This was not the case under President Williams. She knew that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would block the treaty from passing so she began working with him early. Since Edward House, a close advisor to Woodrow Wilson, was not in the picture, Libby worked with Lodge directly to create the platform she would present as the American interest during the negotiations of the treaty.
The treaty addressed many of the future actions of the League of Nations. Libby knew that the League would not prove ultimately effective but was very familiar with the positive outcomes of the League. Incorporating these in the treaty, she was able to accomplish something that Wilson had not. She was able to get the treaty passed by the United States while protecting the interests of the American people. At the same time she was able to influence the world in the ways that the League of Nations had been able to, without the creation of the League. On the other hand, however, the absence of the League caused many issues that she could not have seen coming (which eventually led to the United States falling behind Germany, Yugoslavia, and the Ottoman Empire in world politics).
While the world did not notice the absence of Adolf Hitler, Libby and Vincent did. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was rising to power but the Libby Williams-version of the Treaty of Versailles had changed the ideology of Europe and Asia. The ideology behind Communism and Fascism was corrupted and people were not so easily taken in to that type of life. Dictators who were moving towards that type of thinking were dismissed. She didn’t know it yet but Mussolini would soon be exposed for who he really was and would never rise to full power in Italy.
The Japanese would continue treading their own path but without German or Italian influence. They would, however, successfully push for full dominance over China and would raise a vast army that would expand the Japanese Empire into most of Russia and into India. War would eventually push the Japanese back to their own island, freeing the nations they had conquered, including China – but all of this was years away.
Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles after World War I and for some time afterwards became a nation in disarray. As time passed, the government reconciled and was centralized and strengthened.
In the years to come, there was no rise of a German Nazi Party. The country suffered through the Great Depression but eventually righted itself and culture began to flourish in a nation that was once nearly destroyed.
In 1933, Albert Einstein decided to visit the United States. Where Adolf Hitler’s rise to power would have kept Einstein in the United States rather than returning to Germany, Hitler died during World War I and as a result Einstein went back to the Berlin Academy of Science. He made the same discoveries that led to the creation of the atomic bomb, only this time for Germany. Germany never entered into war on the side of the Japanese. The Holocaust never happened and the State of Israel was not created in 1947 by the United Nations partition of Palestine.
Germany kept the Russians in check and the Cold War never developed. Over the second half of the 20th Century, Germany continued to spread its influence throughout the world. German, rather than English, was the language of business.
Other wars that never would have happened did happen as a result of the new history. People and countries that would have lived in peace were decimated by wars – wars started through new timelines developed because of the death of Hitler. New countries were created and other countries that had previously ceased to exist such as Gran Columbia and Southwest Africa continued as nations. The Ottoman Empire did not dissolve and was now the third most powerful nation in the world behind Germany and Yugoslavia.
All of this happened because the President of the United States and an American were both at the same monument when the President was shot. And at a Belgian hospital, somehow both of them had entered the same coma-induced state of existence.
But the real moment when everything changed was when Vincent shot a young Adolf Hitler. Afterwards, somehow the dreamlike reality they shared edged into actual reality and that reality replaced the reality they had known.
Now, not only were they stuck in that new reality, they took the place of the people in the dream in which they were filling. The man who lay in the bed in the hospital in Belgium and the woman who was being prepared for a flight from Belgium back to the United States ceased to exist. Vincent took the place of his great-grandfather in history and Libby took the place of Woodrow Wilson.
What Libby and Vincent didn’t know, of course, was that the reality of Adolf Hitler ruling Germany, the reality that they had known, was also an alternate reality. Reality had been changed before; many times in fact.
Soon they would meet a man who had also previously changed reality. He was not pleased that everything had changed again. And he was not alone.
In 1920, Libby defeated James Cox and was reelected to a third term as President, riding the wave of popularity that her leadership had provided in making the United States a prosperous nation. What made this victory so special to Libby was that this election marked the first time that women were allowed to vote. This was also the first time that election results were broadcast over commercial radio.
During the campaign, Libby had done something of which was almost unheard. In another life, Warren G. Harding with Calvin Coolidge as his
