Dupes

  In Unfit for Command, John O'Neill recalls the sad experience of Bill Lupetti, a Navy corpsman who was stationed in Vietnam in 1969–70 and treated injured Swift Boat soldiers.18 Lupetti had served at An Thoi, the small base and unit where both O'Neill and Kerry had served. For Memorial Day 2004, Lupetti returned to Vietnam, visiting Ho Chi Minh City, wandering through the streets trying to piece together a period of his life that he had once tried hard to forget, and looking earnestly to find out whether certain Vietnamese friends had survived the merciless Communist takeover that Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Boudin, Gilbert, Gold, Jacobs, Jones, Hayden, Fonda, and friends had hailed.

  Lupetti happened upon the War Remnants Museum. Inside, he came to an exhibit dedicated to “heroes” around the world who had helped the Vietnamese Communists win the war. A wall plaque at the head of the exhibit, written in both Vietnamese and English, offered a note of appreciation from Vietnam's Communist authorities: “We would like to thank the communist parties and working class countries of the world.”

  Among those whom the Vietcong wished to thank for their “strong encouragement to our people's patriotic resistance against the U.S.” were “progressive human beings for their wholehearted support.”19 That included, of course, America's “progressives.”

  Lupetti was not surprised to see photographs of China's Communists and American radicals from the 1960s. He was staggered, however, by a picture of John Kerry.

  The photo showed Kerry in 1993, by which point he was a celebrated Democratic senator, in conversation with a former general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Do Muoi. There he was, John Kerry, in a special exhibit honoring those whose “heroic” contributions had helped the Vietcong defeat the United States.

  The Vietnamese Communists never forgot Kerry's Senate testimony in 1971. It had been a great help to their efforts.

  “Our Most Significant Success”

  Ion Mihai Pacepa, noting that KGB chairman Yuri Andropov had managed the Kremlin's Vietnam operation, said that Andropov “often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations.”

  “Vietnam,” Andropov once told Pacepa, had been “our most significant success.”20

  Yes, it had. And it could not have succeeded without the unwitting, unsuspecting American accomplices who bought and then sold some of the worst Soviet slanders of American boys fighting for their lives and for others’ freedom abroad.

  John Kerry served his country in Vietnam, but he seems to have misserved many of his countrymen with his ill-advised testimony on Vietnam. Whatever the ultimate sources for his claims against his brothers-in-arms, his assertions were enormously damaging and personally hurtful. His erstwhile band of brothers has not forgiven him.

  18

  A KISS FOR BREZHNEV: JIMMY CARTER

  From 1974 to 1980, the Soviet Union incorporated at least ten nations into its orbit—new Communist allies from the Third World, including some countries that had been traditional anti-Communist American allies.1 These changes represented big losses for the United States in its ongoing Cold War against the USSR.

  This dramatic swing was no accident. Under the regime of Leonid Brezhnev and the doctrine that bore his name, the Soviets were suddenly expanding Communism with alarming haste. They did so as they trumpeted an “easing” of East-West frictions and talked of “peaceful coexistence.”

  The Brezhnev Doctrine would not have been so successful had Moscow not found the U.S. leadership so easy to exploit with talk of peaceful coexistence. The Soviet gains took place during an era when the United States was following a policy of détente. This was a bipartisan policy, carried out both by Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and by a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. Throughout, presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan warned—consistently, during both Republican and Democratic administrations—that détente amounted to a “one-way street” benefiting the expansionary ambitions of Soviet Communism.2

  Reagan, it turns out, was exactly right. After the Cold War, Genrikh Trofimenko, the colorful director of the prestigious Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, candidly summed up the Soviet government's take on détente: “There could not be a peaceful coexistence between wicked warmongering imperialists [America] and honorable and peace-loving communists caring for the well-being of all progressive humanity.”3

  Détente facilitated the Brezhnev Doctrine of advancing Communist “national liberation movements” around the world. Occasionally, even the anti-anti-Communist American press managed to get the story right. In a revealing January 1976 article in the Washington Post, Peter Osnos reported: “Soviet commentators have been saying almost daily that the ‘policy of relaxation of tensions [détente] between states with different social systems [U.S. and USSR] cannot be interpreted as a ban on the national liberation struggle of peoples who come out against colonial oppression or as a ban on class struggle.’”4

  Chairman Brezhnev himself said as much. In February 1976, addressing the Twenty-fifth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, he frankly conceded: “We make no secret of the fact that we see détente as the way to create more favorable conditions for peaceful socialist and communist construction.”5

  Brezhnev was even more candid in a secret speech he delivered to fellow Communist leaders in Prague in 1973: “We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist.… We have been able to accomplish more in a short time with détente than was done for years pursuing a confrontation policy.… Trust us, comrades. For by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives.”6

  This bold enunciation was downplayed by most of the American media when it became public four years later. When Ronald Reagan learned about it, he devoted a number of his syndicated daily radio commentaries to the speech, insisting that it “should have been front page [news] in every major paper in the land.”7

  Such was the sorry state of affairs for America by the latter 1970s. Uncle Sam suffered a painful setback in Vietnam, withdrawing in the spring of 1975. The country was experiencing terrible domestic problems like Watergate and President Carter's economic “malaise.” Added to all that, the Soviets were surging in their global competition with the United States. In short, America was losing the Cold War, and Americans knew it.

  “Inordinate Fear of Communism”

  The USSR's dramatic global expansion should have been enough to convince President Carter to be suspicious of Comrade Brezhnev and his Marxist-Leninist ambitions. Instead, Carter continued to trust the Soviets, even in the face of advice from shrewd anti-Soviet aides like National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Carter's naïveté was so pervasive, so deep, that his gullibility seemed to come from the very marrow of his bones.

  Carter trusted the Communists to an unhealthy degree. The first week of his presidency, on January 27, 1977, Carter told high-school students in West Chester, Pennsylvania: “My own hope as president is to explore every possible way to work with the Soviet Union and with other potential enemies of ours, who at this point seem to be our friends.”8 Two months later, at a March 24 news conference, when asked how he might help political dissidents suffering in the Soviet Union, Carter magnanimously reassured his Soviet friends: “I have tried to make sure that the world knows that we are not singling out the Soviet Union for abuse or criticism.”9 Besides, Carter added on June 23, 1978, “We want to get along with the Soviet Union.”10 Three days later, during a June 26 press conference, he said, “We want to be friends with the Soviets.”11 But Carter did not just want to be friends; he saw the Soviets as partners. On July 11 he said, “We are deeply committed to détente, both we and, I believe, the Soviet Union leaders.”12

  In Jimmy Carter's mind, that partnership was paying dividends, esp
ecially in places like Vietnam, where the Soviets—by Carter's estimation—were suddenly inactive. How did he know that? Leonid Brezhnev had told him so: “I discussed the South Vietnamese question with President Brezhnev this week,” Carter told Japanese reporters on June 20, 1979, “and particularly the Soviet presence there, both ships and airplanes. He assured me personally that there would be no establishment of Soviet bases in South Vietnam and that the present ship and plane use of the ports and airports is of a routine nature.”13

  It was clear to Carter that “the Communist nations who sometimes we look upon as adversaries want to avoid war and to have peace just as much as we do.”14

  By Carter's thinking, so much of America's previous misunderstanding was based on a poisonous anti-Communism. The president lamented America's “inordinate fear of Communism,” from which he hoped to unshackle the nation.15 Pushing the idea of peaceful coexistence that the Soviets so effectively exploited, Carter promised the world, “We are not trying to bring the Soviets to their knees.”16

  Here, as in so many other instances, Jimmy Carter stood in stark contrast to the man who ultimately defeated him for the presidency, Ronald Reagan. As president, Reagan would be committed to doing whatever he could to end the Cold War—end it, that is, with the United States and its free allies victorious over Soviet Communism. For Reagan, the real objective was, in his words, to “bring it [the USSR] to its knees”—the polar opposite of Carter's position.17

  Carter and Reagan also parted ways on the Berlin Wall, that cold, gray tombstone to human freedom. In 1987 President Reagan would famously stand aside the wall and exhort Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down. But many years before that landmark speech it was already clear that he and Carter took fundamentally different approaches to the barrier that divided the free and democratic West from the Communist East.

  In July 1978, during Carter's visit to Germany, a West Berlin woman asked him, “For how long, Mr. President, do you think we've got to live with the Wall?” A helpless Carter responded, “I don't know. I hope that it will be removed in the future, but I have no idea when it might be. I'm sorry I can't give you a better answer, but that's the truth.” Onlookers actually laughed at the American president.18

  Of course, Carter made this comment when the Cold War was raging and the Soviets seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Perhaps he could be excused for failing to foresee an end to Communism. But just four months later, in November 1978, Ronald Reagan went to Berlin as a private citizen and had no difficulty envisioning an endgame. In a moment witnessed by only a handful of friends, Reagan stared at the Berlin Wall with a mixture of pity, contempt, and anger. With teeth and fists clenched, he told his two friends and colleagues, Richard V. Allen and Peter Hannaford, “We have got to find a way to knock this thing down.”19

  Reagan, by this point in his life and career, had no illusions about Communism or the Soviet leadership. Two years earlier he had nearly defeated sitting president Gerald Ford in the Republican primaries. After he fell short at the 1976 Republican National Convention, Reagan privately told his son Michael that his only regret was that he would not be able to lean over and whisper “nyet” in the ear of General Secretary Brezhnev.20

  But the man who won the White House that year, Jimmy Carter, apparently did not make “nyet” part of his vocabulary. The president who decried America's “inordinate fear of Communism,” who disdained desires to “bring the Soviets to their knees” in favor of seeking “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR, wanted to accommodate his Soviet counterpart, not tell him no.

  The entire world got a chance to see Carter's approach to the Soviets on June 18, 1979. During the signing of the SALT II Treaty in Vienna, President Carter leaned over toward Brezhnev not to whisper “nyet” in his ear but rather to plant a kiss on his cheek. Photographers on hand captured the embrace, preserving the moment forever on film (in the photo that graces the cover of this book).

  That visual of Carter kissing Brezhnev is a most instructive metaphor. It truly says it all.

  In the Cold War, it would be the difference between winning and losing.

  Carter's Belated Wake-up Call

  Late in his presidency, Jimmy Carter finally woke up—sort of. On Christmas Day 1979 the Red Army poured into Afghanistan in the first Soviet invasion of a nation outside the Warsaw Pact since World War II. This blatant act of aggression put the final nail in the coffin of détente.

  Days after the Soviet invasion, President Carter expressed his shock: “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week.… This action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office.”21

  Those words were streamed across front pages all over the world, from Manhattan to Moscow.22 Among those reading them, probably in his Los Angeles Times, was Ronald Reagan, who would be Carter's presidential challenger in the fall. The former California governor was beside himself at the thirty-ninth president's assessment, though he did his best to keep his disbelief and disappointment to himself. In one private letter he wrote that Carter's assessment “would be laughable, I think, if it were not so tragic.”23 Reagan added, in another private letter to a friend, “It is frightening to hear a man in the office of the presidency who has just discovered that the Soviets can't be trusted, that they've lied to him.”24

  Reagan knew what it was liked to be duped, having been duped by Communists himself decades earlier in Hollywood. But then, Reagan had been a mere actor. Carter was the sitting president of the United States of America. The country was not damaged when an actor said something stupid. For a president to be so misled, however, was downright dangerous.

  A week after those remarks, Carter remained perplexed. “It's difficult to understand why the Soviets took this action,” he told members of Congress in a White House briefing. “I think they probably underestimated the adverse reaction from around the world.”25

  Even then, while pledging to “oppose this Soviet invasion with the means at our disposal,” as both a “moral imperative and a strategic imperative,” the president hoped that détente could be salvaged. It was a tune that Carter did not change. Speaking at the Venice Economic Summit in June 1980, he reassured the world: “We also know that by resisting Soviet militarism and aggression in the present that we can reopen the paths of peace, détente, accommodation in the future.”26

  For Carter, the fatal misplaced trust, the sorry surprise, was an outgrowth of his liberal worldview. As with so many liberals of his day, what was to be denounced and feared was not Communism but anti-Communism.

  There was a toxic moral equivalency at work here as well. Carter reflected the common liberal tendency to insist that neither the United States nor the USSR could claim moral superiority over the other—that both sides were equally culpable for the Cold War and its sins, and neither system was much (if at all) better than the other. As president he publicly expressed this sentiment. “We've got our own problems in this country,” Carter stressed. To his fellow Americans, he called attention to what Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin instructed him: “He said to me, ‘At least in the Soviet Union, our women have equal rights.’”27

  This was a view that Ronald Reagan attacked as rubbish. “Don't let anyone tell you we're morally equivalent with the Soviet Union,” he insisted. “I have heard that term used in places.… We are morally superior, not equivalent, to any totalitarian regime, and we should be darn proud of it.”28

  As these comments suggest, Jimmy Carter had been soft on the Soviets. Only the most peculiar observer would think otherwise. One such observer was Senator Ted Kennedy.

  According to Vasiliy Mitrokhin, a KGB official and senior Soviet archivist who defected in 1992 (bringing with him a huge cache of documents), Kennedy privately relayed a message to Leonid Brezhnev on March 5, 1980. Kennedy had his trusted friend John Tunney personally deliver the message in Moscow. Tunney, himself
a former U.S. senator (a Democrat representing California), had been close with Kennedy since they were roommates during law school. According to Mitrokhin, Tunney was there “to relay [Kennedy's] ideas on ways to lessen international tension to the Soviet leadership.” Amazingly, Kennedy blamed the escalation in Cold War tensions not on the Soviets but on Jimmy Carter. In Mitrokhin's words, Kennedy felt that “the Carter administration was trying to distort the peace-loving ideas behind Brezhnev's proposals,” and that “the atmosphere of tension and hostility” was “being fuelled by Carter.” Tunney said that the great Massachusetts liberal was approaching the Soviet leader because he saw it as (in Mitrokhin's words) “his duty to take action himself.”29

  In other words, Mitrokhin's report indicates that Ted Kennedy was undercutting the American commander in chief by attempting secret conversations with the Kremlin. It is important to note, of course, that in March 1980 the Massachusetts senator was campaigning against Carter, a member of his own party, for the presidency; he was trying to take the 1980 Democratic nomination from the sitting president. Kennedy apparently felt that President Carter was guilty of belligerence but that the Soviet dictator was committed to peace, including to a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan—which the Red Army had just invaded and would bomb mercilessly for a decade.