by David Milne
In the pantheon of political missteps, the president’s decision was not quite as misguided as granting Nixon a full pardon and thus immunity from prosecution—as Ford did immediately after coming to office, with disastrous electoral consequences—but it came pretty close. An editorial in The New York Times asked, “Does President Ford know the difference between détente and appeasement?”186 One of Gerald Ford’s assistants, Dick Cheney, expressed his unease to Donald Rumsfeld, the president’s chief of staff:
I think the decision not to see him is based upon a misreading of détente … 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 [than meeting Solzhenitsyn] to demonstrate for the American people and for the world that détente with the Soviet Union … does not imply also our approval of their way of life or their authoritarian government.187
Cheney was absolutely right. And it hardly needs emphasizing that any decision capable of uniting Dick Cheney and The Times in well-reasoned opposition was likely to either have some serious flaws or be touched by a peculiar genius. The furor that engulfed the administration made clear that it was the former. Kissinger conceded so much in his memoir, lamenting that “our ability to conduct a balanced Soviet policy was far more damaged than it would have been had we found some way to meet with this great and courageous champion of freedom.”188
A month after the Solzhenitsyn snub, in Minneapolis, Kissinger responded to his legion of critics in a speech titled “The Moral Foundation of Foreign Policy.” The speech followed a familiar post-political-fiasco pattern in that regret appears to be expressed, critics appear to be disarmed, and then the essential point is made at the end: my critics are wrong and my approach is not just correct but unavoidably so. Thus Kissinger began by saying, “We have never seen ourselves as just another nation state pursuing selfish aims. We have always stood for something beyond ourselves—a beacon to the oppressed from other lands.” And he ended with a staunch defense of détente and brand Kissinger, reinforcing the advantages of engagement:
As a consequence of improved foreign policy relationships, we have successfully used our influence to promote human rights. But we have done so quietly, keeping in mind the delicacy of the problem and stressing results rather than public confrontation. Therefore, critics of détente must answer: What is the alternative that they propose? What precise policies do they want us to change? Are they prepared for a prolonged situation of dramatically increased international danger? Do they wish to return to the constant crises and high arms budgets of the Cold War? Does détente encourage repression—or is it détente that has generated the ferment and the demands for openness that we are now witnessing?189
The final sentence was a reference to the Helsinki Final Act, signed that same month, which confirmed Europe’s postwar borders, regulated and facilitated East-West exchanges on science, tourism, the environment, and trade, and devoted a discrete third section—or basket—to “humanitarian and other fields.” This final category committed all signatories to respect the inviolability of its citizens’ human rights. The first basket, formally recognizing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, attracted the most attention. And at the time, Kissinger could scarcely imagine what that third basket would portend a generation later. But some historians now believe that Brezhnev effectively signed the Soviet Union’s death warrant in Helsinki. As John Lewis Gaddis writes:
Challenging authoritarian rule … was now a legitimate enterprise, because Brezhnev’s signature on the Helsinki Final Act formally endorsed the argument that the Soviet Union’s adversaries had been making throughout the Cold War: that the people, not the party and its leaders, had the right to organize, vote, and thereby determine their own future. Dissidents who had long hoped for reform could now claim it as their right, and within months their demands were sweeping the Soviet bloc.190
In an act of creative self-destruction, the full text of the Helsinki Accords—technically the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe—was printed in Pravda. Soon after the conference ended, Helsinki Groups sprang to life in the nations of the Warsaw Pact, including Václav Havel’s Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Lech Wałeşa’s Solidarity in Poland. Kissinger could not finesse the full significance of the Helsinki Accords at the time—how could he?—but the secretary of state was sharp enough to identify “ferment and the demand for openness” as an early reality. Gerald Ford’s speech at Helsinki represented his finest hour. The president focused particular attention on the human rights provisions, addressing Brezhnev directly: “To my country, they are not clichés or empty phrases … It is important that you recognize the deep devotion of the American people and their government to human rights and fundamental freedoms … History will judge this conference not by what we say here today, but by what we do tomorrow; not by the promises we make but by the promises we keep.”191 Yet Kissinger’s and Ford’s critics missed all this, assailing Helsinki as if it were Yalta’s second coming—without the mitigating factor of the wartime alliance.
George Kennan was never likely to warm to a diplomatic treaty signed by thirty-five states with domestic politics at its heart. He dismissed Helsinki as “a lot of nonsense … none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.”192 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, smarting from the presidential snub, described Helsinki as “the betrayal of Eastern Europe” and predicted darkly that “an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels will bury and pack down corpses still breathing in a common grave.” Honing his forthcoming primary strategy of blaming the world’s ills on Kissinger, Governor Ronald Reagan said, “At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford snubbed Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the great moral heroes of our time. At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford flew halfway around the world to sign an agreement at Helsinki which placed the American seal of approval on the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.”193 “I think we lost in Helsinki,” chimed in Governor Jimmy Carter, readying himself for his tilt at the presidency. “We ratified the takeover of Eastern Europe. We got practically nothing in return.”194 Kissinger and Ford understood that Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe had been ceded in 1945. The genius of Helsinki was that it grasped a validated, cocksure Brezhnev in a warm embrace—placing official imprimatur on a long-standing reality—and then planted a time bomb on his person.
* * *
Post-Helsinki validation was a long time away. The year 1975 was generally miserable. South Vietnam and Cambodia both fell to communist onslaughts in April. As Kissinger recalled, passively, “As for Indochina, I observed it with the melancholy shown toward a terminally ill relative, hoping for a long respite and miracle cure I was unable to describe.”195 Kissinger favored a military intervention, which Ford swiftly refused to sanction, leaving him to lament, “I’m the only secretary of state who has lost two countries in three weeks.” During an NBC interview with Barbara Walters, which garnered a large viewing audience, Walters asked what this loss meant to the United States. Where had we gone wrong in Vietnam? Kissinger began to answer the question conventionally, observing that there “is in almost every major event a domino effect” that one can attribute to “the general psychological climate that is created in the world as to who is advancing and who is withdrawing.” Then he paused, took a deep breath, and added that “we probably made a mistake” in believing such canards. “We perhaps might have perceived [the war] more in Vietnamese terms, rather than as the outward thrust of a global conspiracy.” Watching Kissinger channeling David Halberstam was an exhilarating moment for The Washington Post’s Stephen Rosenfeld, who hailed “a burst of historical revisionism fit to make his bitterest critics weep for joy.”196
There were few other validations for Kissinger during the remainder of his tenure as secretary of state. During the so-called Halloween Massacre of 1975, Ford ruthlessly restructured his administration, ceding the most significant gains
to the right wing of the GOP. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, became secretary of defense. Dick Cheney was promoted to replace Rumsfeld. Ford’s vice president, and Kissinger’s friend and patron, Nelson Rockefeller, was persuaded to eliminate himself as a running mate in the forthcoming election. Finally, Kissinger’s national security brief was taken from him and handed to Brent Scowcroft. This was positive in the sense that Scowcroft and Kissinger had similar worldviews. But Kissinger had enjoyed the power vested in his unprecedented dual role and struggled to adjust to losing his White House perch. Kissinger retreated into a sulk and contemplated resignation. He soon concluded, however, that the prospect of a Rumsfeld or a Cheney replacing him was sufficiently horrifying for him to stay the course. “Don,” Kissinger said to Rumsfeld during a cabinet meeting to audible laughter, “your wife was over measuring my office today.”197
The massacre was not bloody enough for Ronald Reagan, who delivered an ominous threat: “I am not appeased.” Rather than challenging Reagan, Ford gave appeasement another chance. In November 14, 1975, Ford’s campaign adviser, Robert Teeter, warned the president that “détente is a particularly unpopular idea with most Republican primary voters … We ought to stop using the word wherever possible.”198 Ford agreed, and “détente” joined “liberal” in its lexical journey from descriptor to epithet. Kissinger’s grand strategy was being picked apart in full view.
Scenting more blood that same year, Paul Nitze and Eugene Rostow—Walt’s more belligerent older brother—gathered together a selection of prominent anti-Kissinger Democrats and Republicans to form a Committee on the Present Danger. The roster of members was highly impressive, ranging from Dean Rusk to Richard Perle to Saul Bellow. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a well-regarded professor of international relations at Georgetown University, was an important member of the committee, and she was highly effective at assailing Kissinger’s worldview: “[A] culture of appeasement which finds reasons not only against the use of force but denies its place in the world is a profoundly mistaken culture—mistaken in the nature of reality.”199 The executive committee was divided equally between Democrats and Republicans and its public stance was nonpartisan. This worked well in 1976 when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both assailed Kissinger in more or less equal measure. When their piñata departed the scene, however, and the GOP found a charismatic Cold Warrior in Ronald Reagan, the membership of the committee was almost unified in its support for the Republican Party.
Throughout 1976, Ford faced a fierce primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, which he only narrowly overcame, while Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, secured the Democratic nomination. When it came to foreign policy, Reagan and Carter had near identical messages. “Henry Kissinger’s stewardship of United States foreign policy,” Reagan repeated on the primary campaign trail, “has coincided precisely with the loss of United States military superiority.” He and Ford had presided over “the collapse of the American will and retreat of American power.”200 Reagan’s insurgent campaign ended in defeat when Ford secured the nomination in August at the party convention. But Reagan had won the GOP’s soul.
Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, picked up where Reagan left off. During the second presidential debate, for example, he name-checked Kissinger’s “secrecy” and “secret” diplomacy eleven times. During his powerful opening remarks, Carter observed that “our country is not strong anymore; we’re not respected anymore … We’ve lost, in our foreign policy, the character of the American people. We’ve ignored or excluded the American people and the Congress from participation in the shaping of our foreign policy. It’s been one of secrecy and exclusion.” Yet the principal architect of this dismal state of affairs was not the incumbent: “As far as foreign policy goes, Mr. Kissinger has been the president of this country,” Carter noted.201
Later in the debate, a weak-looking Ford made the worst gaffe in the history of presidential debates. In defending his policy of engaging with Moscow, Ford observed, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” When gently asked for a clarification, Ford simply made matters worse:
I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous; it has its own territorial integrity. And the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.202
Few Cold War–era presidents have sounded quite so much like a Soviet propagandist. As well as being flat-out wrong, Ford’s remarks appeared to vindicate Reagan’s and Carter’s charges regarding his indifference to the Soviet menace and acceptance of its worst excesses. The opinion pollster George Gallup observed that the president’s gaffe was “the most decisive moment of the campaign. It fatally stalled Ford’s comeback.”203
Carter defeated Ford in the election of 1976 by two percentage points in the popular vote and by 297 to 240 electoral votes. With Ford’s defeat, America’s curious relationship with European balance-of-power politics came to a swift and ignominious end. It was a passionate and volatile affair—a holiday romance, perhaps. After the fling ended, however, the nation sheepishly returned to its long-standing spouse: Woodrow Wilson. Kissinger departed the scene with his wit and self-confidence intact. “Can you tell me,” one reporter asked him after his departure, “what you consider to be your greatest success and greatest failure?” “I don’t quite understand your second point,” said Kissinger.204
A little after leaving office, Kissinger made some unguarded remarks about Richard Nixon that were picked up on an open microphone. He described his former boss as an “odd,” “unpleasant,” “nervous,” and “artificial” man. Word got back to Nixon, who was predictably angered—though probably not surprised. It made for an awkward reunion in 1977 when the two men exchanged words at the funeral of Hubert Humphrey, who might have been president had events taken a different course in 1968. “You as mean as ever?” Nixon asked Kissinger. “Yes,” replied Kissinger, “but I don’t have as much opportunity as before.”205 When Nixon died in 1994, Kissinger quoted Hamlet during an elegant and affecting eulogy: “He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.”206 The same might be said of Kissinger.
8
THE WORLDMAKER
PAUL WOLFOWITZ
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well that is the only way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
—WOODROW WILSON
Paul Wolfowitz worked dutifully for the Nixon and Ford administrations, but with no real enthusiasm for their policies. When Fred Iklé, a hawkish RAND strategist, invited Wolfowitz to join the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973, the young scholar dropped his tenure-track job at Yale as if it were a paper route. Wolfowitz was not excited by the thought of making a university career as a political scientist, even at an institution as venerable as Yale. What he wanted was proximity to power and the opportunity to put theory to practice. And he had to start somewhere.
Unfortunately for Wolfowitz, Henry Kissinger had the final say on which theories became practice—and they were usually his own. While Wolfowitz enjoyed the process and detail of his work on missile launches, early-warning systems, and other cutting-edge technologies, he soon grew frustrated with the wider context in which he operated. Wolfowitz viewed the Nixon administration’s strategy of détente as morally wrong and tactically deficient. Instead of taming America’s principal adversary, détente legitimated and vitalized the Soviet Union—plus the accompanying SALT negotiations ceded Moscow significant tactical advantages. Kissinger was incapable of accepting this possibility, as it contradicted his Metternichian focus on dealing dispassionately and constructively with allies and enemies. Waylaid by specious historical analogies, Kissinger was a lost cause. But t
he CIA also appeared blasé about the Soviet threat, and this was a real worry.
At the end of every year, the CIA compiles a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which provides a comprehensive assessment of the most pressing threats facing the United States. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, a growing number of critics—including Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlstetter—began complaining that the CIA was underestimating Soviet military strength. Some wondered whether these sanguine NIEs had been so designed to bolster the administration’s policies of engagement with Moscow. During his bruising primary battle with Ronald Reagan, Ford buckled under severe pressure from the right of his party and instructed George H. W. Bush, the president’s recently appointed director of Central Intelligence, to launch an independent review into these allegations. Bush assembled an external team of experts—designated Team B—to review the CIA’s classified data and determine whether the agency’s view of Moscow was indeed complacent. Team B was led by the Sovietologist Richard Pipes, a professor of Russian history at Harvard University, who oversaw a team of sixteen analysts and defense intellectuals that included two Pauls: Messrs. Nitze and Wolfowitz.1
After completing their deliberations, Team B launched a lacerating attack on the CIA. Their report criticized the agency for leaning too heavily on satellite imagery and signals intelligence. They alleged that the agency paid insufficient attention to the actual speeches made by members of the Politburo—much more than mere bluster—and to the increasingly aggressive manner in which the Soviet proxies across the world, whether in Angola, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, actually behaved.2 As Nitze explained in a letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Soviet leaders are totally frank in saying that they believe the correlation of forces has moved dramatically in their favor over the last five to ten years. They attribute this to their growing military preponderance and to détente.”3 The aggressiveness and certainty with which Pipes and Nitze made their case left the fresh-faced, undermanned CIA “Team A” reeling. “It was like putting Walt Whitman High versus the Redskins,” said one CIA analyst of the meeting between both “teams” in October 1976. Another recalled, “People like Nitze ate us for lunch.”4