American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  As usual the Middle East confronted Washington with the most intractable problems of all. How defend Israel’s security without antagonizing the Arab states? How persuade the Israelis to be more conciliatory toward the Arabs? How find a humane solution to the plight of the Palestinians, whether inhabitants of the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank or holders of a precarious Israeli citizenship? How strengthen friendly Arab states militarily enough to steel their resistance to Soviet power but not embolden them also to threaten Israel? Carter approached these problems not only with the traditional top-priority commitment of Washington to Israel based on domestic political and national security considerations, but also with a deep moral concern. He believed “that the Jews who had survived the Holocaust deserved their own nation,” and that this homeland for the Jews was “compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God.”

  For sixteen months Carter and Vance conducted an intensive, often desperate search for peace in the Middle East. It was their good fortune that Egypt was ruled by the remarkably farsighted President Anwar el-Sadat, with whom Carter established cordial personal relations, and that Israel came to be headed by a tough negotiator, Menachem Begin, who had enough standing with Israeli hard-liners to risk agreement with the Egyptians. In his own efforts in Washington and in the Middle East, Carter proved himself a resourceful and indefatigable mediator. Often his hopes flagged, particularly after Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in March 1978 in retaliation for a terrorist assault that cost the lives of thirty-five Israelis, all but two of them civilians. To maintain credibility with the Arabs he supported a UN condemnation of the invasion and demand that Israel withdraw its forces. The reaction of American Jews was so sharp, Carter wrote later, that “we had to postpone two major Democratic fund-raising banquets in New York and Los Angeles because so many party members had cancelled their reservations to attend.”

  Caught between implacable forces, Carter resolved in July 1978 that it “would be best, win or lose, to go all out” to obtain a peace agreement. He persuaded Sadat and Begin to attend together a September meeting at Camp David. For thirteen days the President and his aides conducted with the two leaders a kind of footpath diplomacy between the cabins. The upshot was Sadat and Begin’s agreement to two sets of guidelines: a framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace providing that the Sinai would be turned over to Egypt by stages while protecting certain Israeli interests there; and a separate framework for “Peace in the Middle East,” providing for a five-year period during which a self-governing authority under Egypt, Israel, and, it was hoped, Jordan, would replace the existing Israeli military government in the West Bank and Gaza, while the three nations negotiated the final status of the territories.

  At perhaps the high point of his presidency Carter declared to a joint session of Congress, with Begin and Sadat present: “Today we are privileged to see the chance for one of the sometimes rare, bright moments in human history.” But nothing important ever came easy for Jimmy Carter. When Begin and Sadat were unable to agree on final peace arrangements before the planned deadline of mid-December 1978, the President decided as “an act of desperation” to fly to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal diplomacy. Once again he demonstrated his flair for mediation, gaining agreement from both sides on the remaining thorny issues, with the aid of inducements and guarantees from the United States. Amid much pomp and circumstance, Sadat and Begin signed the final agreement on the White House lawn late in March 1979.

  Wrote Carter in his diary, “I resolved to do everything possible to get out of the negotiating business!”

  Over all these efforts abroad there fell—at least in American eyes—the shadow of the Kremlin. No matter how much the White House denounced violations of human rights outside the Kremlin’s orbit the issue always came back to Soviet repression of dissidents. A major disturbance could not erupt in a newly emerging African nation without suspicion in the White House that Moscow plotters were afoot. The Administration began its peacekeeping effort in the Middle East in cooperation with the Soviet Union, only to turn away from it out of fear that Moscow was interested less in peace than in extending its own influence in the region. The more Washington pursued its rapprochement with Peking, the more it encountered hostility in Moscow. The Administration suspected that the Russians were bolstering their military strength in Cuba. Even the Panama settlement, which seemed far outside the Soviet sphere of influence, was almost fatally jeopardized by those Americans who feared that the strategically vital canal would under Panamanian control prove vulnerable to Soviet political or military threat.

  The view from Moscow was clouded by its perception of an ever more threatening America. Washington was seeking to exclude Soviet influence in the Middle East—a strategic area in Russia’s own back yard. The Americans were trying not only to make friends with the Chinese but to arm them against the Soviet Union, and thereby encircle it. Washington was trying to block the Soviet Union, as the mother communist nation, from exercising its right and duty to help both stabilize and strengthen “national liberation” movements in the fledgling nations. Above all was the matter of arms—the Soviet Union was on the verge of achieving some kind of nuclear parity with the United States, at which point the Carter Administration undertook a big new arms program that could result only in a spiraling arms race.

  Both sets of perceptions were misconceptions. Washington was more interested in restoring triangular diplomacy with China than in exacerbating the Sino-Soviet rupture. The Russians were more interested in stability in the Middle East than in military advantage. Each side saw itself as defensive, peace-loving, cooperative, the other as offensive, aggressive, destructive. Looking at Moscow, Washington remembered the brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956, the shipping of missiles to Cuba in 1962, the suppression of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Looking at Washington, Moscow recalled the attack north of the 38th parallel into North Korea in 1950, the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the bombing of North Vietnam and invasion of Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Mutual suspicion and hostility of the two superpowers touched every part of the globe—even the smallest and weakest nations. The tiny Yemens were a prime example. South Yemen, with its major naval facilities at Aden, the former British port, accepted aid from Moscow and gave it access to the port. North Yemen, fearful of the Yemenis to the south, wanted American military aid. When the Soviets began to give heavy aid to Ethiopia in support of its dispute with Somalia, Brzezinski saw a new Soviet threat to the Middle East. The canny North Yemenis, seeing their chance to pay off the southerners and gain more aid from Washington, sent alarmist reports of a looming invasion from the south. Alert to this mortal peril, Washington sent American arms and advisers to North Yemen and dispatched the carrier Constellation to the Arabian Sea “to demonstrate our concern for the security of the Arabian Peninsula.” In the end several Arab states mediated the scrap between the Yemenis—and North Yemen made an arms deal with the Russians twice the size of the American deal. The fight between the Yemenis, scholars later concluded, had not been plotted by Moscow. “The United States,” according to historian Gaddis Smith, “was responding, not to a reality, but to imaginary possibilities based on the assumption of a sinister Soviet grand design.”

  Nor was Washington plotting in most of these situations. It was a classic case of confusion rather than conspiracy. At the center of the confusion was the President himself. He continued to be convinced, during his first year in office, that he could crusade against human rights violations in Russia and at the same time effectively pursue détente with Moscow. During his second year he was still talking détente and SALT II but emphasizing also the need to strengthen United States forces in Europe to meet the “excessive Soviet buildup” there. By mid-1978, Carter’s ambivalence was so serious that Vance formally requested a review of relations with the Soviets, noting “two differing views” of the relationship. The emphasis, Vance said, had been on balancing cooperation against competition; was the emp
hasis now merely on competition? When Carter at Annapolis in June reaffirmed détente but now spoke a language of confrontation, the press complained about “two different speeches,” the “ambiguous message,” and general “bafflement.” Moscow, however, viewed the speech solely as a challenge.

  Carter was now enveloped in a widening division, especially between Vance and Brzezinski. The Secretary of State, who had built his reputation largely on high-level negotiations during the 1960s, spurned ideology in favor of détente through persistent—and if necessary severe—diplomacy. The national security adviser, son of a prewar Polish diplomat, had taken a hard line toward Moscow since the 1950s. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, from his Columbia University post he had telegraphed the Kennedy White House a warning against “any further delay in bombing missile sites.” Under Carter the two men repeatedly disagreed over policy toward the Soviet Union—most notably the extent to which the “China card” should be played against Moscow. And they insistently denied the disagreement—until it came time for their memoirs. Vance remembered the national security adviser as afflicted with “visceral anti-Sovietism.” Brzezinski evaluated the Secretary of State “as a member of both the legal profession and the once-dominant Wasp elite,” operating according to “values and rules” that were of “declining relevance” to both American and global politics.

  The President saw the two men as balancing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but instead of moving steadily between them, he followed a zigzag path. His aim was still a summit meeting with the Russians for a climactic effort to achieve a second SALT agreement. During 1978, however, playing the “China card” in a manner tantamount to playing with fire, he allowed Brzezinski to journey to China, where the security adviser urged the not unwilling Chinese to step up their diplomatic and political moves against Moscow. The morbidly distrustful Russians suspected that the Yankees might sell “defensive weapons” to the Chinese.

  The summit was further delayed while Carter amid intense publicity received and entertained Deng Xiaoping at the White House at the end of January 1979, only a few weeks after Washington broke formal diplomatic-relations with Taiwan and established full relations with China. Carter and Deng got along famously, signing agreements for scientific and technological cooperation. The Chinese leader even confided to the President his tentative plans to make a punitive strike into Vietnam because of Hanoi’s hostility to Peking. Carter tried weakly to discourage this, but the Chinese attacked within three weeks of Deng’s visit to Washington.

  On the eve of flying off in June 1979 for the summit the President announced his decision to develop the MX missile. By the time he and Brezhnev met in Vienna, much of the will in both camps for comprehensive peacemaking had slackened. Brezhnev, old and ailing, seemed to have lost his energy and grasp of issues. The two men signed a package of agreements, elaborately and cautiously negotiated over a period of many months, providing for limitations in land-based missiles, submarine-based MIRVed missiles, bombers equipped with multiple missiles, and other arms. SALT II was still a respectable step forward—if the step could be taken. Following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan shortly after New Year’s 1980, however, the President asked the Senate to defer action. This delay, and Reagan’s condemnation of the treaty during the 1980 campaign, killed SALT II’s chances—the most profound disappointment of his presidency, Carter said later.

  Historians will long debate the causes of the malaise that afflicted Jimmy Carter’s presidency about the time he began the last third of his term. Was it largely a personal failure of leadership on the part of Carter and his inner circle at a crucial point in his Administration? Or was the loss of momentum and direction during 1979 more the result of factors that plague every President—intractable foreign and domestic problems, a divided party, a fragmented Congress, a hostile press, limited political resources? Or was it a matter of sheer bad luck—a series of unpredictable events that overwhelmed the Administration?

  In his disarmingly frank way, Carter himself admitted a failure of personal leadership. In midsummer of 1979, he removed his government to Camp David and summoned over a hundred Americans—political, business, labor, academic, and religious leaders—for long consultations, and then emerged to declare in an eagerly anticipated television speech that the nation was caught in a crisis of confidence, a condition of paralysis and stagnation, to which his detached, managerial style of leadership had contributed and at the center of which was the energy crisis, whose solution could “rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future.” At a specially convened cabinet meeting two days after the speech, he stated, according to a participant, “My government is not leading the country. The people have lost confidence in me, in the Congress, in themselves, and in this nation.” A week before his 1980 election defeat he graded himself on CBS’s 60 Minutes, giving his presidency a B or a C plus on foreign policy, C on overall domestic policy, A on energy, C on the economy, and “maybe a B” on leadership. For a President, B and C are failing grades.

  Carter’s shifts toward the middle ground in domestic policy and confrontation in Soviet relations, along with his loss of popularity at home, had opened up a leadership vacuum that was bound to attract a liberal-left Democrat of the stripe of Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, or indeed the 1976-style Jimmy Carter. Would Edward Kennedy run? Since his brother Robert’s assassination, Democratic party leaders and rank-and-file enthusiasts had been trying to recruit him, but the young senator had proved to be a master at saying no. Now, thoroughly disappointed by Carter, he decided to take on the toughest of political assignments, unseating a President of one’s own party. At first Kennedy appeared unable to define his alternative program coherently, and when he took a fling at the dethroned Shah of Iran and the “umpteen billions of dollars that he’s stolen from Iran,” the media treated this as a campaign gaffe to be derided rather than a policy issue to be debated.

  Carter’s early handling of the seizure in November 1979 of the American embassy in Teheran and sixty-three American hostages produced the usual rally-’round-the-President surge in public opinion. Kennedy failed to gain momentum after running far behind the President in the Iowa caucuses. Later the senator picked up strong support in urban areas when he spoke firmly for détente abroad and anti-inflation controls at home, but he never headed his adversary. Some of the President’s men argued that Kennedy’s run hurt Carter in the fall contest with Ronald Reagan, but Democrats showed their usual capacity for reuniting before the final battle. In retrospect it appeared that Carter had defeated himself, largely by appearing to have faltered as a strong leader, a sitting duck for Reagan’s charges of inadequacy and indecision.

  Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s aide and confidant, wrote after the 1980 defeat that he had “found many forces at play today that make the art of governing very difficult”—an “active and aggressive press,” the fragmentation of political power, congressional resistance, special-interest groups, and the like. Conditions, in effect, made governing impossible. Leading students of the Carter presidency instead fixed the blame on the President himself. “Carter lacked any sense of political strategy,” wrote political scientist Erwin C. Hargrove, “and thereby the majority of citizens came to believe that he was not in control of the events which most concerned them.” If Carter was bedeviled by weak party support, congressional factionalism, bureaucratic power groups—and by the “iron triangles” interlocking these resistance forces—the question arises: to what degree did he seek to curb or even master these by leading and refashioning his divided party, for example, or by improving his poor congressional liaison office? He devoted little time to rebuilding either the party or the liaison office.

  The “bad luck” theory of Carter’s decline holds that he was simply engulfed by forces over which he had no control—the energy crisis, soaring gasoline prices, steep inflation, high interest rates, Kennedy’s challenge, and above all the continuing hostage crisis and the brutal Soviet
intervention in Afghanistan. As great leaders have demonstrated, however, setbacks can be—or can be made to be—spurs to action.

  Perhaps Carter’s greatest failure stemmed from his moralism in foreign policy combined with his flair for media showmanship. His reaction to the hostage seizure in Iran and to the Afghanistan intervention was not to put the crises in perspective and restrain public opinion but to dramatize the issues and further inflame the public. This politically expedient course, reflecting also Carter’s moral judgment, brought the heady feeling in the short run of being the true spokesman and leader of the people, but it had severe longer-run effects. In helping to arouse the public, and then responding to that aroused public, Carter raised hopes and expectations inordinately. But Iran held on to the hostages and the Russians remained in Afghanistan. Nothing is more dangerous for a leader than a widening gap between expectations and realization.

  This gap paralleled and exacerbated another one—between Carter’s idealistic, uplifting foreign policy pronouncements and day-to-day specific-policies. Preachments were not converted into explicit guidelines. A strategic approach was lacking. When initiatives had to be taken and tough choices made, the Administration lacked a hierarchy of priorities that could fill the gap between its global activism and the routine application of foreign policies. Carter alternated between born-again moralizing and engineering specifics. In this respect he shared one of the oldest intellectual weaknesses of American liberal activism.