Summary of President Howard Hughes's Second Term (1945-1947) | A House Divided Alternate Elections
Howard Hughes, the 35th President of the United States
Cabinet
Vice President:
- Alvin York (1945-1947)
Secretary of State:
- Owen D. Young (1945, died),
- W. Averell Harriman (1945-1947)
Secretary of the Treasury:
- Dean Acheson (1945-1947)
Secretary of War:
- Robert S. Kerr (1945-1947, fired),
- Elliott Roosevelt (1947, resigned),
- Lawrence A. Hyland (1947, acting)
Attorney General:
- Jack Tenney (1945-1947)
Secretary of the Navy:
- James V. Forrestal (1945-1947)
Postmaster General:
- Elliott Roosevelt (1945-1947, promoted),
- William P. MacCracken Jr. (1947, acting, appointment rejected)
- William Washington Howes (1947, acting)
Secretary of the Interior:
- Edwin W. Pauley (1945-1947)
Secretary of Education:
- Allan Nevins (1945, resigned)
- Orland K. Armstrong (1945-1947)
Secretary of Labor:
- William Hammatt Davis (1945-1946, fired),
- Howard W. Smith (1946-1947)
Secretary of Agriculture:
- Chester C. Davis (1945-1947)
Secretary of Commerce:
- Jesse H. Jones (1945-1947)
The Flight of Icarus
Howard Hughes’s reelection campaign proved to be a triumphant vindication of his first term in office, as he batted away the anti-war challenge of Norman Thomas and his party secured a narrow majority in the Senate. With this newfound flexibility in his appointments, Hughes asked for the resignation of Attorney General Newbold Morris who he had only reluctantly put up as a compromise choice after the consecutive rejection of several of his previous nominees. Hughes would replace Morris with former acting Attorney General Jack Tenney, while Undersecretary of Education Allan Nevins was promoted to fill Vice President Alvin York’s former position and General Electric President Owen D. Young was surprisingly chosen to succeed Louis Brownlow as Secretary of State. Although allegedly planning to also replace Secretary of Labor William Hammatt Davis, Hughes soon became caught up in a different matter. Despite his age, Secretary of State Young proved much more vigorous than his predecessor in seeking to establish answers to questions surrounding the post-war world order and organized a major conference in Caracas between the “Big Three” powers of the United Kingdom, the German Empire, and the United States. Not only insisting on personally attending the conference, Hughes demanded that he personally fly the American delegation to Caracas in an experimental plane developed by his aircraft company. Thus, several high-ranking American officers, political officials, and various aides boarded Hughes’s plane on a fateful March day in 1945.
Just over an hour into the flight, disaster struck as a fluid leak in the starboard engine suddenly severed Hughes’s ability to steer the aircraft. Initially just listing to one side, the plane suddenly pitched downward and began rapidly losing altitude. Despite attempting several different measures such as variously cutting power to different engines, Hughes found himself unable to regain control of the aircraft and instead prepared for a controlled crash landing on the coast of North Carolina. Unfortunately, while passing over the resort town of Nags Head in an attempt to land on a nearby beach, the plane suddenly dipped and crashed into a beach house instead. The impact caused the fuel tanks to explode, leaving a scene of chaos as the entire surrounding area became consumed in a fiery inferno. Among those killed in the crash were the new Secretary of State Owen D. Young, Hughes’s trusted confidante Assistant Secretary of War Glenn Odekirk, accomplished Admiral Ernest J. King, and Air Force General Laurence S. Kuter, while most others on board the plane suffered injuries ranging from the superficial to the serious. President Hughes, having been knocked unconscious, may have died too had it not been for the split-second decision of Ambassador to Germany W. Averell Harriman to pull Hughes from the flaming wreckage and thus save his life. Yet with several broken bones, a collapsed left lung, and third degree burns across much of his body, Hughes’s survival was hardly guaranteed.
President Hughes in the hospital not long after the disastrous crash at Nags Head
Pandemonium
The weeks following the crash proved tumultuous as the Hughes administration scrambled to deal with the fact that their President could perish at any moment. Holding out hope that Hughes would recover and refusing to be seen as usurping any authority, Vice President Alvin York declined to exercise presidential powers beyond the bare necessities in the days immediately following the crash and repeatedly rejected calls that he invoke the 35th Amendment to remove Hughes from office. Defying all expectations, Hughes’s condition steadily improved and he attempted to govern from his hospital bed by appointing W. Averell Harriman as his new Secretary of State and signing several executive orders related to wartime administration. Yet the reality was that Hughes remained seriously incapacitated and his cabinet officers took over much of the responsibility for administering the federal government. However, such an environment proved a fertile breeding ground for personal and factional rivalries. Coming from starkly different backgrounds with strongly different approaches to the war effort, Secretary of War Robert S. Kerr and Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal were among the first to come to blows as Kerr sought to prioritize the war in Russia while Forrestal sought a decisive defeat of the Japanese. But a larger conflict loomed over the cabinet between more independently-minded figures pressing their own agenda such as Secretary of the Treasury Dean Acheson, Secretary of State W. Averell Harriman, and Secretary of Labor William Hammatt Davis against the loyalists of the President such as Postmaster General Elliott Roosevelt, Secretary of the Interior Edwin W. Pauley, and Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones.
As President Hughes recovered, he came to rely on his hard-nosed personal secretary Nadine Henley to become his personal representative to the cabinet. Fighting through bias against her gender and ridicule at her lack of an official position by seizing control of the flow of information to the President, Henley became a powerful force in the government instrumental in decisions as momentous as that to use the atomic bomb on three Russian cities in an attempt to secure their surrender. Although President Hughes managed a full recovery by the autumn of 1945, it was little secret that he had been changed both by the ordeal of the crash and the heavy prescription of codeine and valium by his doctors during his recovery. Already known for his personal eccentricities and said to be cracking under the intense stress of a wartime presidency, Hughes’s notorious reclusivity was only amplified and according to leaks from the State Department he refused to meet with anyone but a small number of confidantes who could be trusted with adhering to his rigorous requirements set forth by his lengthy memos regarding personal meetings. Thus, little changed after Hughes’s official return to governmental affairs, as despite the public insistence of Vice President York and other loyalists that President Hughes’s mind remained as sharp as ever, Nadine Henley continued to serve as the executor of his duties while Hughes was said to lock himself away for days at a time in the White House movie theater.
President Howard Hughes during his convalescence
Fish Out of Water
While the American people could hardly look to the executive branch for clear leadership, Congress was even more wracked with conflict. Although a comfortable plurality in the popular vote had guaranteed the Federalist Reform Party control over the Senate, the House lacked any clear governing coalition. Forced to acquiesce to another term as Speaker of the House, independent Murray Seasongood remained the only glue sufficiently strong to allow Congress to continue to pass war budgets amid torturous tripartisan negotiations in the face of obstinate obstructionism by Socialist Workers floor leader Darlington Hoopes. Any other serious legislation found itself cast aside time after time, ranging from a Social Democratic proposal for a socialized healthcare system to a Federalist Reform proposal for a corporatist economic system to a Solidarist effort to require the award of a percentage of war contracts to small businesses. Even attempts at a veteran’s bill which ostensibly held tripartisan support failed to achieve compromise as the various party delegations squabbled over the extent of the benefits, their form, and which types of service members to provide them to. One of the few measures of distinct policy that emerged from the deeply divided House would be the Fulbright Resolution penned by Solidarist Arkansas Representative J. William Fulbright announcing the House in favor of a world government after the conclusion of the war. Yet the vague nature of the wording, its lack of force in law, and the ridicule subjected to it by the Hughes administration made even this accomplishment a limited one.
Yet with a commanding absolute majority under the leadership of firebrand Indiana Senator Sherman Minton, the Federalist Reform Party had little trouble airing its agenda in the Senate. In addition to its own proposed veteran’s benefits bill, the Senate also passed a bill permanently enshrining a system of universal military training for young men. In reaction to a wave of strikes ushered in by the summary firing of Secretary of Labor William Hammatt Davis and his replacement by the unpopular Howard W. Smith, the Senate also passed criminal syndicalism bills and several corollary bills restricting wartime strikes as well as political contributions by unions. Also seeking to address their long-standing program of political reform, the Senate passed several bills granting the President the power of the line item veto, creating an Executive Office of the President with expanded staffing, granting the President sole discretion to reorganize the executive branch, and even expanding the size of the Supreme Court. But time after time, when presented with each of these bills passed by the Senate, the opposition parties in the House of Representatives ensured that none of them gained the force of law. Ultimately, such obstructionism would become widely denounced by the Federalist Reform-aligned media and was a crucial factor in the victory of the Federalist Reform Party in the 1946 midterms despite the crisis consuming the executive branch.
The Grey Eminence
Once distrusted by President Hughes as a threat to his power even if he was indispensable due to his diplomatic skill and strong connections, following the crash at Nags Head former Ambassador to Germany W. Averell Harriman was elevated to Secretary of State and found himself in near total control of the foreign policy direction of the country at the critical juncture of the Second World War. As little groundwork had been laid by his predecessor Louis Brownlow, Harriman was free to carve his path towards a new world order without significant domestic interference. Instead, his greatest obstacle would be the Foreign Minister of the German Empire: Herbert von Dirksen. Where Harriman sought a balance of four major powers between the United States, the United Kingdom, the German Empire, and the Chinese Republic, von Dirksen sought to ensure Germany’s place in the sun as the premier global superpower. Where Harriman was a believer in a world order based on peace and international cooperation, von Dirksen was an unabashed advocate of his country’s expansionist military-industrial complex. And where Harriman hoped to achieve the spread of democracy around the globe, von Dirksen was a zealous defender of his country’s traditionalist and authoritarian monarchy. Already distrustful of the intentions of the German aristocracy during his time as ambassador, as Harriman established himself as Secretary of State he became convinced that Germany would be an obstacle to his geopolitical aims.
Thus, Harriman began to develop a policy of containing the rampant expansionism of Germany while currying favor with the other major global powers. Beginning first with the United Kingdom, Harriman developed a strong working relationship with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and established a joint statement of principles opposing territorial expansionism, supporting self-determination of the European people, and coming out in favor of international cooperation through some type of global organization. In distant China where the tide of war was finally turning against Japan after a decade-long fight for survival, Harriman negotiated the arrangement of a coalition government recognizing Chiang Kai-Shek as the Premier of China and Feng Yuxiang as the Vice Premier with a melding of their followers in important ministerial posts to help address the persistent infighting that had dogged the Chinese war effort. Also securing the diplomatic backing of much of Latin America with his promises of cooperation on matters of trade and global rebuilding, Harriman then turned his focus towards challenging the ambitions of Germany. Although no friend of either the King of France or the integralist Italian regime, Harriman propped up both to counter German efforts to abolish the French and Italian states wholesale and pilfer their colonies. Likewise, Harriman supported the reestablishment of the Tsardom of Bulgaria and the transfer of occupational duties away from Germany to weaken its position in the Balkans while creating international commissions to study issues of ethnicity and statehood to challenge German claims to the Austrian crownlands. Perhaps most crucially, Harriman blocked von Dirksen’s calls to achieve the Drang Nach Osten through the annexation of wide swathes of Russian territory by demanding that a legitimate Russian government be identified to secure an instrument of surrender.
Intrigue at Court
As more and more news made its way out of the White House regarding the President’s bizarre conduct and apparent inability to manage the government, the mood within the Federalist Reform Party was beginning to swing against Howard Hughes. The inciting incident would come with the turn of the new year, when Secretary of War Robert S. Kerr demanded a personal meeting with the President to force him to accept the nuclear bombing of Japan which Nadine Henley had reported Hughes opposed out of concern for the effect of nuclear fallout. Coercing two military attendants to allow him into the White House movie theater that Hughes had allegedly been locked in for the past week, Kerr was said to have stumbled in to find Hughes completely in the nude save for a loosely-tied bathrobe and tissue boxes on his feet. Enraged at the violation of his privacy and accusing Kerr of violating safety protocols amid continued waves of bubonic plague, President Hughes fired Kerr on the spot. In what many saw as a tactless power grab in the aftermath, Postmaster General Elliott Roosevelt successfully urged Hughes to appoint him as the next Secretary of War but thanks to intra-party opposition led by Hughes’s old enemy Maine Senator Owen Brewster, Roosevelt only barely survived his confirmation vote.
Roosevelt soon found himself overwhelmed by the demands of the office and was quickly embroiled in a scandal of his own when it was revealed by a publication from Secretary of the Treasury Dean Acheson that several prospective defense contractors paid thousands of dollars for Roosevelt to enjoy the pleasures of several Washington nightclubs. Not long after, the President’s own party rejected the nomination of William P. MacCracken Jr. as Postmaster General after the confirmation hearings revealed that in his prior work on airmail contracts he had orchestrated the illicit award of contracts to high bidders including the Hughes Aircraft Company. By then, it was apparent that the Federalist Reform Party was in open revolt against the president with his detractors now rapidly outnumbering and outmaneuvering his remaining loyalists. The next revelation would come from the Council of Censors, which subpoenaed a report from the presidential doctor Verne Mason that had been suppressed by the president’s secretary Nadine Henley. The report discussed at length the President’s crippling pain, addiction to opiates, mental fog, and extreme germaphobia among a litany of other serious disabilities for a chief executive to have. Once published, this proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the President’s credibility.
The President Deposed
Yet by the clauses of the 35th Amendment to the Constitution passed after the similar incapacitation of President Howard P. Lovecraft, there was only one man who could invoke the process to remove Howard Hughes from office: Vice President Alvin York. Still feeling obligated to the man who had done so much for his political career and reluctant to take on the powers and responsibilities of the presidency, York had spent nearly two years resisting pressure to dethrone Hughes. But as the administration of Howard Hughes continued to crumble amid more and more revelations about the extent of his mental and physical incapacity, it became impossible for York to ignore his duty as Vice President. The inflection point came during a private meeting with Secretary of State W. Averell Harriman regarding the state of the executive branch. Harriman, who was already said to have used his contacts in Congress to stall a prospective veteran’s bill to avoid good press for President Hughes, intimated to York that the country could not continue to function amid the challenges of the imminent end of a global war without strong leadership and assuaged York’s concerns about assuming the position. Thus, York penned a letter to Congress declaring his opinion that Howard Hughes was no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Within a few days, Congress completed a perfunctory debate on what was already a foregone conclusion. By stark majorities in both chambers, Howard Hughes was declared incapable and removed from the office of President. Seeking to preserve what dignity remained to Hughes, York had him quietly removed from the White House away from the prying eyes of reporters to return to the same obscurity he had emerged from so suddenly seven years ago.
How would you rate President Howard Hughes’s second term in office?