Episode Next Episode: March 28, 2021

In this, the inaugural episode of Age of Confusion, our voyage into the alternate timeline of history begins on November 22, 1963, as President John F. Kennedy, visiting Dallas, Texas to kick off his 1964 re-election campaign, narrowly avoids the bullets of a sniper perched in the Texas School Book Depository. The attempt itself, its aftermath, its personal and religious resonance for Kennedy and the ultimate fate of his would-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, are detailed. Length: 19:43 Show Notes For This Episode Next Episode: No Later Than March 14, 2021