Foreign Policy Adrift
Domestic issues may have absorbed Americans’ attention more after Vietnam, but foreign threats had hardly diminished. Making matters worse, Ford was weak in dealing with foreign leaders. Soviet dictators, always probing for soft spots, found one at Vladivostok in 1974, when Ford met with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. A hard-line communist, Brezhnev nevertheless was vulnerable. He had suffered a series of strokes that had left him a semi-invalid, attended constantly by a KGB nurse who “fed him a daily stream of pills without consulting his doctors.”43 His entourage was followed everywhere by a resuscitation vehicle. When it came to bargaining with the “main adversary,” as he viewed the United States, Brezhnev differed little from Stalin. He was searching for a strategic advantage that could offset several new U.S. military technologies.44
Of most concern to the Soviets was the antiballistic missile (ABM) system allowed under SALT I. If deployed across the nation, even at low levels of effectiveness, antimissile missiles could effectively combat nuclear warheads aimed at the United States. The ABM system represented a tremendous bargaining chip against the Soviets, since their heavy land-based missiles represented their only guaranteed threat against the United States whereas American deterrent forces were evenly divided within the triad of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), long-range bombers, and ICBMs. Another concern for the USSR was the new MIRV capability of U.S. missiles. MIRV, or multiple independent reentry vehicles, meant that a single American ICBM could hit multiple targets. Its “bus” vehicle carrying up to ten MIRVs could deliver nuclear payloads to as many as ten different locations within a broad target area. Therefore, any advantage the Soviets had in sheer numbers of missiles was offset by the ability to convert existing U.S. ICBMs to MIRVs.
Political will, however, proved more important than advanced technology. As long as Nixon remained in office, he could with some degree of certainty keep together a pro-Pentagon coalition of Republicans and hawk Democrats (such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington). Ford, in contrast, was out of his element. He and his advisers failed to distinguish between warheads and launchers. The Russians enthusiastically agreed to a new SALT treaty (SALT II) that placed limits on launchers, leaving the United States at a permanent disadvantage, which could only be counterbalanced by introducing newer and more survivable submarines, bombers, and ICBM systems. To obtain a treaty that had so clearly put the United States at a disadvantage, Ford and Congress had assured the Joint Chiefs of Staff—without whose approval the treaty would never have passed—that programs such as the B-1 bomber, MX missile, ABM system, and Trident submarine would continue to be funded. Like the support of Vietnam, all these promises rested solely on the will and character of the president and Congress who stood behind them.
“I’ll Never Lie to You”
Had Gerald Ford not had social decay and economic disruption to deal with, he still would have been hard pressed to defeat Georgia Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter in 1976. Carter was one of a line of presidential candidates to “run against Washington.” Born in Plains, Georgia—the first president born in a hospital—Carter was raised in a religious household. He was a professed born-again Christian and a practicing Baptist. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy, entering the submarine service under the “father of the nuclear navy,” Admiral Hyman Rickover. After his service ended, Carter ran his family’s substantial peanut farm and seed enterprise, making him the first president since Truman to have any significant experience in private business. He entered Georgia politics, winning the governorship in 1970, which gave him all the qualifications—except for foreign policy experience—to hold the highest office. He had improved the efficiency of his state government bureaucracy and ran it on budget, a point that allowed him to criticize Washington’s deficit spending. A southerner and a Southern Baptist, Carter appealed to both white conservatives and the religious faithful who perceived that morality was slipping from public service. His military service suggested that he would not abandon the military, and his commitment to racial justice showed that he would not abandon blacks.
Carter also benefited from the self-destruction of the last Kennedy rival. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest and last of Joe Kennedy’s boys (and easily the least talented politically), had cultivated hopes of attaining the presidency that his brother Robert, in the eyes of many, had been denied by an assassin’s bullet. Certainly the Democratic Party would have enthusiastically welcomed a Kennedy heading a ticket. But in July 1969, Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, drowning his passenger, staffer Mary Jo Kopechne. The implications of cavorting with his young campaign worker were damaging, and probably contributed to Kennedy’s decision to leave the scene of the accident. He did not even report the incident to police and made no effort to save the trapped woman as she drowned. The Kennedy spin machine immediately flew into high gear, containing the press coverage, inquest, and grand jury probe. Still, few scholars looking at the evidence have concluded anything other than the fact that Ted Kennedy was culpable in the death of Kopechne.45 After lying low in 1972, Kennedy took the nation’s political pulse in 1976, and found that tremendous resentment accompanied the unanswered questions about the incident. He quietly ceded the field to the Georgia governor.
Having begun a long preparation in 1974, Carter sealed the nomination and then led Gerald Ford by some thirty points in the polls. Selecting Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his vice presidential running mate, Carter nailed down his liberal base, then veered back to the center with pithy but pointed remarks. “I’ll never lie to you,” he told the public, then proved it by giving Playboy magazine an interview, the first presidential candidate to do so, in which he admitted that he had “lusted in his heart” after women. Such poor judgment undercut his image as a religious man and helped erode much of the lead he had built up. Ford proved little better. Having barely held off challenger Ronald Reagan in the Republican primary, Ford blundered by stating in a television debate that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination. Americans concluded that Ford was dense or uninformed. His running mate, moderate Kansas Senator Bob Dole, a disabled war veteran, was designated the attack dog, endowing him with a reputation for conservatism he did not deserve.
Ultimately, the campaign turned on the economy rather than either candidate’s competence. Carter’s aides concocted a “misery index” comprised of the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate, which, depending on the source, was 10 percent in 1975 (but had dropped back to about 6 percent at election time). Carter asked a simple question of the voters: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Most people answered in the negative, giving Carter a 51 to 48 percent popular vote margin (but a much narrower electoral victory, 297 to 240). A swing of two large states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, would have made Ford president. Any Democratic strategist looking at the map would have been concerned. Carter had lost the entire West except for Texas, most of New England, and the key midwestern states of Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. The party’s success came almost entirely from the South, where only Virginia voted for Ford.
Attempting to enhance the outsider image, Carter walked rather than rode in his inaugural parade. He sold the White House yacht and adopted an informal atmosphere, even wearing a sweater instead of a suit during a televised “fireside chat.” Like Ford’s win button, though, the cardigan sweater gained a negative connotation, reflecting the president’s inability to do anything about the ongoing energy crisis. Invoking a preacher’s style of moral calling to the public, Carter encouraged Americans to turn down their thermostats and conserve. Labeling the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war,” Carter only stirred up memories of the last two wars the nation had entered, and lost—Vietnam and the war on poverty.
Adopting a comprehensive energy policy, Carter and Congress rolled out multimillion-dollar subsidies for solar and wind power, biomass, and
other alternative fuels, virtually none of which could come online soon enough to affect the nation’s immediate energy problems. Wind farms of massive and unsightly windmills only generated a fraction of the kilowatts of a soundly run coal-fired or hydroelectric plant. (Later, environmentalists would shut down the windmill farms in the San Francisco area because the windmill blades were killing birds.) Solar power, which worked well in places like Arizona and Florida, was dangerous to install and, at best, unreliable. In colder climates it was completely impractical.
The nation desperately needed new sources of energy, and the cheapest and safest was nuclear power. But already the antinuclear movement had demonized atomic energy, even though the nations with the longest history of nuclear power use—France and Japan—had never had a serious accident. Nuclear power in America had a similar spotless record until March 1979, when an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania necessitated the release of radioactive gases. Not a single person was killed or injured, but the media and activists ensured that nuclear plant construction would be dramatically curtailed, if not stopped.
Leverage over foreign powers proved even more difficult for Carter than Ford because the new president imposed a requirement that countries observe basic human rights. Longtime allies in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East suddenly became the objects of criticism. Although Carter did point out Soviet treatment of dissidents, he avoided any broad and energetic condemnation of either the Soviet or Chinese systems, both of which were inherently hostile to human rights. The entire policy, designed to reverse the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger, was fraught with danger. No nation—including the United States, with its history of slavery and its treatment of Native Americans and Japanese Americans during World War II—had hands that were entirely clean. On a practical level, spying demanded that one work with people of questionable character: murderers, terrorists, and people willing to sell out their own countrymen. From where else would the information come? And when it came to strategic issues, the time-tested rule was “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Implementing the most idealistic foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson was Wall Street lawyer Cyrus Vance (secretary of state) and Columbia University professor Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security adviser), a Polish-born liberal wrongly portrayed as a cold war hawk. Carter also appointed Andrew Young, a veteran of the civil rights movement with no foreign experience, as the ambassador to the United Nations. Their inexperience compounded the impracticality of human rights emphasis in foreign policy.
Carter angered conservatives by winning Senate ratification of the treaty returning the Panama Canal Zone to the nation of Panama and announcing support of black majority rule in several African states. He denounced pro-U.S. Latin American dictators, which encouraged the Cuban-backed communist Sandinista guerrillas to overthrow the Somoza government in Nicaragua. In each instance, Carter traded the substance of strategic control and genuine working alliances for a shadowy world of public opinion and goodwill.
Carter finally appeared to have found his stride in foreign relations when he played a broker’s role in negotiating a remarkable Middle East peace. Faced with prospects of another Arab-Israeli war, Carter invited leaders of Egypt and Israel to the Camp David retreat. Egypt was represented by its president, Anwar el-Sadat, who had allied with the Nazis in World War II. Israel sent its prime minister, Menachem Begin, who had engaged in terrorist activities against Palestinians as a member of Israeli Irgun commando units. These were fighters—men who knew war and had no illusions about the cost, but who were also fatigued and desperate for a compromise. Meeting in February 1979, with Carter smoothing over hard points and even jawboning the pair to keep them from walking out, Begin and Sadat signed the Camp David Accords, normalizing relations between Egypt and Israel and paving the way for Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The final agreement, however, was accomplished only when Carter bribed the signatories with “the largest-ever American foreign-aid package…a total of [$5 billion] over a three-year period.”46 Israeli withdrawal, in particular, came when Carter promised that the United States would construct two military airfields for Israel in the Negev. Money talked, at least temporarily. Arab states quickly denounced the agreement, and the fundamentalist wing of Islam threatened to boil over. Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, for which Sadat paid with his life in October 1981, when Islamic extremists in his own army assassinated him.
In fact, Egypt obtained everything it wanted but the Israelis were left to deal with the central canker sore of the region, the Palestinian issue. Israel had begun to sell land in the occupied territories (the West Bank, which is within Israel’s biblical borders) to its own settlers in 1979, and Camp David did nothing to address the problem in favor of either side.
The apparent triumph of Camp David masked Carter’s more significant weakness in dealing with the USSR. He canceled the planned B-1 bomber (which had been promised to the air force for its support of SALT II) and delayed the deployment of the MX missile (which had been guaranteed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in return for the military’s support of Salt II). Carter also ended all serious consideration of reviving the ABM, another promise related to SALT II that went down the drain.
If there was one thing the Soviets could smell, it was weakness in a leader. In short order, the number of worldwide terrorist incidents started to rise, with most of the funding coming from Moscow.
A far more dangerous development accompanied the Soviets’ assessment that Carter was weak: the “window of vulnerability” opened. In the mid-1970s the Soviets developed two new ICBMs, the SS-18 and SS-19, which reflected a completely different nuclear strategy in that each carried a single huge warhead (as opposed to multiple warheads). The new missiles had one purpose: to burrow into American ICBM silos in a surprise attack and destroy U.S. missiles on the ground. Any astute observer would immediately ask if U.S. missiles would not be airborne the instant a Soviet launch was detected on radar, but this was a question of political will, not technology. Not only did the new heavy missiles of the Soviet missile forces indicate that there was serious consideration of a first-strike surprise attack, but publications by Soviet strategists themselves openly discussed their military doctrine. These publications increasingly were dominated by phrases such as “the first strike,” the “offensive,” and “surprise,” which indicated that planning for a nuclear war—or, more precisely, to fight and win a nuclear war—had intensified since Nixon left office.
Cancellation of numerous new high-tech weapons by the Carter administration convinced many Soviet leaders that the president would not respond in the event of a surgical attack aimed “only” at American missile fields. Under such a scenario, the Soviets would destroy the U.S. ICBM fields, killing relatively few people, and the president would hesitate, or negotiate, while the Soviets reloaded their missile silos (a feature ours did not have), threatening a second all-out attack against a disarmed America’s major cities. (For a number of reasons, bombers and SLBMs were not capable of taking out Soviet missile silos.)
This concept was poorly understood by the American media, which seemed capable only of parroting lines such as “We have enough warheads to blow up the world several times over.” In fact, the proper illustration was two gunfighters: one draws first and shoots the gun out of the other’s hand. Despite the fact that the other has a belt full of bullets, he is made helpless by the fact that the weapon needed to fire the bullets is disabled. Leverage came from available launchers, not warheads. Security came from will, not technology. Ford’s and Carter’s aura of weakness opened this window of vulnerability, which reached its widest level around 1979, when the United States came the closest to nuclear war than at any time in its history, including the Cuban crisis.
Carter had none of Franklin Roosevelt’s luck. No sooner had he helped negotiate the Camp David Accords than a revolution in Iran, in January 1979, overthrew the pro-American shah with an Islamic fundamentalist,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Carter made overtures to the new Islamic government, which rebuffed him, calling the United States the Great Satan before shutting off all oil exports to America. Failing to see the dangers posed by a new government that hated the United States, Carter did not withdraw the American embassy personnel. He antagonized the Iranian mullahs when, several months later, he admitted deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into the United States for medical treatment. Iranian mobs, fanned by the ayatollahs, erupted and stormed the U.S. embassy, taking hostage sixty-six Americans inside. Khomeini warned that any attempt to rescue them would result in their execution (although he later released all women, blacks, and one ill white male). Television pictures transmitted to North America revealed to a stunned public the raw hatred of the mobs. Carter seemed helpless to do anything about the situation. Lacking the impetuosity of a Teddy Roosevelt, who would have sent a military force to punish the Iranians, or the stoicism of a Coolidge to ride it out, or the deviousness of Nixon to strike through covert measures, Carter adopted halfway measures and always employed them too late.
Television made matters worse. News networks kept a daily tracking of the fiasco, leading each newscast with banners reading america held hostage. America, of course, was only held hostage if it allowed a foreign country to use the fifty remaining captives as leverage. The public, unable to do anything substantial, engaged in symbolic gestures like tying yellow ribbons around trees and flagpoles. Carter compounded the error by elevating the safe return of the hostages to his administration’s top priority. American helplessness in Iran exposed the Camp David agreements as of minimal value, since Carter refrained from military action, in part because of fear that the Arab world would support the Iranians. Days turned into weeks, then into months.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 122