rock and roll part 2: It ain’t Ike.
I have been informed that Dwight D. Eisenhower would not have been the chosen Leader of the United States after the overthrow of President Henry Wallace in 1945. Who would it be then?
I believe the USA, during a really bad war with the Germans, would not have gone for the Germanic name to be appointed as your Presidential What-if. I remember there was a bit of controversy when Eisenhower was promoted over a whole raft of Full-Colonels in the Regular Army but since the next REALLY GOOD MAN in line right behind him at that time was named Krueger, General Marshall went ahead and appointed Ike to the European job and shipped Krueger out to the Pacific to work with/for MacArthur.
To add to your What-if, think of this; If Eisenhower had not been under MacArthur as Staff Officer in the Phillipines during the late 1930’s and while there learned, as others had before him, that as a General Macarthur was without peer, but as a Boss he was a perfect Asshole, i.e., nobody in the Regular Army wanted to work for him. I believe one of the reasons Ike was not sent to the Pacific [he did have previous Staff experience there] was because of his intense dislike for MacArthur [Mac did say after Ike went back to the States after leaving the Phillipines that Ike was a Superb Clerk!]. General Marshall had a far better view of Ike’s capabilities than anyone else in power did and Marshall was the Army Chief of Staff at the time.
I believe in line with your What-if that someone of the type you mentioned would have been chosen but that man would habe been General George Marshall, who had every attribute needed for any high office up to and including President, AND, he did not have a Germanic name as so many of our high-ranking Army/Navy Officers did at that time. Believe me, that was an important thing, then.
Bah De Bah Bah. Somehow my idea of the collisions of that nebulous “Powers that Be” brokering in our real onto Ike — a man for both political parties who’d see the construction of the war machine through– as they would in the alternate history under considerably different circumstances has been destroyed. Ah well. Live and Learn. All hail, quote-in-quote “President” George Marshall, I guess.
Update: On second thought, this would work out okay. You know… the “Marshall Plan”? The idea is that the alter-reality will work out to a point where it will easily converge back into our own reality, so our reality in 2006 would be identical in both.