by Conrad Black
Ford had a cordial but not especially productive visit to China in December 1975. He and Kissinger did their best to hold the line and keep the alliance in good order, but it was a difficult time. The negotiation of the possible handover of the Panama Canal to Panama arose after lengthy agitation by de facto Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos. Panama was (Chapter 7) an artificial country sliced out of Colombia by Teddy Roosevelt because the Colombians were being shirty about what to charge for the right to build an isthmian canal. The whole policy of détente with the USSR, including what was held to be a charade of a human rights conference, the spectacular fall of Vietnam, the alleged over-placation of China, and now the plan to give away the Panama Canal to the original banana republic, revived the fissures in the Republican Party between the old Goldwater and Rockefeller factions. Gerald Ford, a good and brave and conscientious man, was not a sufficiently galvanizing or ingeniously cunning leader, as Eisenhower and Nixon had been, to keep those factions together.
5. THE 1976 ELECTION
The leader of the liberals, Nelson Rockefeller, was now the vice president and was tarred with the perceived shortcomings of the administration, and Ford, though personally appreciated for his human qualities, was seen by the Nixon-haters as beholden to the former president and too quick to give him a pardon. The Democrats, having buried Johnson and canonized the Kennedys, were now in the hands of pacifistic naifs. Though they would allow Mayor Richard Daley back at their convention and pay him homage as a party elder, unworldly righteousness now reigned. So shaken was the country by the debacle of Vietnam and the shambles of Watergate, so convinced was most of it that both were the result of intolerably sleazy politics and politicians, the Democrats had become an aggregation of innocents and the Republicans a house sharply divided at the bifurcation between left-center and medium-right.
For president, the Democrats nominated the former governor of Georgia, James E. (Jimmy) Carter, who ran effectively as a Washington outsider, never having held a position there. The last president who could claim outsider status was Woodrow Wilson. Humphrey, Johnson, and Kennedy, and even McGovern had been Washington veterans for many years before becoming contenders for the presidency. Carter took Humphrey’s successor as senator from Minnesota, Walter F. Mondale, for vice president, heavily emphasized the alleged corruption and undoubted cynicism of the Watergate Republicans, and opened up a large lead in the polls before the Republicans’ convention, in Kansas City in late August.
The leader of the conservative Republicans was no longer the stolid Goldwater from the relatively small state of Arizona. It was now the twice-chosen governor of California, Ronald Reagan, mocked by his opponents as an ex-actor, but a hypnotic public speaker and public relations genius who sold conservatism as no one else could. He entered the race against Ford and won a number of the primaries. He ran the incumbent president the closest race to the convention of anyone who had attempted the same step since Theodore Roosevelt, a former president after all, running against President Taft in 1912 (Chapter 7). Ford won the convention, but felt obligated to disembark Rockefeller as vice president and chose the sharp-tongued senator from Kansas (where there weren’t many voters and which always voted Republican), Robert Dole. Ford won the nomination, though fairly closely, but Reagan made the convention wait about 15 minutes before he emerged to give one of his rousing political orations, while scarcely referring to the nominee. If Ford didn’t win the election, Reagan would be waiting and ready four years later.
Ford trailed by 33 points as the campaign started but campaigned pluckily and made telling arguments against Carter’s rather simplistic view of the world. It was a mediocre election, fought between uninspiring candidates, who played out the exhausted morality play of bombed-out, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American public life. The country was just starting to recover from deep self-inflicted wounds, aggravated by misplaced sanctimony. (In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation awarded the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Medal to President Ford for pardoning Nixon, who had always got on well with all the Kennedys except Bobby, including the father. In making the award, Senator Edward M. Kennedy said that while he had opposed the Nixon pardon at the time, he now recognized that it was the just and correct decision. Teddy Kennedy, having drowned one of his assistants in a drunken car accident in 1969 and fled the scene of the accident, was not a natural source for Solomonic moral judgments, but in this case he was surely right, and it was a gracious tribute to the 87-year-old Ford.)
The Democrats were accusing the Republicans of being unprecedentedly corrupt (which they weren’t; Kennedy and Johnson, not to mention some old-timers, gave them plenty of precedent), and proposed a cure of puritanical altruism that was going to cause the leaders in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City to split their sides in laughter; the country was see-sawing between the excessively stigmatized and the unpromisingly righteous, while the national media patted itself endlessly on the head and back for exposing (i.e., exacerbating) two of the greatest disasters in American strategic and political history, Vietnam and Watergate.
Jerry Ford made it a close election, as Hubert Humphrey had in 1968, and Harry Truman had in 1948, all gallant fighters. Apart from Watergate and the Nixon pardon, there were only two other issues: Ford was offering Vietnam draft evaders a conditional transfer to an honorable discharge, and Carter offered an unconditional pardon to dodgers and deserters. America, still trying to detoxify itself from the 20-year Indochinese nightmare, leaned to Carter’s proposal. There was a return, for the first time since 1960, to televised debates, and although Ford generally did well, he at one point said that the “Poles don’t consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” Carter and his partisans represented this as unawareness on the part of the president of the presence of the Soviet army in Poland, and of the location of the headquarters of the Warsaw Pact. Ford wasn’t verbally agile (and neither was Carter), and he should have expressed himself more unambiguously, but this was only an infelicitous choice of words. Although Ford was a distinguished athlete and an alumnus of the Yale Law School, he could be caricatured as a bit of an oaf and not overly intelligent. LBJ, the master of the destructive barb, said of Ford on separate occasions that “Jerry played football too often without his helmet,” that he “couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time,” and that he “couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.” Carter wasn’t as amusing as Johnson, but almost as nasty, and perceptions are crucial in politics. Ford paid for his presentational problems.
On election day, Carter won, 40.8 million (50.1 percent) to 39.2 million (48 percent); 297 electoral votes to 240, though Ford won 27 states to 23 plus the District of Columbia for Carter. It was a completely clean election, and if 11,000 votes had changed sides, or Ford had polled 22,000 more in Ohio and Wisconsin, Ford would have won. It was almost as close as the 1960 and 1968 elections, though unlike those, with an ethically unexceptionable campaign. Gerald Ford had never sought nor expected to be president, entered the office in very difficult circumstances, and was, in his unpretentious plainness, a distinguished president. He had had no thought except what was good for the country, and had a long and happy retirement, ultimately living longer than any other president of the United States; he died in 2004, aged 93 years and five months, universally honored for his character, personality, and service. Unfortunately, this was also effectively the end of Henry Kissinger’s public career, though he sometimes was consulted by future presidents of both parties. He was too great a talent to have been left underutilized, and was only 53. He continued as a world-renowned and historic figure, but, for different personal reasons, future Republican presidents did not invite him back to the State Department.
6. PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER
The world was not sure what to expect from a president calling himself Jimmy, a successful peanut farmer and Naval Academy graduate who was an understudy of the father of the U.S. atomic submarine program, Admiral Hyman Rickover, and an
authority on naval nuclear propulsion and submarine design, now the cornerstone of America’s nuclear deterrent. He had served on surface vessels as well and had been a well-regarded junior officer (as had Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford, though they were all in combat). President Carter was the first person from the Old South to hold that office since John Tyler. (Zachary Taylor and Woodrow Wilson were from Virginia but left in their mid-twenties, and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas wasn’t the Old South.) Carter was a very pro-civil rights governor in a state that had been fairly retarded in treatment of African Americans for an unconscionable length of time, though he was not otherwise a particularly distinguished governor.
He quickly paid for his unfamiliarity with the operations of the Congress, in particular contrast to his four predecessors, who between them had served 80 years at the Capitol before becoming president (including the last three as vice president). Almost none of his ambitious domestic program gained any traction at all, including his endlessly repeated promises of tax reform.
In foreign and defense policy, however, where the president does have much more latitude, his imprint was visible, and uneven. His secretary of state was veteran lawyer and public official Cyrus R. Vance, an able but very conciliatory foreign policy expert, balanced by the more hawkish national security advisor, the learned and forceful Polish-Canadian Harvard academic, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. (It says something distinctive and flattering about America that two of its greatest modern foreign policy experts were men of such distant and unlikely provenance as Kissinger and Brzezinski.)
Carter started with his unconditional pardon of draft evaders and deserters on inauguration day, and immediately began withdrawing forces from South Korea. This was quickly opposed by the armed forces committees in the Congress and he was widely advised that anything that might encourage North Korean adventurism was a bad idea. In the end, he only withdrew a few thousand of the American troops in South Korea. In his first budget, Carter slashed defense spending by six billion dollars and, in a major address a few months into his administration, said that the country must get over its “irrational fear of communism.” Most Americans, unlike in the McCarthy era, were not afraid of communism, but were a good deal more skeptical than their president about the motives of the Soviet Union. (The people were right.)
From the start, he emphasized human rights in foreign countries, including allies. This is always a controversial matter, disputed between those who emphasize morally neutral strategic interest and those who emphasize the moral high ground. It has been an almost constant irritant to Sino-American relations. At a certain point, some regimes become too odious for almost anyone, as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge Cambodians, who murdered over a quarter of the entire population, did even for the Chinese and Russians. But short of such an evil government, there is room for legitimate debate about the point of crossover between national interest and maintenance of political and moral standards. It is likely that Carter’s emphasis on human rights may have caused many countries to be less casual about oppression of their citizens, but it is also undeniable that the policy brought serious geopolitical inconvenience on the U.S., without accomplishing any significant improvement in the political quality of the lives of the populations Carter was sincerely trying to help.
He sided openly with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, essentially a communist front with no more regard for civil rights than communists normally have, against America’s longtime docile and corrupt protégé, the Somoza family (FDR’s famous “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch,” Chapter 9). The United States certainly could not go on being identified with the Somozas, as Eisenhower realized about the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the late fifties (Chapter 13). But assisting worshipful puppets of Castro provoked severe communist infiltration in Central America and required Carter’s successors to expend a great deal more effort and political capital in that region than it would normally justify.
Even more destructive to American interests was Carter’s appeasement of the fundamentalist Islamic opponents of the Shah of Iran, and his pressure on the Shah to yield ground to the Islamist leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. What possessed the U.S. president that an Islamic believer in a fundamentalist Muhammadan theocracy was any sort of legitimate democratic opposition escaped the comprehension of most observers and of all of posterity. Khomeini was militantly anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and an absolutist of the most primitive kind. It became clear fairly early on that the Shah could only deal with the problem by a combination of force and generosity, which he had the military and paramilitary force and the oil income to do. Carter discouraged him from that and in the end, as Brzezinski put it, “threw him out like a dead mouse,” in 1978. He did not even permit the Shah to enter the United States after he had abdicated, though he had been a fiercely loyal American ally since he had met with Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943 (Chapter 10) and particularly since Eisenhower had restored him to his throne in 1953 (Chapter 12). He had ignored the oil embargo five years before. (Carter did relent a year later, when the Shah sought entry for medical reasons.) Human rights in Iran deteriorated and the country regressed in every respect, becoming an even greater nuisance to the civilized world than the North Koreans. In this instance, Carter’s policy was self-destructively foolish and the fate of America’s relatively respectable allies, from Diem and Thieu to the Shah and others to come, was noted.
Carter did complete the giveaway of the Panama Canal in 1977, and the Senate ratified it. The canal would have to be widened and deepened, and was no longer useful for large tankers, aircraft carriers, and even cruise liners, but it is not clear why Carter didn’t settle on some system of co-ownership. The U.S. had a clear title, unlike the British and French at Suez (Chapter 12), though it must be remembered that it was Ford and Kissinger who started down this path. The U.S. had occasion to invade Panama and seize a successor president and try him as a common criminal 12 years later (the trial and imprisonment a dubious enterprise legally, but that is addressed later in this chapter).
President Carter’s greatest achievement, and a great personal triumph, was the Camp David agreement of 1978 between Egypt and Israel and their formidable leaders, President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin. This secured the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, the reopening of the Suez Canal after 11 years, the exchange of full recognition and embassies between the two countries, and a promise by Begin to produce a formula for Palestinian self-rule. As Egypt was the most populous and historically significant of the Arab powers, this was an immense step forward for normalization of relations between the Jewish state and the Arab world. As part of the arrangement, the United States pledged extensive annual assistance, military and otherwise, to both countries, cementing the abject Soviet expulsion from Egypt.
Sadat had been an agitator for Egyptian independence in British times, and was Nasser’s vice president when the president suddenly and prematurely died in 1970. He had succeeded in inflicting a momentary defeat on Israel in crossing the Suez Canal in 1973 at the outset of the Yom Kippur War, which—through Nixon and Kissinger’s intervention with Golda Meir to prevent the destruction of the overexposed Egyptian army that had accomplished this (considerable) feat—enabled Sadat to be the liberator of the Sinai, who took back the Canal, and took the leadership of the Arab world back from the proponents of endless war with Israel (a policy easier for those who didn’t actually have to do battle with Israel).
Menachem Begin, a fugitive from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the head of the violent independentist organization Irgun, and 29 years the leader of the opposition in Israel against all the preceding prime ministers in the country’s history, had also moved a long way. He had been an advocate of a greater, Biblical Israel, with an ancient and expansive notion of its rightful extent. Regrettably, he gave no substance to the Palestinian autonomy plan, which, when it finally emerged, was, as one knowledgeable commentator on the Middle East put it, “the righ
t of the Palestinians to take out their own garbage.”
Sadat would be assassinated in 1981 by the Muslim Brotherhood, chiefly motivated by the Camp David agreement. And Egypt lost stature, as its economy stagnated and its population grew, and the oil states, especially Saudi Arabia, became steadily more influential. But that takes nothing from President Carter’s achievement in brokering the greatest advance there has been in Arab-Israeli relations since Israel was created (in 1948, before many of the Arab states were fully independent).
President Carter went to Vienna in June 1979, to meet with Leonid Brezhnev, and signed there a SALT II agreement along the lines that Ford and Kissinger had negotiated with Brezhnev and Gromyko at Vladivostok. There was criticism at once that the United States was conceding too much nuclear equality to the Soviet Union. As if by delayed reaction, there was a backlash against McNamara’s reverence for Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), and the aggressive return of the Russians to public ruminations on the inevitable triumph of Soviet Communism as the wave of the future and force of history. Carter’s placation of the communist powers was creating unease across the American political and national security establishment.
The SALT II agreement was assured of a rugged passage, as by some measurement it did give the Soviet Union superiority (in numbers), though it didn’t entirely dilute Nixon’s inspired notion of “nuclear sufficiency”—technological superiority and multiple warheads. But that could not be publicly argued, and Carter was immediately on his back foot, contending with the bipartisan Committee on the Present Danger, supported by most of the intellectually serious national security experts from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, most of the southern Democrats, big defense Democrats led by Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, and virtually all the Republicans, except a few New York liberals. (Nelson Rockefeller had died in January 1979, aged 70, confirming Ronald Reagan as the almost certain leader of the Republicans in the next election.)