darklordoftech said:
I got the impression that Tarkin had a major role in the rise of the Empire. I imagine that he helped Palpatine become President of the Senate, helped wipe out the Jedi, etc. I think that the prequels should have shown an escalating rivalry between Bail Organa and Tarkin.
Here's some Lucas quotes from summer 1977:
"[...] One of the Chancellors began subverting the Senate and buying off Senators with the help of some of the large intergalactic trade companies and mining companies and intergalactic power companies. Through their power and money, he bought off enough of the Senate to get himself elected to a second term, because of a crisis. By the time the third term came along, he had corrupted so much of the Senate that they made him Emperor for the rest of his life.
"Giving the Emperor that title for life and doing away with the elective process was all done with a lot of rationalizing. Many in the Senate felt that having elections and changing leaders in the time of an emergency disrupted the bureaucratic system. And the bureaucracy was getting to be so big that changing leaders made it impossible to have any effect on the system and make it work - moreover the bureaucracy was running amok and not paying attention to the rulers. So they reasoned that the Emperor could bring the bureaucracy back in line. So the Emperor took control of the bureaucracy. The Galactic Senate would meet for a period that was similar to a year, but after it became the Imperial Senate, the meetings were less and less frequent until finally the meetings were only once a year, and they were very short.
"With the bureaucracy behind the Emperor, it was impossible and too late for the Senate to do anything. He had slowly manipulated things; in fact, it was he who had let the bureaucracy run amok and therefore had blackmailed the Senate into doing things because he was the only one who really had any power over the bureaucracy. It was so large there was no way to get things done, but he knew the right people; the key people in the bureaucracy were working for him and were paid by the companies.""Darth Vader is really attached to the Emperor himself, and he was not really part of the Death Star personnel or any of that system. Lord Vader worked directly for the Emperor and was the Emperor's emissary.
[...]
When the Jedi tried to restore order, Darth Vader was still one of the Jedi. What he would do is catch the Jedi off guard and, using his knowledge of the Force, he would kill the Jedi without them realizing what was happening. They trusted him and they didn't realize he was the murderer who was decimating their ranks. At the height of the Jedi, there were sever hundred thousand. At the time of the Rebellion, most of them were killed. The Emperor had some strong forces rally behind him, as well, in terms of the army the Imperial forces that he'd been building up secretly. The Jedi were so outnumbered that they fled and were tracked down. They tried to regroup, but they were eventually massacred by one of the special elite forces led by Darth Vader. Eventually only a few, including Ben and Luke's father, were left. Luke's father is named Annikin."
This is pretty interesting, it gives some details to Palpatine's take-over as Emperor. (It's also very similar to Nazi history isn't it? I don't remember specific political details, but it sounds very similar.) That first quote could fit really well with what we've discussed earlier that Palpatine's New Order probably existed for quite a while before it eventually fully took over in the form of the Empire in 18 BBY.
The second quote is quite an interesting addition to what we've read/heard before in the movies and books (as well as the PT for that matter). It's never occurred to me before that he could have been an assassin on behalf of Palpatine before he eventually became Darth Vader and eventually performed the military "purge" that we're more familiar with.
I think ROTS would have been a lot more interesting if they had gone for this story, rather than the fairly instant transformation that we did get.
Although this quote mentions Vader and "Annikin" as different people, it could still more or less be attributed to the post 1983, pre-PT canon.