"I have spent sixty years pointing a people in one direction. When the pointing stops, they will go in every direction at once."Elliot O'Neil, memoir, last chapter
Elliot O'Neil (9 April 2254 to 3 October 2348) was the second President of the United Nations of Earth and the first President of the Unified Solar Republic. He held the presidency for twenty-one years in two periods, from 2292 to 2300 and from 2328 to 2345, longer than anyone before or since. In his first period he signed the Manifest Pledge, founded Exploration Command and sent out the four explorers that found the Mardak Vol and the Voor. In his second he returned under the Third Term Amendment after the Voor trade ban of 2328, built the Grand Armada, led the federation through the Voor War and accepted the Voor surrender at the Krakre in 2340.
His enemies called him the New Alexander, and he took the name. He was born to Martian refugees on Earth and held one idea for eighty years: a species with four worlds would fight over them, and a species with forty would not. His critics have never forgiven the amendment that kept him in office. His supporters credit him with the Expansion Era and with the Republic itself.
Early life
O'Neil was born in Townsville, in the Pacific Union's Queensland, on 9 April 2254. His parents were Chasma schoolteachers whom the Coalition's occupation had moved to Earth in the population transfers of 2247. They stayed in a resettlement estate of 4,000 Martians on the rebuilt Queensland coast, because Chasma in the Program's first years had nothing to go back to.
He grew up on the estate and read, in its library, the lives of the conquerors. On his own account in his memoir, the one he returned to was Alexander's. It was not the conquests that held him. It was that Alexander had taken peoples who had fought each other for three centuries and pointed them all the same way. O'Neil's politics, his biographers agree, were that sentence.
The Chamber
O'Neil entered the Chamber of Representatives for Queensland North in 2283, at twenty-nine, in the first Chamber of the new federation. He sat on the Scientific Research committee. In 2288 the committee's vote on Vinak Pillai's budget for the hyperdrive was decided by one vote, and the vote was his.
Through 2289 and 2290 he argued that the drive answered a question the constitution had not asked: what the federation was for. When President Tuji, term-limited after 2291, declined to name a successor, O'Neil ran against the Treasury minister, Senator Ingrid Halvorsen of the European Federation, who ran on consolidation.
First presidency, 2292 to 2300
The election of 2291
O'Neil ran on one word, expansion. The election of 12 November 2291 gave him 54 percent of the votes cast on four worlds and 71 percent on Mars and the moons. Their people had been called colonial by a census the year before, and they understood the word.
The Manifest Pledge
The Manifest Pledge was his first act and the Expansion Era's founding instrument. It was a declaration that humanity's future lay beyond Earth and that every people would be part of the journey, and a funding act that the declaration was written to carry. It set the era's rule that every colony would be settled by the federation, with its founding population drawn by quota from a designated region. Each new world would carry, in O'Neil's words to the Chamber, "the footprint of a people and not the average of all of them".
In September 2292 he killed the Chartered Worlds Bill, which would have let companies found colonies. His argument was that the Jovian moons had been built under company charters and that the federation had fought a thirty-year war over the result.
Exploration
Exploration Command was founded at West Rhine on 1 January 2293. The four Voyager-class survey ships were launched in 2299 and the first three jump-capable warships commissioned on 1 January 2300. O'Neil left office on 15 January 2300 with the drive proved, the Fund committed for fifty years and the four ships about to depart. They found life on Phoenicia, the observation posts at Sirius, the Mardak Vol colony ship at Tadasca, the garden world of Mardak Vol and, in 2317, the Voor.
The Chamber years, 2300 to 2328
Ingrid Halvorsen won the election of 2299 on consolidation and held the Office of Settlement to two worlds until the pictures of Mardak Vol changed the Chamber's mind in 2309. O'Neil did not go home. He took back his Chamber seat in 2303 and held it through the presidencies of Halvorsen, Arjun Desai (2308 to 2316) and Nkemdirim Okafor (2316 to 2324).
For twenty-four years he was the Chamber's most senior representative and the leader of the Pledge majority. He argued for every appropriation the Fund asked for and against every cut the consolidation minority proposed. From 2318, after the federation saw a Voor hearth, he argued for a fleet. He chaired the defence committee from 2320 to 2328. War Plan Purple's funding, the Ferrer compromise and the forts' concession revenue all passed through his committee, and the shipbuilding title of 2320, which built the yards, was his bill.
In 2324, at seventy, he did not run. The constitution's fifth article limited a President to two terms, and the election belonged to the Voor trade. President Aurelio Benavides of the Argentine Republic, the Cirban Exchange's first director, was elected on the trade boom.
The return, 2328
The ban
The Voor Confederacy banned human trade on 1 January 2328. The Maweer trade stopped in a day and the Exchange's traffic halved in a month. The Gulf's companies told the Chamber in February that the Gulf's economy would shrink by a third that year. Benavides offered the Voor ambassador a suspension of the Maweer field licence. The High Council declined, and when the offer was reported in the Chamber on 26 February it ended his presidency.
The recall
The fifth article also let the Chamber, by two thirds with the Senate's agreement, declare the presidency vacant "for incapacity or loss of confidence". The drafters of 2283 had copied the clause from the European Federation's treaty, and no Chamber had used it. On 4 March 2328, on O'Neil's motion, the Chamber voted 540 to 190 that it had lost confidence in Benavides. The Senate agreed the next day, 88 to 22.
The Third Term Amendment
O'Neil had served two terms and could not stand. In the eight weeks before the special election he campaigned for an amendment instead. The Third Term Amendment passed the Chamber on 2 April 2328 by 530 to 200 and the Senate on 4 April by 84 to 26, and two thirds of the members' legislatures ratified it by 21 April.
Its text is short. A President elected at a special election after a declaration of lost confidence is not bound by the two-term limit, and may be re-elected for as long as the emergency continues, which the Chamber decides by a vote each January. The amendment did not name O'Neil, and every legislature that ratified it knew whom it named. The Chinese and European Federation delegations voted against it. The Martian, Jovian and colonial delegations, the Pledge's majority since 2291, gave it its two thirds.
Halvorsen, aged ninety, spoke against it in the Senate. She said the federation had built a presidency that could be removed only by the Chamber that had installed it.
Readiness
O'Neil won the special election of 14 May 2328 with 58 percent, at seventy-four. His one word this time was readiness. He took office on 1 June 2328 and told the Chamber that the federation had spent nine years selling the Confederacy its food and had learned on 1 January what the Confederacy thought the trade was for. It would spend the next five years learning what a fleet was for.
Second presidency, 2328 to 2340
The build-up
His third term was a war ministry without a war. The Emergency Naval Act of September 2328 doubled the Naval Act's remaining appropriation. He moved the Exploration and Settlement Fund's colony money to the yards, so that Hualapai, founded in 2330, was the era's last colony. He made Fleet Admiral Izabel Beattie's Interstellar Command the Navy's operational headquarters. In 2331 he created the post of Commander of the Grand Armada and appointed Grand Admiral Tyson Vol.
From 2329 to 2332 he offered the Confederacy every arrangement short of surrendering the field licence, and was told each time that the Council would consider it. The European Federation's and China's delegations and the consolidation press accused him of fuelling an arms race. He did not deny it. The pickets' count of the Voor build-up across the line was his answer, and the Chamber agreed every January that it was enough.
He was re-elected in November 2332 with 61 percent, at seventy-eight, and took office for the fourth time on 15 January 2333.
The war
The Ciriban Incident at Nomotar in July 2333 and the Voor declaration of 7 August brought the war he had prepared for. His memoir says he had not wanted a war and had spent five years making sure the federation would not lose one, and that the two were the same work.
He approved Vol's recommendation of an offensive into Voor space on 1 June 2334, after the Second Battle of Media. He gave the 108th ROD Division its name, the Boarders of Media, on 1 July 2334. On 10 January 2338, at eighty-four, he chose to take Hiverion from the ground rather than starve it. The decision cost 230,000 lives in the Siege of Hiverion. In September 2340 he and Vol held Beattie's fleet at the edge of the Maweer frontier and made no signal.
The surrender
O'Neil travelled five weeks from New Luxor to Hiverion by the third-generation drive. On 21 December 2340, aged eighty-six, he accepted the Voor surrender in the court of the Kindling, standing without help on the recording. His remarks were four sentences long and did not use the word victory. Schoolchildren learn them as they learn Tuji's.
First President of the Republic, 2341 to 2345
The Republic Act took effect on 1 January 2341, and the United Nations of Earth became the Unified Solar Republic. On 15 January 2341 the Chamber voted the emergency for the thirteenth time, by 620 to 140. Its resolution held that the Republic that had won the war should not change its President in the month of its founding. Constitutional historians have not forgiven the reasoning.
His last term covered the Republic's founding and the war's settlement: the Treaty of Ximpok, the constitution of the Voor territories, the transfer of the Voor Aegis's technology into the fleet, and the first worlds of the Second Wave. He lost the fight to renew the Exploration and Settlement Fund, which expired in 2342.
On 12 March 2344 he told the Chamber he would not stand again. The amendment would have allowed it, and the Chamber's majority, which had voted the emergency in January 2344 by 590 to 170, would have voted it again. His stated reason was that a Republic that could not change its President was not a Republic, and that the emergency had been meant for a war that was over. He named Dario Okonkwo, his Minister for Member Affairs, as his choice. Okonkwo won on 10 November 2344. O'Neil left office on 15 January 2345, at ninety, after twelve years and seven months of continuous tenure. That day the Chamber declined to declare the emergency for the first time since 2328, and the amendment went dormant.
Retirement and death
O'Neil had bought back his birthplace, the house on the Townsville resettlement estate, from the Pacific Union in 2300. He retired there in 2345 and took no further public office. He made two public statements in retirement, both against the Naval Reduction proposals of 2347, and declined every invitation to New Luxor.
He died at Townsville on 3 October 2348, aged ninety-four. The state funeral at New Luxor on 10 October was the largest gathering in the city's history: 4 million people in the streets and 9 billion watching on twenty-six worlds. The eulogies were given by President Okonkwo, by Tyson Vol, then eighty-one, and by the Trade-Speaker of Vi Simni, presiding member of the Voor High Council, who had signed the surrender to him. He was buried on 14 October in the estate's cemetery beside his parents, as his will asked.
Legacy
O'Neil's death marked the end of the Pledge majority that had held the Chamber since 2291. The Republic turned inward. The Chartered Worlds Bill that he had killed in 2292 passed, the Fund was not renewed, and the Naval Reduction Act of 2350 cut the fleet by half. The last chapter of his memoir had predicted it: when the pointing stopped, the people would go in every direction at once.
His reputation divides on the amendment. Constitutional historians hold that it cost the federation its clearest rule and made the emergency and the tenure of a President the same vote. His defenders point to what the tenure produced: a fleet that won a seven-year war against a power a thousand years older, and a Republic of twenty-one worlds. Both sides agree he left office of his own accord when he did not have to.
His grave at Townsville and the Museum of Humanity's Pledge gallery were among the Republic's most visited memorials through the following century. The Navy named the first ship of the Republic class laid down after his death, the battleship O'Neil, for him in 2349.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.1 "The Pillai Hyperdrive and the Manifest Pledge" and §7.2 "On the Solar Wind"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.1 "War Plan Purple" and §8.5 "The New Alexander: Elliot O'Neil"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 to §9.7
- Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.3 "End of a Dynasty" and §10.5 "Republican Stagnation"