In fact the combination of Carter’s pressure, and the prospect of a SALT II treaty, led to a major jump in Soviet Jewish emigration from only 14,000 in 1976 to 29,000 in 1978 and 51,000 in 1979. At that point, I got a call from Charles Vanik, the House sponsor of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which, because of Moscow’s restrictive emigration policy, barred our government from offering the Soviet Union the best trade terms we offered other countries. He wanted me to urge the president to waive Congress’ own anti-Soviet amendment on a year-by-year basis in order to encourage further progress. Following Carter’s instructions, I found American Jewish groups split, but Senator Jackson and his hard-line foreign-policy aide Richard Perle strongly opposed; thus, we were unable to proceed.42 This was a lost opportunity. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Senate roadblock on SALT II, and no prospect of improved trade, Soviet Jewish emigration plummeted to 21,000 in 1980.43
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Carter’s human rights campaign coincided with an extraordinarily important event in the eventual demise of Communism, the elevation to the papacy of Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II on October 16, 1978. His 1979 visit to his native Poland was preceded by Carter’s visit in December 1977, his first trip abroad as president. Carter received a wildly enthusiastic reception, exceeded only by the pope’s a year and a half later. But it was marred by a series of gaffes, thanks to his State Department translator, Steven Seymour, for whom Polish was only his fourth language. Arriving on December 29, 1977, at 10:40 p.m., Carter and his party were welcomed by the dour Polish Communist leader Edward Gierek. The president declared he was glad to be in Poland, which Seymour mistranslated as Carter expressing his pleasure at abandoning America to live in Poland. Most embarrassing, when Carter said he wanted to learn about the desires of the Polish people, Seymour turned it into “I want to have sex with the Polish people.” The Polish press converted that the next morning into “carnal knowledge of the Polish.” At the closing banquet Seymour simply gave up and the Polish government’s interpreter had to step in.44
Things worked more smoothly when the pope visited Washington. In a private meeting with the president,45 the pope’s major message was the need to reach out to Eastern Europe. The head of the Catholic Church had in effect made common cause with the president’s human rights agenda. As Harold Brown put it: “I always felt that the human rights position really got a lot of people in a lot of countries thinking about the difference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In a way Carter and Pope John Paul II were the two poles of that.”46 The connection became useful when Brzezinski called the pope to ask that he use his influence when the Soviets were massing troops at the Polish border, late in the administration.47
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No one can honestly draw a clear line between the collapse of the Soviet Union and Carter’s human rights campaign. Every American president after World War II played a role in the bipartisan Cold War policy of containing the spread of Communism, until the Soviet Union collapsed of its own contradictions. This was validated in 1995 by no less than Dobrynin on the American television program 60 Minutes, who commented that the system had fallen of its own weight: “We did it to ourselves.”48 But Carter played an important role.
Far from being the weak and naive leader his critics asserted, he combined human rights as a tough and effective foreign-policy tool with the beginnings of a military revival brought to its apogee by his successor. This put the Communist world on the defensive, stimulated domestic movements within the eastern bloc, and exacerbated internal divisions by a covert campaign aimed at national groups within the USSR, little known even today. Though not immediately heralded as a success, the human rights campaign became a blueprint in U.S. foreign policy and held every president following Carter to a standard. How large a role human rights play in any specific policy fluctuates with every administration, but it is always a component. Thomas Pickering, who served every president from Nixon to Clinton as an ambassador or senior State Department official, emphasized that “no administration has said the hell with human rights,” just because it was some idealistic invention of Carter and the Democrats.49
In later years Soviet dissidents would be virtually unanimous in their praise of Carter’s policy and its importance in elevating their cause. Robert Gates, who served on Brzezinski’s NSC staff, and as Defense secretary in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, wrote: “Too bad for Carter that the important impact of his policies would only become known years later, as dissidents fled the East and those affected by his policies would become leaders as their nations became free.”50
CARTER AND MILITARY POWER
Like human rights and soft power, Jimmy Carter’s exercise of hard power began a process that would lead to the implosion of the Soviet Union long after he left office. He significantly increased U.S. defense spending, following a post-Vietnam decline, and pressured our NATO allies to increase theirs; introduced sophisticated Stealth technology in use today that makes U.S. fighter jets, bombers, cruise missiles, and other weapons systems invisible to enemy radar; strenghtened CIA covert action against the Soviet Union; laid the diplomatic groundwork for deploying intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe against a Soviet missile buildup; signed SALT II; and reacted with firmness and clarity against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All this helped restrain and ultimately unravel the Soviet empire, as these policies were enhanced by Ronald Reagan.
These historic contributions remain unrecognized, and to this day his Soviet stance is associated with weakness, not strength. This misreading arises from Carter’s habit of sending mixed signals, particularly in the first half of his administration. He canceled the B-1 bomber and the neutron bomb while pressing for a military buildup. While pursuing diplomatic détente, he refused to take the Soviets and their Cuban proxies to task as aggressively as Zbig urged for their subversive activities in Africa.
The thread of ambivalence weaving through these contradictions reflected Carter’s unwillingness to choose between the contrasting views of Vance and Brzezinski about handling the Soviet Union. From the very start he boldly sought different opinions in the confident conviction that he could synthesize them into a coherent policy, but he had great difficulty doing so. I believe Carter put such a high premium on a nuclear-arms-control agreement that he was willing to unlink, though not ignore, their aggressive activities elsewhere.
From the earliest days of our work together, I was struck by Carter’s suspicion of the value of military intervention and his personal dedication to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons by working with the Soviet Union to reduce them. The fiscal conservatism of this former naval officer played an important role in his critical evaluation of many highly complex weapons systems, whose costs often outweighed their utility. During the campaign he took dovish views on defense policy, and not simply to appeal to the more liberal Democratic primary electorate. He called for reducing present defense expenditures by $5 to $7 billion;51 reducing sales of all kinds of weapons abroad;52 a voluntary moratorium on new nuclear fuel-enrichment plants; and a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union.53 He forswore CIA or other covert intervention to overthrow popularly elected governments or change their policies, even Communist regimes.54 And he sent shock waves through Asia with a campaign statement (never pursued) that American troops and nuclear weapons should be withdrawn from South Korea.55
Once in office, when he realized the harsh realities facing him, Carter acted contrary to the campaign’s impression that he would gut the defense budget. Far from hollowing out America’s military as his opponents had charged (and his liberal supporters hoped), he was the architect of the beginning of its revival, after Americans turned away from pride in military might following the bitter defeat in Vietnam. In the eight years preceding Carter’s single term in office, defense spending declined by about one-third after inflation. Carter started the climb back, but as was too often the case, he took less c
are with appearances. Ford had submitted a deliberately bloated defense budget as he left office, but even after Carter finished cutting it, defense spending had increased by 3 percent in real terms that first year, and 10 percent during his four-year term, with a commitment to a 5 percent annual increase for the following five years, starting in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
But the impression stuck that he was soft on defense, in part due to his human rights policies, his strong preference for diplomacy, his initial reluctance to increase defense spending substantially, and his rejection of untried weapons systems while emphasizing arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union. Carter spoke of the horrors of a “nuclear holocaust” that would be produced by a nuclear war with a passion he brought to few other problems.56 He immersed himself deeply in the intricacies of nuclear negotiations, underscored the goal of rough equivalence with the Soviet Union, and was able to discuss with fluency the great U.S. advantage of its triad of land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear weapons, in comparison with the heavier throw weight and increasing accuracy of the large Soviet land-based missiles, concealed in their silos.
When Carter took office, the USSR represented a very real threat that demanded a Western response, and it was Defense Secretary Brown who persuaded the new president to focus on strengthening NATO.57 The psychological and strategic nuclear balance had changed in the Soviets’ favor. While the number of U.S. strategic missile launchers remained relatively stable over a fifteen-year period, the Soviet number grew nearly sevenfold. Through technology that enabled each of these missiles to be loaded with several nuclear warheads, each aimed at a different target, called “MIRVing” (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles), the United States doubled the number of its intercontinental warheads, but the Soviet Union increased them by nearly twenty times. Carter knew that if the Soviets were to provoke Western aggression, the American people would not want to enter into a military engagement without allied support.
So in May 1977 he appealed directly to NATO defense ministers to increase their budgets by 3 percent annually, to which they agreed in a formal communiqué.58 American pressure for increased NATO spending remains a thorn in our relationship with them to this day (as President Trump has emphasized), but Carter persuaded them to get started. Not only did this serve to prepare the allies for a potential attack from the East, but it restored vital American leadership in the alliance after we had escaped our entanglement in Vietnam.
GROUNDING THE B-1 BOMBER
Far more complex, both politically and technically, was a divisive debate over whether to build the B-1 bomber, which presents a good lesson in how difficult it is, even for a president with a military background like Carter’s, to balance the appetites of what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” against his own prudent instincts. Only a week after his inauguration, the president met with military and budget officials to discuss whether to fund this technical marvel designed to fly at ground-hugging but supersonic speeds, under Soviet radar, to drop nuclear bombs on enemy territory.59 The plane was planned to supplement the aging fleet of B-52s that had once been the pride of the Strategic Air Command and was the aerial workhorse of the Vietnam War.
Carter said that he and not the Pentagon would personally decide what to include in the budget and therefore expressed the hope that “before I do, I can assess Soviet intentions.” Brown told him he had until the spring, because a new generation of cruise missiles was being built, and the numbers could be increased to serve as negotiating leverage in the SALT II talks. Carter commented: “A commitment to the B-1 says to Russia that we are still committed to the triple method of delivering nuclear weapons, and it will put pressure on them for reductions.” Sitting in and taking notes, I felt that these comments reflected a clear desire to move forward with the B-1, and so did everyone else around the table.60
But because Carter’s campaign statements questioned the utility of the B-1, word was already filtering through to Congress that he was seriously considering killing the plane. In June the president met with a group of the B-1’s congressional supporters, including several representing districts where components would be built. They were led by Democratic Representative Sam Stratton, a strong defense advocate from upper New York State, who argued that there were no good alternatives to the B-1 if the United States wanted to maintain the airborne delivery system of the land-sea-air triad. Another argument was that the costs could be trimmed by building fewer than the 249 planes in the Pentagon’s plans. Senator John Stennis, a Mississippi power on the Armed Services Committee and a strong supporter of Carter’s presidential campaign, took up the diplomatic argument in a slow, Southern cadence. He said construction had already started, and “Mr. President, to delay the B-1 further will put yourself in a hole on SALT.”
These arguments were tossed around the table until they reached the superhawk Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican and Air Force reserve pilot, who unforgettably promised as a 1964 presidential candidate to “drop one into the men’s room of the Kremlin.” He stressed that the B-1 could stay in the air for 28 hours and pleaded: “Mr. President, don’t make the red [missile] button the only alternative.” He said that the B-52 fleet was so old that “the crews flying them now were not born when they started,” and in any case it would cost just as much to retool the aging fleet without achieving the speed and penetration promised by the B-1.
Carter listened carefully and then asked a series of questions indicating the depth at which he had examined the options. Since the Pentagon conceded that the B-1 could be easily detected by Soviet radar, he said the CIA indicated that the Soviet Union was far less concerned about the B-1 than about the new cruise missiles, which he supported. These unmanned air-breathing missiles could be fired outside Soviet borders, but penetrate deep into Soviet territory with pinpoint accuracy and less vulnerability to Soviet radar than manned bombers of any type—and by 1980, he asserted, the United States could produce 30 cruise missiles a year. He continued: “The total cost of the B-1 does not bother me, but if the B-52s armed with cruise missiles are as good and cost less, I will go with it.” Goldwater countered with a technical argument: It would take years for Soviet radar to be upgraded to detect incoming B-1s, and the planes could approach from any direction while cruise missles would most likely come only from the direction of Europe.61
Three days later, when Senators Ted Kennedy and George McGovern led the congressional opponents of the B-1 in their own meeting with Carter, I was struck that these liberals came nowhere near matching the expertise of their opponents.62 As well as I thought I knew Jimmy Carter, it also struck me how strange it was that a Southerner, an Annapolis graduate, and nuclear submarine officer would make common cause with this liberal group. I have never believed this arose from his religious convictions, or he would not have chosen a naval career to start with. On the contrary, I think it was his very service aboard nuclear submarines that imbued him with a deep awareness of the incredibly destructive capacity of the nuclear weapons that had been in his own hands. The liberals made many of the arguments Carter himself had already thrown back at the B-1 advocates. They emphasized the enormous cost of the bomber and argued that the money could be better spent on rebuilding our conventional forces or—like true liberals—on domestic programs. They made the political point that his position had been clear in the campaign and that recent polls showed a majority opposing the bomber. Kennedy urged him to focus instead on the country’s “human misery.” Carter closed the meeting by saying that he now had access to all the secret military information he had lacked as a candidate. As someone who was not a defense specialist, I was impressed by how strong the arguments were on both sides, coming as they did from different perspectives. To me, this is what the presidency is all about: making decisions when arguments are closely balanced.
At the end of June the president called me into his study next to the Oval Office, where he did most of his reading, t
old me he would oppose the B-1 program—and that I would be the one to tell Brown.63 But first I would have to review the draft of the public announcement with Brzezinski. Neither of us discussed the merits of the decision Carter had just made, and I did not have the technical competence anyway. I instinctively felt it was substantively correct, but I was certain it was a serious political mistake and an early example of his compartmentalization of decisions.
However deeply the president had considered the technical and fiscal aspects, he had ignored an important diplomatic and political implication: The conservative senators were precisely the ones whose votes he would need to ratify the eventual SALT II arms-control treaty that meant so much to him. He already had the liberals on his side, and he needed to demonstrate to the doubters that he was strong and reliable on defense and thus co-opt them into a coalition that would muster enough votes for the treaty. As far as I know, there was no serious discussion among his national security advisers of the possible relationship between the two issues, nor had his principal political adviser, Ham Jordan, sat in on any of the meetings he held with members of Congress—on this or any other major issue during the Carter presidency.
I never found out why Carter asked me to go to the Pentagon in person and give the news personally to Brown instead of informing him over a secure telephone line. Perhaps he did not want to give Brown one last opportunity to plead the case for the plane. So, in the early morning of June 28, the White House limousine left me off at the Pentagon’s River Entrance. This was my first visit to this nation’s largest federal building, and by square footage, one of the world’s largest, with its five enormous, interlinked corridors. As I walked up the winding staircase toward Brown’s office, the sense of history was overwhelming as I passed the paintings of all former Defense secretaries. I was ushered into Brown’s huge office, handed him the presidential statement drafted by Brzezinski and reviewed by me, and told Brown that the president felt the B-1 was a costly insurance policy, and that while research and development on the plane should continue as a backstop, Carter’s mind was made up. Harold Brown is a brilliant and enormously able man, a physicist who had left the presidency of the California Institute of Technology to join the cabinet, and in my view its best member. He speaks in measured terms, without one superfluous word.
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