Successful presidential candidates from Harry Truman in 1948 forward to Richard Nixon in 1972 had easily rejected pressure from the left but had found themselves needing to move to the right to counter its criticisms. Once conservatives realized that Ford’s adherence to Nixon’s foreign policies was not absolute, they seized every opportunity to push, pull, and trap Ford in their direction. As the 1976 election grew closer and Ford became more concerned about his chances of staying in office, the right’s power to influence his stances on foreign affairs increased.
In July 1975, when exiled Russian novelist and Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Washington to be honored at a dinner given by the AFL-CIO, Kissinger pleaded with the president not to attend or invite Solzhenitsyn to the White House, to prevent offending the Soviet leaders. Ford acquiesced, and in Ford’s name Kissinger forbade Cabinet members to attend the dinner.
This was an error: Solzhenitsyn was viewed by many, not only those on the right, as a hero for his impassioned dissent to the Soviet system. Cheney sent a memo to Rumsfeld, who forwarded it to Ford, suggesting that the president meet with Solzhenitsyn as a “counter-balance,” so that “we not contribute any more to the illusion that all of a sudden we’re bosom-buddies with the Russians.” Kissinger’s attempt to keep the Cabinet from attending the dinner backfired. Someone leaked the order, and Kissinger was publicly castigated as unduly propitiating the Soviets. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger and UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, two staunch anti-Communists, attended the dinner without repercussions. Brezhnev later needled Ford and Kissinger about Solzhenitsyn, saying that his former problem had become their problem.
On the day of the dinner, Kissinger made certain he was out of town in Minneapolis, where he gave an important speech on “The Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy.” This was Kraemer’s usual turf but Kissinger wanted to capture it for himself—and for Nixonian pragmatisim. In a world where “power remains the ultimate arbiter,” he argued, the existence and prevalence of nuclear weapons forced the United States to “seek a more productive and stable relationship [to the USSR] despite the basic antagonism of our values.” Kissinger noted that Solzhenitsyn’s message was that “the U.S. should pursue an aggressive policy to overthrow the Soviet system. But I believe that if his views became the national policy of the U.S., we would be confronted with considerable threat of military conflict [and] the consequences of his views would not be acceptable to the American people or to the world.” Kissinger insisted that the United States “must be true to its own beliefs or it will lose its bearings in the world. But at the same time it must survive in a world of sovereign nations and competing wills.” By insisting that pragmatism in foreign policy must and should trump fixed values, Kissinger seemed to be addressing Kraemer as much as he was tweaking Solzhenitsyn.
In the eyes of the anti-Communists, Ford and Kissinger could do nothing right—even when, during this period, the State Department helped prevent a Communist takeover in Portugal and tried to fight one in Portugal’s former colony, Angola. In Portugal, an infusion of American aid helped effect a transition from an autocratic regime to a more democratic, pro-NATO government. In Angola, U.S.-backed entities actively fought Soviet-backed ones until Congress pulled the plug on CIA assistance. These aggressive promotions of democracy and blocking of Soviet expansionism would later be cited as exemplars by neocons, who made the championing of democracy a centerpiece of their philosophy. As they occurred in 1975, however, the nascent neocons were distracted by another worry: an upcoming conference in Helsinki, where they feared that Ford and Kissinger would further diminish the United States in relation to the USSR.
The conference was an unusual one, bringing some thirty-five nations together to resolve unfinished business from World War II. Ford had not wanted to attend, but he was scheduled to meet Brezhnev there in a sort of side summit. Moreover, the leaders of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary wanted Ford to attend in support of conference provisions that would commit signatories (including the USSR) to uphold certain human rights, particularly freedom of religion and free movement of people and ideas, which could loosen the satellites’ ties to Moscow. For Ford and the United States, the downside of the conference was that it would also affirm all extant international borders—which the Soviets would trumpet as validating their domination of Eastern Europe.
In a preconference phone call to William F. Buckley, Jr., Kissinger acknowledged that “a lot of conservatives are screaming that the Security Conference is sanctifying the Soviet presence in Europe.” However, he explained,
The Conference wasn’t our idea. It isn’t something I’m proud of. Our instructions to our men were to stay a half step behind the Europeans. Insofar as anything of substance at the conference is concerned, it should be looked at as a provision for peaceful change. The territorial integrity issue is something they have gone over for years. The French, British, and Germans had already made their bilateral agreements. It is more in the direction of change than sanctification.
Buckley was unconvinced. But at Helsinki, the two Germanys refused to accept the wording of the borders statement. A stalemate developed, and the statement became so hedged with codicils that it could be interpreted as giving credence to either the Soviet or the anti-Soviet position. The matter that Kissinger (and Buckley) had so casually dismissed—the human rights declarations—turned out to be the conference’s most revolutionary aspect, offering the satellites ways to increase their independence that within a generation would lead to the collapse of their Communist governments and to the implosion of the USSR. These events, in turn, would fuel the neocons’ belief in the transformative power of democracy promotion.
The Brezhnev-Ford summit at Helsinki was also supposed to lead to some moderate progress on SALT II. But this too stalled, entangled by the side issues of the Backfire bomber and cruise missiles.
The right’s pressure on Ford continued to mount. Bob Gates, the CIA Soviet specialist who had moved to the NSC in 1974, railed at the administration for what he considered yielding to the Soviets at Vladivostok and Helsinki, complaining that it would be impossible to verify the Soviets’ compliance with missile limitations. Congressional Republicans pointed out that a plank of their party’s platform since 1948 had been the annual celebration of Captive Nations Week, reaffirming a U.S. commitment to the future freedom of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; by signing the Helsinki accords, they said, Ford had accepted that these three nations were part of the USSR.
In his memoir of the Ford years, Kissinger chastises the neoconservative opponents of the Nixon-Ford policies as “oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions [for a crusade against Communism] had to be carried out…. With a non-elected president [the United States] was not in a position to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy of the Nixon and Ford Administrations as a form of appeasement…the neoconservatives undercut the real foreign policy debate”—which, in Kissinger’s view, was about how to find ways for the United States and USSR to coexist in a world where power was becoming dispersed more widely among a larger number of nations.
Soon, the neoconservatives would have a candidate: Ronald Reagan. At the YAF annual convention, when John Sears, the former Nixon aide who was now campaign manager for Reagan, told the young conservatives that Reagan would not run as a third-party candidate, the YAF endorsed Reagan for 1976; many members signed on to work for him. When Reagan left the governorship, YAF paid for his weekly radio addresses, which reached 20–30 million people.
Another right-wing rallying point in these months was the proposed “return” of the Panama Canal to the government of Panama. In a Ford-led NSC meeting to discuss revising the decades-old treaty with Panama, Schlesinger made the case for keeping the canal, and every public official who spoke confirmed that his mail was running 100 percent against “giving away” the canal. As others at the meeting noted, however, the United States was bound by a long-established treaty to return the canal. Moreover, South American countries were warning that they would send troops to aid Panama if the United States should attempt to renege on its treaty promise. Over Schlesinger’s objections, Ford decided to continue the process that would lead to Panamanian control. Ford had determined that to have the best chance at winning in 1976 he must wherever possible embrace rightist notions, but he could not in good conscience do so in regard to the Panama Canal.
He did, however, decide to abandon détente. That subject came up in an unusual way. Arms control expert Ed Rowny was convinced that, in accords like Helsinki, “détente was playing into Soviet hands.” He suggested to Schlesinger that détente was “a code word for a policy of unwarranted accommodation [and] a constraint only upon the policies of the United States,” and needed to be dropped from the diplomatic vocabulary.
Schlesinger agreed. But he cautioned Rowny that détente was “one of Henry’s sacred cows. He believes he invented the concept and will never give it up.” Rowny and Schlesinger developed a presentation for Schlesinger to give to the president on the subject of dropping the word. To Schlesinger’s surprise, Ford accepted the idea. The president soon instructed Kissinger that the administration would no longer follow a policy of détente, and that U.S. officials were not to use the term but to substitute “peace through strength,” a phrase Barry Goldwater had used in 1964. Kissinger was furious, but he had no choice but to follow his president’s wishes.
Replacing détente with “peace through strength” was more than a rhetorical substitution. As an expression of how the United States should deal with the world, “peace through strength” owed much to Kraemer’s notion that a nation must prevent displays of provocative weakness—that peace could only be enforced by displays of military might. The change was a serious attempt to shift away from the Nixon-Kissinger program of working with rather than endlessly confronting America’s enemies.
Ford’s friend Mel Laird threw another spear against détente. In the July issue of Reader’s Digest, Laird charged that the Soviets were routinely violating their agreements with the United States, making a shambles of détente. Kissinger rebutted the article in an eight-page memo for Ford, who then used it to argue with Laird. Among the points Kissinger made was that even tough critics such as Schlesinger admitted that there was no evidence of meaningful Soviet violations of the ABM and SALT agreements. Still, the accusation about the alleged violations kept being repeated—for example, in the next issue of Reader’s Digest, where columnist Joseph Alsop reiterated Laird’s charges: “The Soviets have forged ahead with fearful rapidity…. If we continue to stay stock-still…the Soviet edge will turn into a significant Soviet strategic superiority.” Conservatives were increasingly convinced that the U.S. decision to abandon South Vietnam, coupled with increases in Soviet military spending, was emboldening the USSR’s attempts to install Communist-leaning regimes and undercut American global supremacy. The conservative think tanks identified the countries in potential danger: Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.
AS THE FALL of 1975 approached, former governor Ronald Reagan continued to attack the administration on many fronts, including its foreign policies and its increasing inability to control inflation and the effects of the OPEC oil price increases. To meet the Reagan threat, Ford press secretary Ron Nessen later explained, “various strategies were tried to discourage Reagan from entering the race,” including selecting a southern conservative, Secretary of the Army Hollis “Bo” Callaway, as Ford’s campaign manager; allowing Callaway to suggest—without objection from Ford—that Nelson Rockefeller would be a drag on Ford’s nomination, thereby undercutting Rockefeller as Ford’s 1976 running mate; and shifting Ford’s policies “further to the right.”
Rumsfeld and Cheney argued that Ford must take Reagan’s issues from him—principal among them the presence of Rockefeller on the 1976 ticket and Ford’s retention of Nixon holdovers on his cabinet, which reminded voters of the new administration’s ties to the disgraced old one. Reagan, they suggested, would attack Kissinger’s continued prominence in directing U.S. foreign policy, and Ford’s apparent unwillingness to resist Congress’s attempts to rein in the CIA. In reaction, Ford agreed that CIA director Colby must go—not just because Colby was a focal point of anger at the CIA, but also because he had too willingly agreed to congressional oversight.
In the fall of 1975, James Schlesinger irritated Ford once too often. In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, the secretary of defense had some testy exchanges about the next Pentagon budget with committee chairman George Mahon, a close friend of Ford; he then gave a press conference in which he blasted the committee, and Mahon by name, for wanting “deep, savage, and arbitrary cuts.” Ford now decided that Schlesinger must go.
He also determined to cut back Kissinger’s power by stripping him of the national security adviser post. He settled upon Rumsfeld as the replacement for Schlesinger. Rumsfeld consulted Paul Nitze before deciding to accept the appointment; Nitze was enthusiastic, believing that Rumsfeld would be able to do a better job as secretary of defense than his predecessor because of his close relationship with Ford.
On November 1, 1975, the White House announced the high-level changes, including the substitution of Rumsfeld for Schlesinger as secretary of defense, calling George H. W. Bush home from his post as envoy to Beijing to replace Colby as director of the CIA, and elevating Kissinger’s former deputy, Brent Scowcroft, to the national security adviser position. Cheney took over from Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff. In a press release, the White House said that Rockefeller was “voluntarily” taking himself off the ticket for 1976. The press instantly dubbed the firings and replacements as “the Halloween Massacre.” Ford was convinced that he had made the right personnel decisions for the Cabinet and staff, but was later angry at himself “for showing cowardice in not saying to the ultra-conservatives: It’s going to be Ford and Rockefeller, whatever the consequences.”
Bush did not want to head the CIA. He had been hoping for a position at Commerce or Treasury when he returned from China—a position that would give him the necessary experience to become a viable vice presidential candidate. He attributed the CIA nod to the influence of Rumsfeld, pointing out to Ford that Rumsfeld was positioning himself for the VP slot. During Bush’s confirmation hearings, Scoop Jackson—who had gotten along well with both Colby and Schlesinger—derided Bush and Rumsfeld as poor substitutes. Then Jackson raised a point that Bush came to believe Rumsfeld had planted with the senator: “It seems to me that President Ford should assure this Committee that Ambassador Bush will not be on the ticket.” To save Bush’s nomination, Ford was forced to send a letter to the committee vowing that if Bush was confirmed as CIA director, “I will not consider him as my Vice Presidential running mate in 1976.”
On the morning after the firings, according to recently released transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls, Kissinger called Schlesinger to say that he regretted what had happened and that “I hope you know it wasn’t my idea.”
Schlesinger acknowledged that, but observed that Kissinger’s “suspiciousness” had added to the difficulties of their rivalry. “I think you and I could have held this thing together,” Kissinger offered, adding “maybe only you and I.” Schlesinger said there was “an awful lot of unfair stuff” about Kissinger going around, but that on philosophic grounds, especially in regards to the Soviets, “you and I are reasonably close.” “It never occurred to me that this could happen,” Kissinger said, “and I did my best to prevent it.”
Later the same day, Kissinger insisted to New York Times columnist James Reston that Schlesinger had been considerably milder toward him in NSC meetings and other councils than in his “extremely ruthless and irritating” remarks to the press. He charged that Schlesinger sniped away at administration positions but “never presented what the real alternatives were for America.” Kissinger told Reston that he expected that kind of sniping from a Scoop Jackson, but not from a secretary of defense.
“The guy that cut me up inside this building isn’t going to cut me up any less in Defense,” Kissinger next confided over the telephone to treasury secretary William Simon. In his own conversations with the press, Simon tried to assure them that Kissinger had not engineered Schlesinger’s ouster, arguing that Kissinger would not have removed himself as national security adviser even to evict his rival Schlesinger from Defense.
Despite myriad public hints that Rumsfeld was behind these personnel changes, the public, the Congress, and Fritz Kraemer still believed that Kissinger had a hand in Schlesinger’s firing.
To explain the situation, Kissinger asked Kraemer to come to his office at Foggy Bottom. Kraemer entered as he often did, via the private elevator reserved for the secretary and for foreign dignitaries who did not wish to be seen consulting the secretary. According to a friend, Kraemer found Kissinger less interested in talking about Schlesinger than in agonizing over whether to resign as secretary of state. But as Kissinger spoke endlessly about whether his “role in history” would be better served by a resignation now rather than by remaining until the end of Ford’s term, Kraemer became convinced that Kissinger had fatally overreached himself. In Kraemer’s view, Kissinger was no longer concerned with what was best for the country, only what was best for him—and that, Kraemer could not tolerate.
For this perceived offense, Kraemer now saw no choice but to break decisively with Kissinger. He told Kissinger he would no longer speak with him.
Kissinger was deeply wounded by his mentor’s decision. Weeks later, when it became apparent that Kraemer was serious about keeping his distance, Kissinger’s wife appealed to Sven to mediate, but made no headway. Some time later, Kraemer told Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson his reasons for shutting Kissinger out of his life: “As a human being, you have to stand for political values. People must know that I do not approve of him. This is a political-ethical stance.” Kraemer would not speak to Kissinger for the next thirty years. “Kraemer took Schlesinger’s dismissal as a personal insult instigated by me and resolved never to speak to me again,” Kissinger later wrote. “The loss of that friendship became the most painful and permanent wound of my service in high office.”
As the Kissinger-Kraemer break was occurring, Thimmesch visited Richard Nixon at San Clemente. It is not known whether the two men discussed the Kissinger-Kraemer break, of which Thimmesch was certainly aware. But shortly afterward, the reporter received a “Dear Nick” letter that contained a startling request:
The next time you see Dr. Fritz Kraemer I would appreciate it if you would ask him on a totally confidential basis to write me, for my eyes only, a memorandum…setting forth his views about détente and the world situation generally. He is one of the most courageous and able foreign policy observers in the nation today.
It was a moment of high irony: At the very moment when Nixon seemed to be ratifying Fritz Kraemer’s status as a thinker on a par with himself, Henry Kissinger—the man who had done the most to help imagine and carry out Nixon’s foreign policies—was being disavowed by his mentor.
IN LATE 1975, the shah of Iran signed a peace agreement with the Baathists who ruled Iraq. As part of that agreement, he prevailed upon the Ford administration to stop a small program of assistance to the Kurds of northern Iraq that Nixon had initiated in 1972 at the shah’s suggestion. This squelching of an independence movement—in favor of balance-of-power pragmatism—came to be considered a seminal moment in the sequence of events that led to the fall of the shah in 1979, the Gulf War of 1990, and the war in Iraq that began in 2003. At the time, however, it went unnoticed by both the press and the right-wing leaders such as the not-yet-declared presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.
Interviewed by Time, Reagan focused on the Halloween Massacre. He said he was “not appeased” by Rockefeller’s disappearance from the ticket. “If the reason [for Schlesinger’s firing] is that the President wants a different approach to defense, I don’t like it. It disturbs me.” Reagan did not think Kissinger had lost any authority—rather that Kissinger would require a “new Nixon…to keep him from giving away the store.” Reagan pronounced himself “against détente as a one-way street. It annoys me the way we tiptoe around. We’re so self-conscious of our own strength. I’m for decreasing confrontation but not with us doing all the leaning over backward.” With the campaign season right around the corner, Reagan asked, “What’s going to happen if someone beats an incumbent President in these primaries?”
On James Schlesinger’s last day as secretary of defense, the armed services gave him a tribute at the Pentagon. After reviewing the troops arrayed on the grounds, he addressed an audience of several thousand military and civilian employees in distinctly Kraemerite terms. “The contribution of the United States to worldwide military balance remains indispensable to all other foreign policies,” Schlesinger said. “Détente rests upon an underlying equilibrium of force, the maintenance of a military balance. Only the United States can serve as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.” He warned that the USSR had been increasing its military investments and that “a continuation of this trend will inevitably bring a drastic and unwelcome alteration to the preferred way of life in the United States and among our allies.” He deplored the “national mood of skepticism,” calling upon Americans to “sharpen our sense of values [and] rekindle an historical feel for that which defines this nation.”
As a coda, Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, calling himself “a Schlesinger man,” resigned as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Graham, who had publicly opposed the Vladivostok and Helsinki accords, began to advise Reagan on defense, intelligence, and foreign policy—as did Schlesinger.
The Pentagon brass was wary of their new secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, although they recognized his ideological similarity to Schlesinger. The military chiefs hoped that Rumsfeld’s closeness to Ford would help the military establishment, yet they doubted Rumsfeld could be the capable and forceful counterweight to Kissinger that Schlesinger had been.
Rumsfeld soon became a more successful opponent of Kissinger within the administration than Schlesinger had been, more attuned to the philosophies of the emerging neocons than Schlesinger, and more able to push a rightist agenda because of Ford’s willingness to give weight to his advice. For Rumsfeld, the Pentagon was an ideal base; from it, he could exercise his belligerence, his elitism, and his distrust for the Kissingerian brand of diplomacy. It was no wonder then that when Fritz Kraemer introduced himself to the new secretary, they hit it off and began a series of colloquies. These were as important for Kraemer as they were for Rumsfeld, because they ensured that Kraemer’s influence would continue in the thoughts of a new generation of leaders. Soon Rumsfeld was parroting lines and ideas of Kraemer’s. In an interview shortly after taking office, he warned that “you can be provocative by being belligerent. You could also be provocative by being too weak and thereby enticing others into adventures they would otherwise avoid.” Rumsfeld also became interested in the work of Andy Marshall, who stayed on as head of the Office of Net Assessment. Over the next year, Rumsfeld would increasingly listen to the advice of Kraemer and Marshall; he repeated some of their ideas during a series of White House briefings for selected congressmen on “the growing Soviet threat.”
Scowcroft, whose job it was to assess that threat, thought that Rumsfeld’s staged briefings were inadequately grounded in the facts; he viewed Rumsfeld’s increasingly belligerent postures in NSC meetings as “a tactical shift to the right…merely a matter of political convenience.” But by January 1976, Aviation Week, a respected defense industry publication, was writing of “a marked change in congressional attitude toward the U.S. defense posture and the Soviet strategic surge,” and columnists Evans and Novak—not longtime Rumsfeld fans—were crediting him with holding back Kissinger on SALT II.
That was something Rumsfeld accomplished in NSC meetings, together with the JCS and the rightists at the ACDA—Lehman, Wolfowitz, Iklé, and Rowny. Kissinger complained directly to Iklé about their opposition: “I don’t understand how the Arms Control Agency can put itself to the right of the secretary of state on issue after issue,” especially since ACDA was part of State. The rightists were abetted in this task by an influential Evans and Novak column charging that the draft SALT II proposals, which Kissinger was about to travel to Russia to lock in, were “major concessions to Moscow” made to salvage an agreement at any cost, and thus ensure Ford’s election, rather than to bolster the security of the United States. Other reporters traced the column’s origin to a “cabal” of Perle, Lehman, and Rowny.
Rumsfeld then proceeded to sabotage Kissinger’s trip to Moscow. On January 21, 1976, while Kissinger was at the Kremlin, and without his knowledge, Rumsfeld convened a meeting of the NSC. That was not unusual; what was unusual was that Rumsfeld too was out of town. (Officials who convened an NSC meeting for a particular purpose were usually expected to lead the discussion.) At the meeting, the Joint Chiefs withdrew their support for the positions on Backfire and cruise missiles on which Kissinger was basing his negotiation. When he heard that, Ford was “angrier than I have ever seen him,” Scowcroft later said. “He ranted about the total inconsistency with the previous Defense positions.” Scowcroft cabled Kissinger that the situation was “surreal,” but the damage to Kissinger’s bargaining had been done. The SALT II treaty would stay dormant for the remainder of the Ford administration.
Rumsfeld next submitted to Congress a new military budget whose $9 billion increase exceeded what Schlesinger had recommended. The budget was premised on the notion that the increasing Soviet military buildup was causing “a gradual shift in the [world’s] power balance” that would continue unchecked “unless U.S. defense outlays are increased in real terms.” It did not, however, contain an authorization for the conservatives’ prior favored program, the Safeguard ABM. Less than three months after Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, he all but shut down the system that Jackson, Nitze, Wohlstetter, Wolfowitz, and Perle had fought for in 1969 but that had since become a target for conservative ire, so reduced in scope that they considered it meaningless.
A LOOSE AGGREGATION of Democrat and Republican conservatives, inside and out of the administration, had succeeded in preventing Ford from continuing Nixon’s foreign policy agenda. Still split between the two parties, these foreign policy conservatives did not yet have a candidate to carry the flag for the transformation of U.S. foreign policy they hoped to achieve.
In the primary season of 1976, they would find one.