The heart of his case was that the “Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War.” He summarized the package of sanctions designed to make Moscow realize that “its decision to use military force in Afghanistan will be costly to every political and economic relationship it values.” He also put the invasion in the regional context of the Middle East oil fields and articulated what became known as the Carter Doctrine, which implicitly invoked the NATO commitment of collective defense: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To provide bulk to his commitment, he noted that he had steadily increased military spending during the past three years, and his new five-year defense program would increase it even more. The speech was repeatedly interrupted by applause, often bringing members of Congress to their feet cheering. As we left the House chamber on a high, it would have been hard to foresee that his standing would fall so far, so fast, and that he could be attacked by Ronald Reagan for a weak national security policy—a false image that lingers to this day.42
For the United States the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan effectively meant the end of détente. To drive this home, Zbig made a trip to Pakistan to assure them of administration support. At the famous Khyber Pass dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan, he took a Pakistani guard’s rifle, pointed it at Afghanistan, with its Soviet troops, and symbolically said: “Let’s hunt some bear.” To drive home American backing for the anti-Soviet mujahideen, Zbig proclaimed: “God is on your side”43 Unfortunately, this is also the fervent belief held by the Taliban, which helps explain why even after the Soviet defeat, this has been a war without end.
For the Soviet Union the invasion was also a pivotal event in the Cold War, as well as a major contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet regime and its empire. The USSR did not withdraw from Afghanistan until 1989, nine years after their invasion. It takes nothing away from the increased support to the mujahideen by the Reagan administration to underscore that Carter began providing nonlethal assistance six months before their invasion, and afterward promptly provided them with Soviet-made weapons to mask their American origin, at a time when they were so desperate that they had to hike across the mountains into Pakistan early in 1979 to buy bullets in the Peshawar bazaar at $2 each.44 However, that leads to two broad questions about Afghanistan.
The first is whether by arming the mujahideen the Carter and Reagan administrations inadvertently laid the groundwork for today’s Taliban in Afghanistan, which led to direct American military intervention in 2001, and now ranks as our country’s longest war.
The reason American troops first went there was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, who had been given shelter by the Taliban to plan and direct the 9/11 attacks. We now know that many of the rebels who fought off the Soviets later became the Taliban—literally “students,” meaning students of the Holy Quran—and incited a civil war that continues down to the Trump administration.
More than anything else, the Taliban’s rise to power was aided by the fact that Western powers all but abandoned the people of Afghanistan as soon as the Soviets pulled out. If the United States had staying power to assist in rebuilding the devastated nation, perhaps the vacuum could have been avoided. But the Taliban seized the opportunity provided by political and social turmoil to assume power over significant parts of Afghanistan and remains a major threat to Afghan peace and security.
The second question is whether the threat of the Soviet invasion was exaggerated? Was it indeed the greatest threat to world peace since the end of World War II—as President Carter repeatedly proclaimed in rousing domestic and global support? Or was it simply a onetime intervention to prevent the collapse of an unruly Communist government on the southern border of the Soviet Union? Would the Soviets really have projected their power into the Persian Gulf? We may never be able to say with certainty. But Carter was correct to assume the worst. If they had occupied Afghanistan with no resistance, it would have profoundly undermined America’s influence in the region and given Moscow a green light to extend its military power at a time when they were aggressively building up their military forces and acting through their Cuban client state in the Horn of Africa. The USSR was flexing its muscles everywhere. Carter’s tough response restrained them.
Much of the speculation over the ultimate Soviet goals arose because the administration could not be certain of the Soviets’ motives for invading Afghanistan in the first place. This was the first time Moscow had used military force to expand its sphere of influence since its overthrow of the government of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Although Soviet tanks crushed the Communist reform movement known as the “Prague Spring” in 1968, it brought no effective international censure. The Russians got away with it and were able to establish the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that once nations were inside the Soviet orbit they could not leave it. Brezhnev, who told Dobrynin “It’ll be over in three or four weeks,” may have assumed he could escape censure for Afghanistan as he had for Czechoslovakia.
But for many the Soviets’ ambitious mission to salvage their interests in Afghanistan pointed to the decline in their global influence. Desperate to hold on to Communist allies in the face of a stronger U.S. and NATO presence abroad, the Soviets severely miscalculated the costs of inserting themselves into a war with Afghanistan. It was later disclosed that their decision to invade Afghanistan had been a product of an inefficient Soviet decision-making process through which the Politburo pressed ahead with questionable decisions opposed by some generals and others, who dared not argue against them even in the privacy of the highest councils of state.45
More to the point, Carter’s unhesitating actions had a demonstrable effect on Soviet behavior in the future, and from the very start he made clear that was his goal. At a January 9 meeting of the president, vice president, and a number of cabinet officers, Carter asked them to assess the impact of Afghanistan on their agencies. HUD Secretary Moon Landrieu said that people expected the Soviet troops to pull out shortly and our purpose in acting was not clear. Carter hastened to clarify his purpose: “Brezhnev says his troops are in Afghanistan only temporarily.… What we have done is to deter further aggression, not with the expectation it would cause them to withdraw. This is a major threat. We need to punish them. I am doing this to avoid military action.”46 Carter could not have known what an explicit effect on the Soviet leadership his firm stance and his package of sanctions would soon have, however hastily and imperfectly drawn up they may have been.
The following year, continuing strikes in the Gdansk shipyards by Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity trade union disrupted Poland’s government. On October 18, 1981, the Kremlin ordered the defense minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to take power as prime minister. The general warned the protesters that he was ready to invoke martial law, backing up his warning with a threat to deploy hated Soviet troops as occupiers. But Moscow refused his demand for reinforcements, and the Kremlin was furious at Jaruzelski for making an idle threat. In staying the hand of Soviet power, Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB and a future head of the Soviet Union, harking back to the Carter sanctions over Afghanistan, told the December 10, 1981, Politburo meeting: “We do not intend to introduce troops into Poland. Even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarity, that is the way it will be. And if the capitalist countries pounce on the Soviet Union, and you know they have already reached agreement on a variety of economic and political sanctions, that will be very burdensome for us [emphasis added]. We must be concerned above all with our own country and about the strengthening of the Soviet Union.” That was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.47
* * *
Every American president from Harry Truman through George H. W. Bush played a role in the eventual demise
of the Soviet Union and the eclipse of its Communist ideology. But Jimmy Carter’s has been least appreciated. His human rights campaign exposed the weakest spot in Soviet society and provided a positive contrast for the United States. Cold War archives now underscore that Carter’s human rights policy inspired democratic opposition movements in the Communist bloc, from those led by Václav Havel of Czechoslovakia to Lech Wałęsa of Poland.48 Obviously there are limits to making human rights a centerpiece of foreign policy; they cannot be applied everywhere, nor can realpolitik be totally replaced in dealing with the autocratic and pro-American Sunni Muslim states in the Gulf. But human rights add a moral element that is consistent with American values and remains to this day an important ingredient that was missing in the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger model and that of the Trump administration, as well. When presidents after Jimmy Carter ignored human rights concerns, they opened themselves to criticism for failing to reflect values that are an element of America’s attraction and a source of its power.
At one level the relationship between Moscow and Washington that Carter left after four years in office was in tatters. The Carter administration’s Soviet policy presented maddening inconsistencies as the president tried to straddle the unbridgeable gap between his two principal foreign-policy advisers, Vance and Brzezinski. But much of this severe deterioration must be blamed on Brezhnev and his sclerotic comrades, who pushed too aggressively too far, even for a president eager for conciliation and peaceful relations.
Some of Carter’s actions, prompted by Soviet misconduct, strained relations in the short term but weakened the Soviet Union in the long term. President Carter started to match their military buildup while mutually limiting the number of nuclear-tipped missiles, normalized the relationship with China as a counterweight, and firmly took a hard line after the Afghan invasion. Economic and political sanctions and the Carter Doctrine could only go so far. In the end, however, Jimmy Carter bent the arc of history away from a Soviet power that seemed to be growing without restraint when he took office, but was, by the time he left it, hopelessly bogged down in Afghanistan, the object of opprobrium across the civilized world as a result of his human rights offensive, and no longer dominant thanks to the trajectory of increased U.S. military spending which he began.49
PART VII
THE UNRAVELING: RESIGNATIONS AND RESHUFFLING
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THE “MALAISE” SPEECH
In the space of ten fateful weeks between the president’s return from the Tokyo summit early in July 1979 until mid-September that year, the Carter administration appeared to unravel through a dizzying set of events almost unprecedented in peacetime. As the Iranian revolution erupted, oil prices spiked, and lines threaded around gasoline stations across the nation, Jimmy Carter tried to reset his presidency with boldly unorthodox actions. Suddenly and without public explanation, he canceled a national address on energy, withdrew to Camp David, and then exposed himself to unprecedented flagellation by inviting scores of prominent Americans to come to the mountain and help provide new directions for leading the American people. This resulted in the most successful—but also the most controversial—speech of his presidency, dealing with America’s “crisis of confidence,” soon labeled by the press as his “malaise” speech. This rhetorical diagnosis was never publicly advanced by Carter, nor did the word appear in his speech. It was introduced in a memorandum to the president by his brilliant young pollster, Patrick Caddell. For a long time it remained a mystery how this negative characterization of an upbeat speech circulated so widely. It can now be said that Caddell passed his memorandum containing the term to Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker immediately after the speech, and she mentioned “malaise” for the first time in print. The word was later widely used by the press as a shorthand description and even now continues to stick to Carter.1
Whatever the quality of his rhetoric, the president then stepped on his own best lines by firing his entire cabinet and hiring back most of them, to the confusion of the public he sought to rally behind him. Those dismissed from the administration included his energy secretary in the midst of an oil crisis; his Treasury secretary at a time of soaring inflation; his transportation secretary in the midst of gasoline lines and deregulation of transportation; and his secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, an experienced Washington hand and key link to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, who was in the process of negotiating crucial parts of the president’s health agenda with Congress. He also suffered a near-mutiny by his valued vice president, who fortunately kept his complaints largely private, even from Carter himself, though not from his own senior staff and not from me.
Although it was during this period that he made perhaps the most significant and lasting economic decision of his presidency by appointing Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Carter blithely said years later that “none of it” was preplanned.2 When this ghastly period was over, the Gallup poll of September 14 showed his ratings were the lowest of any president in three decades.3 And Senator Ted Kennedy saw a clear path to deny the renomination of his party’s president.
Very little of this came out of thin air. At its center was a 29-year-old data specialist turned political guru and pollster, who was not even a member of the administration. Pat Caddell was not satisfied with providing poll numbers for the president; he saw deeper trends in American society that he impressed upon the president and first lady with ferocity. He sported a heavy black beard with a streak of white that made it appear he had been touched by lightning—and in a sense he had been. He also wore a perpetual frown under a furrowed brow, and his eyes seemed to be lit by embers of coal, so intense was his visage.
Carter first met this boy wonder, whose unfinished college senior thesis was about changes in Southern politics, when McGovern swung through the South in 1972. Caddell, fresh out of Harvard, worked as the polling expert for the McGovern presidential campaign. Carter and his young Georgia political team sat with Caddell at metal counters in the giant kitchen of the governor’s mansion talking politics, particularly Southern politics, until 2:00 a.m. Ties were cemented when Carter learned that Caddell’s family roots were those of a Southern Catholic from Charleston, South Carolina, who grew up in the North but whose grandfather had fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War.
When Carter announced for the presidency on the theme of healing the country after war, Watergate scandals, political upheavals, and assassinations, Caddell heard a message of both despair and hope that dovetailed with his own belief that among the American people there prevailed a profound sense of alienation from their government. Caddell told me: “I never saw a candidate in my life connected to people like he was. His instincts were just unbelievable, and he got it from campaigning for two years, living in people’s homes; he knew the country.” When he came aboard the campaign, this young pollster was more than a number cruncher. He joined Ham, Jody, and Rafshoon in successfully urging Carter to avoid emphasizing traditional Democratic programs, and instead to run a populist campaign for a more responsive and trustworthy government that was “as good as the American people.”4
Abandoning the traditional formula of running to the left to cement the Democratic base in the primaries and then turning to the center for the general election, Carter did the reverse. As Caddell reflected, “we nearly lost the election,” as the nontraditional, thematic candidate took on all the barnacled interest groups and established bosses of the traditional Democratic Party going back to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Yet, without the support of the groups that turn out the vote, running a campaign based on some abstract sociological theme most likely would have failed.
Carter assembled a unique but internally contradictory coalition, and barely eked out a victory by holding on to almost half of the white Southern vote while overwhelmingly winning the support of Jews, blacks, liberals, union households, and city dwellers. This posed one of the central dilemmas of the Carter presidency that we never fully overcame: gove
rning effectively with the party’s dominant liberal wing demanding more spending than the country could afford, while keeping faith with the more conservative principles that contributed to his victory against President Ford. (By 2016 Caddell had moved into the orbit of Donald Trump and served as pollster and sometime adviser to the candidate and his billionaire backers. Steve Bannon, Trump’s political guru, likened Caddell to an “Old Testament prophet” for propounding the same message of voter alienation for a quarter of a century.5 Caddell was one of the few pollsters to predict a Trump victory, drawing on data showing the same popular suspicion of government as in 1976. In that year Carter had run as an outsider against Washington, just as Reagan did in 1980, and Trump in 2016, albeit with very different messages. (Only the actions of the Trump administration will determine whether his political fate validates Caddell’s dark vision.)
Caddell did not join Carter’s White House staff but continued running his own firm, Cambridge Survey Research, while spending a week or more each month at the White House. So he was unable to plant himself in the policy flow, but he had his eyes on more visionary concepts. In a memorandum just before the inauguration, he explored ways for Carter to maintain his image as an outsider by serving as a “thematic” rather than “programmatic” president, emphasizing “style over substance.”6 These grand ideas were leaked to the Washington Post, but that did not deter Caddell from incessantly pressing his case with end runs to both Carters that I and others on the White House Staff learned about only afterward. He was a catalyst of the dramatic events of this brief but seminal period while we were struggling with the business of governing in the real world of Washington and global challenges. “While we would go home to our wives,” recalled Rafshoon, “Pat would be on the phone calling Rosalynn, saying: ‘It’s all falling apart; you know your husband is in danger; they’re not listening to him; this is what he has to do.’” Without the hyperbole, but with a touch of reality, Carter would say the next day: “‘I’ve decided to do the thing that Pat [recommended].’ We said, ‘But you said yesterday we weren’t going to do it.’ And he would say, ‘Just do it; I don’t want to talk about it.’”7
President Carter Page 80