by Dick Cheney
The objective of preventing a communist takeover of South Vietnam was a worthy one. There were many errors in the way America pursued this objective, about which much has been written elsewhere. Perhaps the most significant obstacle to our success was that our policy was never aimed at defeating the enemy. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara captured the essence of U.S. policy in Vietnam when he famously asked General William Westmoreland in 1965, “How many additional American and Allied troops would be required to convince the enemy he would be unable to win?” The American strategy wasn’t to win. It was to convince the enemy he couldn’t.
Former secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger explained it another way:
The strategic goal was not to lose in order to give South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds of the population. . . . What is certain is that the process required a time span of stalemated war beyond the psychological endurance of the American public.
President Nixon, elected in 1968, began to bring America’s troops home from Vietnam and formally ended the war in January 1973 with the Treaty of Paris. America’s combat troops came home, and the United States promised to provide economic assistance and renewed military support to the South if the North Vietnamese violated the treaty. Despite these promises, when the North reinvaded the south in early 1975, the U.S. Congress refused to provide funding for the assistance we had promised. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975.
The way the war ended was tragic. We had abandoned millions of South Vietnamese, leaving them to the mercy of the communists. Kissinger explained:
The United States devoted two decades of blood and treasure to help a group of newly independent fledgling societies avoid conquest by their merciless and militarily more powerful communist neighbor in North Vietnam. Yet, when the precarious peace wrought by the Paris Agreement was challenged, the United States, in the throes of physical and psychological abdication, cut off military and economic assistance to people whom we had given every encouragement to count on our protection. This consigned those we had made our wards to an implacable—and, in Cambodia, genocidal—communist conqueror.
On April 23, 1975, President Gerald Ford spoke at Tulane University and declared the war “finished as far as America is concerned.” Even those who had supported the war felt a sense of relief at its end.
Long after the conclusion of the war, there was a view among many of our nation’s top military leaders that the political leadership had failed our men and women in uniform. And in many ways this is true. President George H. W. Bush and his team were very aware of this when the United States deployed forces to liberate Kuwait in 1990. President Bush was committed to deploying a force large enough to win and providing them with all the resources they needed to do the job the country had asked them to do.
WHEN RICHARD NIXON BECAME America’s thirty-seventh president in 1969, he inherited an array of international challenges, including America’s ongoing war in Vietnam and the nuclear arms race with the Soviets. Henry Kissinger described the priorities of Nixon’s first-term foreign policy strategy:
(1) to extricate from Vietnam under honorable conditions; (2) to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; (3) to seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, we would do our utmost to control its dangers and gradually overcome it; (4) to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including China in the international system; (5) to strengthen our alliances; (6) and, from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially in the Middle East.
It is a well-informed summing up that contrasts markedly with President Obama’s description of his foreign policy strategy: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”
It was clear from Nixon’s first days in office that there were tensions between the Soviet Union and China. The president decided to exploit those tensions and drive a wedge between the world’s two most powerful communist nations. On Monday, February 21, 1972, as a Chinese military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Nixon became the first American president to visit China while in office. Strategically the trip accomplished what he had hoped by reestablishing relations between the United States and China, inserting an irritant into the conduct of foreign policy for the Soviet Union and demonstrating that America’s national security policy was larger than the war in Vietnam. “On the way back from Beijing,” Kissinger said later, “I knew we’d made history.”
Nixon and Kissinger also made history when they established the controversial policy of détente, which was intended to reduce the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to lessen the crises between the two powers that dominated the first two decades of the Cold War. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), an agreement to limit the number of ballistic missiles in the arsenal of each superpower, was one of the products of détente.
Critics of the policy point out that it essentially solidified the status quo and ensured that America would not confront Soviet oppression or question the Soviets’ right to exert their rule throughout the Soviet Bloc. Critics of the policy also point out that it was only when Ronald Reagan discarded détente and confronted the Soviets across all fronts that the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.
It is not clear that Reagan’s approach would have been as effective in the 1970s as it was in the 1980s. Strategies (or tactical approaches, for that matter) have to be tied to concrete circumstances. The art of statesmanship is understanding the environment correctly and choosing the most effective ways and means to secure national objectives. It is also true that another of the hallmarks of détente, the Helsinki Accords, sowed the seeds of the destruction of the Soviet empire.
IN AUGUST 1974, PRESIDENT Nixon resigned over his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. That evening, even before Vice President Gerald Ford took the oath of office to become America’s thirty-eighth president, he met the press in front of his home in Alexandria, Virginia. His first order of business was to reassure the world that America’s national security and foreign policy was in experienced hands and would remain unchanged. Henry Kissinger would be staying on. “Let me say without any hesitation or reservation,” Ford said, “that the policy that has achieved peace . . . will be continued as far as I’m concerned as President of the United States.”
One of President Ford’s first acts was to pardon Richard Nixon, a decision highly controversial at the time, but widely praised today. Ford rightly judged that in the aftermath of everything the nation had been through, it was time to begin to heal and to move on.
IN JULY 1974, ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn, a prominent Soviet dissident who had been imprisoned in Stalin’s prison camps, visited Washington. He had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, his devastating account of life in the camps. There was a debate inside the White House about whether President Ford should meet with Solzhenitsyn. Henry Kissinger and his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, advised against it. Arguing for the meeting was one of the authors of this book, Dick Cheney, who wrote in a memo:
My own strong feeling is that the President should see Solzhenitsyn. . . . I think the decision not to see him is based on a misreading of Détente. Détente means nothing more and nothing less than a lessening of tension. Over the last several years it has been sold as a much broader concept to the American people. At most, détente should consist of agreements wherever possible to reduce the possibility of conflict, but it does not mean that all of a sudden our relationship with the Soviets is all sweetness and light. . . .
I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate for the American people and for the world that Détente with the Soviet Union . . . in no way means that we’ve given up our fundamental principles concerning individual liberty and democracy. Solzhenitsyn, as the symbol of resistance to oppression in the Soviet
Union, whatever else he may be, can help us communicate that message simply by having him in to see the President. Seeing him is a nice counterbalance to all of the publicity and coverage that’s given to meetings between American presidents and Soviet leaders. Meetings with Soviet leaders are very important, but it is also important that we not contribute any more to the illusion that all of a sudden we’re bosom-buddies with the Russians.
[The Soviets] have been perfectly free to criticize us for our actions and policies in Southeast Asia over the years, to call us imperialists, war-mongers, and various and sundry other endearing terms, and I can’t believe they don’t understand why the President might want to see Solzhenitsyn.
Cheney lost the argument, and Ford’s refusal to see Solzhenitsyn became a key element in the conservative foreign policy case against Ford.
Henry Kissinger would later write, “In retrospect, I believe we would have been wise to . . . schedule a meeting with the President . . . in as unobtrusive and dignified a manner as possible.” The trepidation some in the Ford administration felt about shining a light on human rights abuses inside the Soviet Bloc would be overcome with the signing of the Helsinki Accords.
The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe opened on July 30, 1975, in Helsinki, Finland. Former secretary of state Kissinger has written of the conference and the accords that followed, “Turning points often pass unrecognized by contemporaries.” Both sides had incentives to participate and sign the accords, and, it is fair to say, neither side recognized the dramatic impact the agreement would ultimately have on the collapse of communism and the downfall of the Soviet Union.
The accords included provisions that affirmed the postwar division of Europe, which the Soviets wanted. The accords also, and more important as it turned out, included language recognizing “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms . . . in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Former ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin described the reaction of Soviet Politburo members when they read the text. He said they had no objections to the first parts of the treaty, but when they read the article guaranteeing human rights, “their hair stood on end.” Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko tried to reassure them, arguing that the significant thing about the Helsinki treaty was that it recognized the postwar borders of Europe. “That’s what we shed our blood for in the great patriotic war,” Gromyko said. “All thirty-five signatory states are now saying—these are the borders of Europe.” As for the sections about human rights, Gromyko declared, “We are the masters of this house, and each time, it will be up to us to decide how to act. Who can force us?”
As President Ford saw it, “The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations did not recognize that the human rights provision was a time bomb. We, the United States believed that if we could get the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations to respect human rights, that was worth whatever else was agreed to in the Helsinki Accords.”
The Soviet leadership believed they could explain the agreement to their people by stressing the final settlement of the postwar boundaries and essentially ignoring the human rights provisions, but according to Ambassador Dobrynin, when the full text of the accords was published in the official Soviet Communist Party paper, Pravda, it had “the weight of an official document.” Thus, in Dobrynin’s words, “It gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement, a development totally beyond the imagination of the Soviet leadership.”
Within months of the treaty’s signing, “Helsinki Groups” began forming in countries behind the Iron Curtain. What had once been forbidden—demanding respect for fundamental rights from Soviet Bloc governments—was now, in essence, officially sanctioned. The Soviet government had, after all, signed a treaty committing to observance of those rights and published the treaty for all to see.
On January 1, 1977, a group of intellectuals in Prague signed the “Charter 77” manifesto urging the government of Czechoslovakia to live up to its obligations under the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords. A number of the signatories were imprisoned, including playwright Vaclav Havel. While Havel was in prison and later under house arrest, his influence grew as he continued to write essays and plays about human rights and human freedom. Twelve years later, he would become the first president of liberated Czechoslovakia.
PRESIDENT FORD LOST THE 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. The Nixon pardon had cost him politically. There was also a moment during the October 6 presidential debate from which it was very hard to recover. A question from Max Frankel of the New York Times implied that the Helsinki Accords meant the United States accepted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. President Ford responded by saying, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Frankel was perplexed and followed up: “I’m sorry? Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence and occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it’s a communist zone?” Ford doubled down, explaining that the people of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland did not consider themselves to be dominated by the Soviet Union. The national press and the Carter campaign had a field day. The next day President Ford clarified his statement, but the damage had been done.
ON JANUARY 12, 1977, eight days before he was sworn in as president of the United States, Jimmy Carter met at Blair House with General George Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and members of Carter’s national security team. According to a report by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in the next day’s Washington Post, Carter and his top advisors were receiving a briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan, which covered “the President’s awesome responsibilities in the event of a Soviet attack.” Carter shocked the assembled group by instructing General Brown to begin studies of the possibility of cutting the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal significantly to only 200–250 intercontinental ballistic missiles. General Brown, reported Evans and Novak, was “stunned speechless.”
Two months later, Carter sent Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on a mission to Moscow. In late 1974, President Ford and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev had agreed in principle on nuclear arms limitations that would extend the terms of the SALT I Treaty. Vance arrived in Moscow with a plan for far deeper cuts in each side’s arsenal. Brezhnev flatly rejected it. Les Gelb, who served in the Carter State Department and traveled to Moscow with Vance, explained later that the mission’s failure was interpreted as a sign that “the Carter team was inept.” The impact of this misstep was, in Gelb’s view, “a deep stab wound.”
In May, President Carter explained his aims for strategic arms reductions in a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, calling for a freeze on modernization and weapons production, along with “continued substantial reductions.” He also said, “The great democracies are not free because we are strong and prosperous. I believe we are strong and prosperous because we are free.” It was an odd turn of phrase given that it was precisely America’s strength that guaranteed our freedom. As for the other “great democracies” to which Carter referred, in the aftermath of World War II, they, too, were free because America was strong.
In June 1977, President Carter canceled America’s B-1 bomber program. The B-1 was to have replaced the aging B-52s. Carter secured nothing in return from the Soviets. In April 1978, Carter announced he was stopping the development of America’s neutron bomb program, again without securing anything in return from the Soviets. Even members of his own party were concerned. “I’m dismayed and puzzled. I don’t understand,” said Georgia Democratic senator Sam Nunn. “They’re not on a very clear course.”
The appearance of American weakness was compounded by a sense of diplomatic incompetence. On March 6, 1980, for example, the American ambassador to the United Nations voted to condemn Israe
l’s building of settlements on the West Bank. Arab states hailed the vote. Israel, which had expected an abstention from the United States, was shocked. The following Monday, the White House was forced to issue a statement in Carter’s name explaining that the vote had been, in fact, a “mistake.” It was, according to the White House spokesman, a “foul-up” in communications between the State Department and the White House.
The most significant and long-lasting damage to American interests during President Carter’s administration came with the takeover of Iran by the militant Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. The shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in January 1979, had been one of America’s most important allies in the Middle East. Less than a year after he was deposed, an Iranian mob stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans and forty others hostage. The Iranians would ultimately hold fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days.
When the shah fell, the government of Saudi Arabia asked the United States for a demonstration of our continued commitment to our other allies in the region. President Carter sent a squadron of F-15s. When the planes were airborne, he announced they were unarmed.
Until 2009, Jimmy Carter’s was the least competent presidency of the postwar era. His misguided actions extended beyond his time in the White House. When the United States was attempting to gain UN support to liberate Kuwait in 1990, we learned that former president Carter had contacted heads of government with seats on the Security Council and urged them to vote against the American position. By then his influence was not what it had been when he was in office, and he failed.
Governor Ronald Reagan of California summed up the concern millions of Americans felt about President Carter’s mishandling of our national security policy. Accepting the Republican presidential nomination on July 17, 1980, Reagan asked: