Elizabeth Shannon (Napoleon's World)

Elizabeth Annabelle Rose Shannon (nee Danson) (10/10/1925-) was the 38th President of the United States of America, serving 1981-1989, and was the first and to date only female President in American history, and the only female to ever run on the top of a national party ticket (two other women have run as Vice Presidential candidates).

Elizabeth "Liz" Shannon was also, from 1971-1975, the first female Governor of Michigan and only the fourth woman to ever serve as a Governor in the United States, and prior to her term as Governor she was a United States Congresswoman representing Michigan's 5th District, from 1963-1969.

1980 Presidential Election
See also: 1980 US Presidential Election

Presidency: 1981-1989
Shannon was referred to by conservative commentator Ronald Reagan as "the ultimate pragmatist;" while she held fast to her conservative family values and fiscal beliefs, Shannon was also a noted deal-cutter who was approachable to Democratic leaders who were in power in Congress for large swaths of her term and who preferred involving herself in the legislative process to help hash out compromises between the two parties as opposed to deferring to Congressional leaders to do so themselves.

Domestic Agenda
Shannon's highest domestic priority entering office was to tackle the ongoing economic crisis while dealing with the sudden rise in racial strife across the country. While integration and equal rights was a long-ago achieved goal, the depression had caused racial turmoil to emerge once more.

Shannon delegated much of the domestic agenda to Vice President Redford, whom she thought was a more effective communicator of ideas based on his successful record in California and his approachability to the people, while she focused personally on the economy and foreign policy. In early 1982, Shannon made a televised address to the nation in which she outlind her "Decade of Goals," which included a permanent law on the status of abortion, a Presidential Women's Council, a national crackdown on crime, especially drug crime, by cracking down on suppliers as opposed to buyers, a balanced national budget and a lofty plan to establish a permanent presence on the moon by 1995.

Shannon focused heavily on her federal crime initiatives in her first term, plugging through Congress the Alton-Ringler Narcotics Distribution Act in 1984, which changed the focus of the DEA and law enforcement from draconian laws against low-income addicts and recreational buyers, and instead focusing efforts on punishing suppliers, smugglers, and high-end dealers. The law was hailed as a huge success in that it appropriated almost a billion dollars in government funds to modernizing the techniqeus in which federal and state narcotics agents could find and punish lawbreakers while providing new financial support and training to cash-strapped police departments nationwide as they struggled to recover from the depression.

In 1985, Shannon won her next big legislative coup by personally appealing the the Supreme Court about a ruling that would permanently leave the matter of abortion to the individual state, and in the landmark ruling Johnson v. Mississippi, the Court upheld the 1975 law passed by Dawley guaranteeing the state's right to determining the legality of abortion, denying the defendant's argument that the federal government was denying her right to privacy. Shannon later commented that despite her own support of abortion, she felt that a significant portion of the United States disagreed with her stance and that it was unfair for the federal government to unilaterally ban or allow the practice.

Shannon threw enormous support behind the measures of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and in 1986 helped force a federal mandated increase in the drinking age from 18 to 20 across the country, feeling that "two years of development and independence from the family will mature people enough to make intelligent decisions with alcohol," but in accordance, Shannon also fought to raise the age of draft eligibility to 20, as she claimed, "it is unfair that you can die for your country but not have a beer." The draft age was raised in 1990 under her successor, Robert Redford. However, the law would maintain that 18 year old men could still volunteer for military service at 18 and still vote at that age.

The next big-ticket items on Shannon's domestic agenda during her second term fell flat to an extent, and she found herself battling a measure to mandate universal health care that was being pushed by the emerging liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Shannon, who wanted to focus on new civil rights measures that would jointly affect minorities, women and homosexuals, was forced to go head-to-head with powerful Congressional Democrats, especially in the Senate, throughout 1987 and 1988 over their National Health Care Act. Eventually, Shannon vetoed what she called an "omnibus bill of crippling proportions" in August of 1988, and as Congressional election races began heating up, the Senate was unable to override her veto.

Shannon's greatest second-term accomplishment on the civil rights front, however, was her unequivocal backing of Bill Cosby during his sensationalized 1986 racketeering trial. Shannon swore to pardon Cosby were he to be convicted, but declined to pressure the state of Pennsylvania from dropping their racketeering and fraud charges against him. When Cosby was eventually acquitted following signs of procedural error by the state prosecution, Shannon flew Cosby to Washington to declare that "justice has been served appropriately." The support of Shannon and the following groundswell of Nationalist donors to the Civil Front further tied the National Party to the civil rights movement and continued to eradicate the influence of Southern Democrats who at one point had opposed such measures.

Economic Policy
Shannon entered the White House during the roughest economic period in United States history in almost sixty years and declared in her inauguration address that it was "time to clean shop." Her first act in office, only hours after inauguration, was to demand the resignations of every member of the National Bank's board of directors, most of whom had inexplicably been retained since the stock market crash in 1979, including Chairman Francis McCay. While the worst of the depression was considered over by most economists by the time Shannon was inaugurated in January 1981, the new President decided to immediately make her presence felt with what she called an "overhaul" of the federal government's regulatory system.

While Shannon emphasized the government's new role in jumpstarting the economy, her methods in doing so were about as far from the stimulus-focused and deficit spending efforts of the Wallace administration that preceded her. Shannon instantly ordered a freeze on interest rates from the National Bank, passed a sixth month "loan reprieve" from all commercial banks lending from the federal source, and also signed into law a bill that would separate investment and commercial banks from one another.

The depression gave way to the "lingering recession," which Shannon combatted with a policy of "Build Here, Build Now," in which billions were invested in infrastructure projects and defense spending. Shannon's kickstart of the defense contracting industry helped phase out generation-old fighter jets and built newer, safer and more efficient modern weapons, bringing the competitive balance of the United States and French Empire back up to par. She also invested in a high-speed, federally regulated fiberoptic network to connect computers throughout the nation and usher in "the computer era of economics," which would in turn cause the 1987-1991 technology boom.

Shannon's conservative but pragmatic financial strategies did not bring about a reversal of economic fortunes, as the period between 1983-1993 is often referred to as the "Lost Decade" - on New Year's Day 1994, the stock market finally reached the same pre-1979 levels it had once enjoyed. Still, the second half of Shannon's time in office experienced steady, healthy economic growth, although not nearly as robust as the 1970's had been. For this reason, Shannon is often credited with steering the US out of the deep recession with what was later titled "Elizanomics."

Foreign Policy and the "Shannon Doctrine"
Influenced by Secretary of State George Steinbrenner and Secretaries of Defense Julius Holmes (1981-1984), Carl Gerlich (1984-1987) and Brian Wolfenburg (1987-1989), Shannon focused her earliest efforts on the war effort in Brazil, going so far as to "delegate and divide" responsibility of domestic matters to Vice President Redford and her Attorney General, John Baihn.

Shannon's strategy in Brazil was to slowly withdraw American soldiers while escalating the "non-direct engagement," i.e an increase in aerial bombing, naval strikes and covert operations deep within Brazilian borders. In mid-1982, with the American presence in Brazil somewhat winding down as the Colombian army bought the largest single order of American-manufactured weapons in history, Shannon met with her top foreign policy and military aides at Camp Marks in the mountains of Maryland and outlined her new Cold War doctrine, summed up in a few words: "funding, not fighting."

In an ensuing address to the nation on October 8th, 1982, the then-embattled Shannon declared, "Detente has failed, as we clearly see a foe in Brazil with the full support of the French Empire, prepared to battle to the death. Our support must now shift to a method of preventing more dominoes from falling, as opposed from trying to push the fallen ones back the way they've already toppled."

The implementation of the Shannon Doctrine and disastrous "retreat" of American soldiers in Brazil effectively ended the brief era of detente enjoyed since the early 1970's but at the same time removed much of the Hoover/van Dyke-era methods of direct engagement of American soldiers or intelligence operatives overseas to topple French-backed regimes. Shannon's Nationalists suffered heavily in the 1982 midterm elections, although Shannon's successful withdrawal of American soldiers back into Colombia by Christmas 1983 was hailed as a major step towards regional peace. Shannon ended the draft a month later and announced that the American presence in Colombia would be cut in half, to remain only within their ally's borders in case the Brazilians were to invade, but the message was clear: America had lost in Brazil.

Regardless, Shannon maintained a strong role in the Cold War and financed the Third Iberian War in 1985 and helped avoid a nuclear confrontation during the 1988 Persian Gulf War. Wary foreign leaders were often unsure how to greet Shannon while she was on foreign visits, but the first female President often showed enormous deference and reverence to local customs, even wearing a head shawl while visiting countries with a Muslim majority such as Turkey, Arabia or Egypt, and she wore a sari during her landmark tour of Bengal, Gangestan and Mysore in 1987. Her visit to France on Shroud Day 1986 was seen as an unusual but hailed moment in US-French relations.

Possibly her greatest individual achievement as President, however, was the negotiation of lasting peace between Syria and the Zionist Liberation Front, punctuated by the Camp Marks Accords in 1986, in which the Syrian government agreed to establish an autonomous Zionist state within their borders, and which was followed in 1988 with the Jerusalem Treaty, which denationalized the city of Jerusalem and made it a special protectorate of the League of Nations, a territory all three Semitic faiths and people of all religions around the world could share equally, a treaty Shannon herself signed eagerly on the steps of the Dome of the Rock.

Cabinet and Appointments
Elizabeth Shannon made sure to surround herself with an enormously capable Cabinet, drawing from the model of Clyde Dawley and hiring advisors from both ends of the National Party's broad political spectrum. She made a surprising choice in 1983 when she fired her National Security Advisor, Carl Hunt, and hired Cyrus Bloch, the first black man to serve on the Cabinet.

During her term, three Supreme Court justices retired and one died, allowing Shannon to appoint a bevy of new, conservative minds to the Court, including the Court's first Hispanic in George Sanchez and the Court's first foreign-born member, English-born Howard Smith.

Probably Shannon's most influential Cabinet member was Secretary of State George Steinbrenner, a powerful, conservative foreign policy expert who hailed from the Center of International Relations, one of the largest foreign policy think tanks in Washington. Steinbrenner was the "arrow to Shannon's bow," as one administration official phrased it, and during his eight years at the State Department revolutionized the diplomatic field and exerted an enormous amount of influence over the foreign policy decisions of Shannon and even her successor Redford, and his 1986 trip to Portugal was seen as a political statement on his part, rather than America's. Another important member of her administration was Chief of Staff Robert Hyman (1986-1989), who would later serve as the ambassador to France between 1991 and 1994.

Public Image
As the first female President, there was a great deal made over her image as being "ladylike." Shannon was an admirer of Gangestani Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and she employed two wardrobe advisors whose entire job was to select which outfits she was to wear to what events. Shannon herself joked, "As the first woman President, I need someone to pick out my wardrobe, otherwise I'd never get anything done while I'm deciding what to wear!"

Shannon was also regarded by allies and opponents as a shifty political figure with a multi-faceted persona; she employed often a sympathetic, maternal image, leading her to be called "Grandma President" or "Aunt Liz," an image she equally embraced and spurned, depending on the context. Her 1984 Presidential campaign focused much on her matronly appeal to poorer voters, making sure they knew they had a President looking out for them as a mother looks after a child.

However, she also was known as "Iron Liz" or the "Iron Woman," due to her occasional brazen attitude and firm stance in the face of foreign or Congressional opposition. Presidential historian Clyde Bartley once commented that no President could stare someone down like Shannon, and that during her reputation around Washington was that "one moment, she's pulling cookies out of the oven and handing you a tall glass of milk, and then ten seconds later, she's an ice-cold bitch."

Shannon was aided enormously by the First Husband, Roger Shannon, who was an articulate former engineer who was often cited as one of the most influential spouses in Presidential history, due to his own political acumen and his confrontational, charismatic speaking style.

Shannon's approval rating was low for the majority of her first term, typically hovering right under 50%, before it moved up thanks to economic stability and the ending of the Brazilian conflict in 1984 just in time to help her reelection. Still, Democratic opponents jumped behind the slogan, "you can't spell Brazil without an L-I-Z" or referring to the conflict as the "Bra-Liz-ian War." Her "Elizanomics" were derided for being naive, and despite her relative youth at leaving office of 62, Shannon was often referred to as a "stale old woman" or "Little Old Grammy."

Post-Presidency and Legacy
Elizabeth Shannon retired mostly from the political arena after leaving office in 1989, although she began an initiative as a humanitarian in 1993 aimed largely at the developing nations of South Asia and Africa. She spent most of the 1990's travelling in African and Indian countries on a variety of Aide Internationale missions. In 2001, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Shannon ended her various philanthropic and humanitarian efforts after a major heart attack in 2003, which left her paralyzed from the waist down and bound to a wheelchair. Regardless, the 82-year old Shannon spoke at the 2008 Nationalist Convention to rousing applause, the first time she had spoken at a party convention since 1992.

Shannon opened her Presidential library in Clark, Michigan in 1994 and has stated that she wishes to be buried there someday.