8

The Mayaguez Incident and the Helsinki Accords

America’s only unelected president did what his four predecessors could not: he extricated the United States from Vietnam’s long-running civil war. Yet even though that was what most of his constituents wanted, and despite the final U.S. evacuation from Saigon having gone better “than we had any right to expect,” as the commander in chief himself put it, Gerald Ford got only mixed reviews for ending America’s part in the conflict. The lack of acclaim drew in part from what Ford’s achievement revealed: that U.S. involvement in Indochina had accomplished little, and at high cost. “If we had pulled out ten years ago, Viet Nam would have fallen then,” summed up Harold Hannon, a U.S. Army officer who had been deployed to the embattled country during the Eisenhower presidency, with the small first wave of American advisers. “If we had stayed on another ten years, they still would have collapsed when we pulled out. This is a battle we lost. You can’t win them all.” But before Vietnam, America had won them all. And therein lay the problem with Jerry Ford, in the eyes of some of his countrymen.

The message the Ford evacuation gave was hard to swallow: that it had been for nothing that 8.75 million Americans had served, that 154,000 had been seriously wounded, and that more than 58,000 had died. Even worse, to the hawkish, was the resulting perception that the richest and supposedly mightiest superpower in the world had been humiliated by a ragtag band of Third World guerrillas. As simplistic and ethnocentric as that may have been—Ho Chi Minh and his North Vietnamese followers had demonstrated the power of nationalism in their decades-long struggle against the French and the Americans—the image lingered that the United States had become the “pitiful, helpless giant” Nixon had warned about five years earlier.¹

Fortuitously, events didn’t leave America looking weak for long. Just twelve days after the fall of Saigon, Indochina was the site of another challenge to American power. On May 12, 1975, a Cambodian patrol boat seized the Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant ship, and its crew of thirty-nine for allegedly entering territorial waters in the Gulf of Siam. What turned this incident into a crisis was the overheated U.S. response to it, which would cost forty-one American, and many more Cambodian, lives. The 480-foot container ship carried either “a cargo of U.S. government materiel,” according to the antiwar journalist William Shawcross,² or “a cargo of food, paints and chemicals,” according to Gerald Ford.³

In any case, the Mayaguez was about sixty miles off the Cambodian coast—but only six to eight miles from the tiny isle of Poulo Wai, then being warred over by the Communist governments of Cambodia and Vietnam—when it radioed a distress call: “Have been fired upon and boarded by Cambodian armed forces.”

Although initial intelligence reports wrongly stated that the Mayaguez had been forced to the mainland port of Kompong Som, it had been held near where it was captured for some twelve hours before being supposedly escorted to the Cambodian island of Koh Tang, thirty-four miles off the coast. (It was later revealed that the Mayaguez was actually taken to the island of Rong Sam Lem.) As it turned out, at least to that juncture, the worrisome situation aboard the ship had stayed surprisingly benign. According to the Mayaguez crew, in fact, their Cambodian captors didn’t even try to seem threatening. “They were a raggedy bunch and they didn’t know how to use things,” one of the U.S. merchant seamen recalled. “The shower was a big hit. Once we showed them how to use it, they had a ball. One guy held the gun and the rest piled in under the shower.” The American sailors described their treatment as astonishingly polite. “At first I thought the Cambodians were going to take us out and shoot us,” another crewman said later, “but they were so nice, really kind. They fed us first and everything. I hope everybody gets hijacked by them.”⁴

Things weren’t nearly as calm at the White House, where officials essentially had no idea what was going on in the Gulf of Siam. The uncertainty spawned antsy memories of the USS Pueblo, a navy intelligence ship the North Koreans had seized in 1968. Then, eighty-two American sailors had been imprisoned for eleven months before the Johnson administration admitted to a territorial-waters violation to secure their release. No one in the Ford administration wanted to replay that embarrassment born of reluctance to use armed force. What’s more, no one in the White House thought it wise to assume anything but the worst about the Khmer Rouge Communists who had taken over Cambodia less than a month before. The Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, had launched a horrific wave of genocide and repression. “Foreign policy considerations weighed heavily as well,” Henry Kissinger would admit in his third volume of memoirs. “Especially in the aftermath of Indochina’s collapse, the United States needed to demonstrate that there were limits to what it would tolerate.”⁵

With the last consideration apparently uppermost, President Ford consulted with his full range of cabinet, military, diplomatic, and political advisers, and then ordered a considerable force of U.S. ships, aircraft, and 1,100 marines to the region. During the two days it would take them to get there, Ford instructed Kissinger to work on a diplomatic solution. The secretary of state, who was pushing the hardest for a strong military response, delegated the gentler approach to the chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, George H. W. Bush. Try as he did, Bush couldn’t get far, because even his network of Asian contacts didn’t know whom to talk to in the new Cambodian government.

As the prevailing confusion continued, the imperative remained to get the Mayaguez’s thirty-nine crewmen out of Cambodian hands quickly. Naval air reconnaissance early in the morning of May 13 indicated that the Mayaguez was still docked at Koh Tang; U.S. officials assumed that her crew was on the island, too. Late that night in Washington, Ford called together his national security team to go over the military options. The meeting was interrupted by the news that navy fighters had attacked a Cambodian flotilla heading to the mainland from Koh Tang Island. After sinking three of the boats, the squadron radioed that one pilot thought he saw “Caucasian faces” on another. Ford immediately ordered a halt to the attack—fortunately, since those indeed belonged to the thirty-nine Mayaguez crewmen.⁶ The next afternoon, still unsure where the American merchant sailors were, Ford ordered a full-scale military rescue operation. Helicopters would lower some marines onto the Mayaguez and others onto Koh Tang as U.S. jets bombed mainland installations to keep the Cambodians from sending in reinforcements. The first helicopter to near Koh Tang was shot down in a portent of the blistering defense the Cambodians mounted. Yet, two minutes earlier, the official Phnom Penh radio service had begun broadcasting allegations that the Mayaguez was a spy ship—followed by the announcement that they would release it. Whether the crew would also be released was not mentioned.

Although it was too late to abort the U.S. attacks already in progress, President Ford ordered that the Cambodians be informed that the military operation would be halted immediately upon the release of the thirty-nine American seamen. With no other means to deliver the message, Kissinger got press secretary Ron Nessen to put it out on the Associated Press international wire in hope that Cambodia’s leaders would see it.⁷ In the meantime, Ford decided to let the bombers begin their assault on the mainland.

As the marines tried to recapture the Mayaguez and battled unexpectedly strong Cambodian forces on Koh Tang Island, they discovered that the merchant crewmen were being held in the targeted port of Kompong Som. They were also being treated as cordially as ever. “The first man who spoke English greeted us with a handshake and welcomed us to Cambodia,” recalled the ship’s captain, Charles T. Miller. “He wanted to know if we were CIA or if we were FBI.” Miller and his men managed to persuade their captor they were neither, and that their cargo ship had had nothing to do with American espionage or military operations. With that—and just a few hours after the U.S. military rescue assaults had begun—the crew was released. The Cambodians put them on a commandeered Thai fishing vessel, gave them white sheets to wave at their rescuers, and set them off back to the Mayaguez anchored at Koh Tang, which by then had turned into a war zone. Fortunately, the sheets did their trick, the fishing boat’s intent was recognized, and the entire Mayaguez crew was safely transferred onto a U.S. destroyer.

Although the mission had been accomplished, the operation wasn’t over. The marines who had landed on Koh Tang were still engaged in a brutal firefight with several hundred powerfully armed Cambodian troops they hadn’t expected to find there—or to have the firepower to take out eight of the nine U.S. helicopters sent to the island.

The Mayaguez and her crew would be safely back at sea on their original course the next day, but at the high price of forty-one of their rescuers’ lives. Later Captain Miller would lament, “I talked to the Marine major in the first chopper that was shot down, who had about a quarter of his back torn off by shrapnel. I cried. People were being killed to save me.” Another seaman exclaimed, “After the Marines came, God I felt good. Damn good. Those Marines are great. Ford did a damn good job, but I just want to thank those Marines.”

Many Americans, including some mainstream media figures, agreed that the president had done a damn good job. Newsweek called the Mayaguez rescue “a daring show of nerve and steel … swift and tough—and it worked.” New York Times columnist Cyrus L. Sulzberger gushed that thanks to President Ford’s “resolute and skillful leadership” in the crisis, “a polluting American image of lassitude, uncertainty and pessimism” had vanished. Republican senator Barry Goldwater summed up the feelings of the broader American public, remarking, “It was wonderful, it shows we’ve still got balls in this country.”⁸ Gerald Ford himself would boast in his memoir, “All of a sudden, the gloomy national mood began to fade. Many people’s faith in their country was restored and my standing in the polls shot up 11 points.”⁹ Ford would have the Mayaguez’s bell placed on his Oval Office desk as a sign of American resolve.¹⁰

The general acclaim for the commander in chief’s swift and decisive handling of the Mayaguez incident was, naturally, offset by some harsh criticism that Ford had overreacted, ordering a disproportionate military response just to prove his own toughness. Far more disturbing charges that the entire episode had been cooked up to bolster American public morale would prompt Ron Nessen to assert, “I never saw a shred of evidence that the Mayaguez was deliberately allowed to sail into a Cambodian trap in order to provoke an international incident.”¹¹ For his part, Henry Kissinger recalled replying to such allegations at a State Department press conference on May 16, 1975, “We were not looking for opportunities to prove our manhood, only that it was essential for America’s global role in the wake of the fall of Saigon to establish that there were limits beyond which the United States could not be pushed.” Praising President Ford for assessing the Mayaguez affair the same way in a May 23 interview for European television, Kissinger added, “What Ford had said was true, but it could not alter the reality that we had entered Indochina to save a country, and that we had ended by rescuing a ship.”¹²

For all its success both as a rescue mission and as public relations, the Mayaguez episode also revealed some serious problems in the White House. The troubles arose from the escalating infighting among Ford’s senior advisers, more than a few of whose impressive egos seemingly put their self-interests above the nation’s. In retrospect, the constant backbiting among his staff tarnished many of Ford’s finer moments in 1975.

After nine months in office, the Ford administration’s internal schisms no longer fell cleanly along the line between Nixon holdovers and Ford newcomers. As ambitious members of each camp gravitated toward their like-minded peers and superiors in the other, the cliques within the White House had quickly reconfigured, breaking between Kissinger people and those who were not, no matter whether they’d worked for Nixon. The most gaping breach grew between the secretaries of state and defense, as the Mayaguez incident showed.

Immediately after the cargo ship’s capture, Secretary of State Kissinger had advocated mounting an all-out military assault against those who had commandeered it—perpetrators he broadly defined as the new Khmer Rouge government. Wanting to put the fear of the United States in them, Kissinger argued that B-52 bombing strikes on mainland targets would not only protect the rescue mission at hand but make it perfectly clear to the Cambodians and the rest of the world that the United States was not to be toyed with.

Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, normally hawkish, adamantly opposed B-52 strikes on the mainland, with all their evil echoes of Nixon’s—and Kissinger’s—brutal 1973 B-52 bombings of Cambodia. Schlesinger argued that overreacting to the seizure of the Mayaguez could be disastrous, and was completely unnecessary in any case. It was possible, he pointed out, that what could be taken as an aggressive act might just be a mistake, and an easily fixed one at that. As it turned out, Schlesinger proved right, and even the actual tactical bombing of the mainland was not only overkill but also contributed absolutely nothing to the resolution of the affair. That, however, was not the point. President Ford, as commander in chief, had ultimately ordered four bombing waves, and Schlesinger had personally reported to him when the first had been “completed.” That report began what Ford called in his memoir “some high-level bumbling at the Defense Department.” In fact, the first wave had performed “armed reconnaissance,” according to the Pentagon, and dropped no bombs. “The first strike never tool place, although we were told it had been ‘completed,’” Ford would write.

After allowing that communications or technical problems may have caused confusion that hampered the first wave, Ford continued: “What is harder for me to understand is why the fourth air strike—and I had specifically ordered four—was never carried out. I hadn’t told anyone to cancel that attack. Apparently, someone had, and I was anxious to find out who had contravened my authority. The explanations I received from the Pentagon were not satisfactory at all, and direct answers kept eluding me. Perhaps I should have pursued my inquiry, but since we had achieved our objective, I let the matter drop.”¹³

Encouraged by high approval polls, on July 8, 1975, President Ford announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. After promising to run a clean campaign, Ford declared: “I will not forget my initial pledge to be President of all of the people. I believe I can best represent my party, but this will be futile unless I unite the majority of Americans who acknowledge no absolute party loyalty. Therefore, I will seek the support of all who believe in the fundamental values of duty, decency, and constructive debate on the great issues we face together as free people.”¹⁴

Along those lines, three weeks later Ford attended the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki. Ford’s participation proved controversial from the start. And it would haunt him ever after, losing him much crucial support among conservative Republicans. Yet, with their calls for openness and respect for human rights, the Helsinki Accords would mark the beginning of the end of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Ford’s attendance at the Soviet-sponsored conference substantially boosted the credibility of the ensuing Helsinki Accords, which became one of the finer legacies of his presidency. The agreement reflected everything that was best about Jerry Ford: long-term thinking, his deep-seated internationalism, and his belief in engagement rather than aggression, in matters large and small.

The CSCE, which opened in the Finnish capital on July 30, marked the largest assembly of European heads of state or government since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. For nearly three years, diplomats from each of the thirty-five countries had been niggling over a treaty scheduled to be signed at the conference. The document that emerged from these prolonged negotiations appeared as tepid and universally unobjectionable as one might expect. The proposed treaty airily covered three broad areas of concern: respecting the sovereignty of nations and the inviolability of their borders; lowering barriers to economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation and exchanges; and recognizing human rights. The Helsinki Final Act made no mention of any particular situations to which its vague provisions might apply, nor did it spell out any consequences for noncompliance. Basically, it provided a guideline for future civilized conduct in Europe. Yet as toothless as the Helsinki Accords seemed, no previous agreement had ever offered any guarantee of human rights of citizens in Eastern bloc nations—including the Soviet Union.

Before the CSCE summit, the United States had never made much of the human rights issue. As the scholar William Korey put it, the Nixon White House, “guided by national security advisor Henry A. Kissinger, looked upon the rights issue as unwarrantedly threatening to the Soviet Union at a time when Washington was pursuing its own bilateral détente with Moscow.”¹⁵ That attitude would change under the presidency of Gerald Ford, who believed that emphasizing human rights fell entirely in line with the ultimate goals of détente.

And that explained why so many Americans vigorously opposed Ford’s trip to Helsinki. America’s hawks had never embraced Richard Nixon’s forays at thawing the Cold War. They preferred that détente remain unsupported by any agreement outside the existing SALT I treaty, which dealt strictly with quantities of arms, not ideology. Hardliners on both sides fervently maintained that preserving the state of undeclared, unprosecuted war would allow their system to prevail eventually.

However, just as Ford was firming up his plans to travel to Helsinki, the dissident Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stirring up anti-Soviet feeling in the United States. Solzhenitsyn, whose terrifying novel The Gulag Archipelago had just been published in English, had been awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for his works on the cruelties of the Soviet political system, none of which were then available in his native land. Dissident lines about the totalitarian Soviets’ “unwiped jackboats of the unsleeping State Security operatives” grabbed the attention of the Kremlin.¹⁶ Arrested by the KGB and charged with treason for his revelations, Solzhenitsyn was deported to West Germany in February 1974, and he immigrated to the United States early the following year. Instantly sought after across America, Solzhenitsyn quickly tired of the spotlight and sought refuge on a farm in Vermont, where he resumed writing against the Soviet totalitarian state. On June 30, however, at the behest of the anti-Communist U.S. labor leader George Meany, Solzhenitsyn made a speech at an AFL-CIO dinner in Washington, excoriating not only the Soviet system but also any attempt at accommodation with it.

Coming less than a month before the Helsinki conference, Solzhenitsyn’s urgent call for U.S. action against Communist brutality was seized upon immediately by conservative Republican senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who on July 2 jointly requested that President Ford meet with Solzhenitsyn before the dissident left the nation’s capital three days later. Ford refused.¹⁷ Unfortunately, the White House failed to firmly enough cite the reason as the outrage against protocol of making demands on the president’s time with less than half a week’s notice. Instead, as Ford himself would admit in his memoir, “I decided to subordinate political gains to foreign policy considerations.”¹⁸

In truth, Ford’s motives for going to Helsinki had less to do with promoting “security and cooperation” in Europe than with pushing SALT II, the prospective follow-on arms control agreement he craved. Certain that he had made headway toward such a treaty in Vladivostok eight months earlier, Ford believed that putting the final pieces of it together during talks with Leonid Brezhnev in Helsinki before the eyes of the world would go a long way toward ensuring the arms agreement’s success. What’s more, although he never quite admitted so, Ford also felt that, if he could swing it, SALT II would stand as the hallmark of his presidency. Achieving that goal largely depended on enhancing the fine rapport he had established with the Soviet leader in Vladivostok. Doing so would not be easy if he had met with Solzhenitsyn just before the Helsinki congress. So Ford had it conveyed to the interested senators that he would be happy to meet with the dissident after he returned from Finland. The offer was apparently lost on opponents of détente. To these Cold Warriors, the prospective CSCE agreement proposed an intolerable implied acceptance of Soviet domination of the entire Eastern bloc. Even simpler to rail against was the president’s so-called snub of the Soviet Union’s best-known critic. “Does President Ford know the difference between détente and appeasement?” wondered the New York Times. “This unlikely question arises in light of the news that President Ford decided not to receive Nobel Laureate Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn because to do so would be inconsistent with détente.”¹⁹

Washington Post syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft offered a rare, if implicit, defense of the president. After hearing Solzhenitsyn’s speech in Washington about his experience in Soviet work camps and his resulting thoughts on labor-management relations and international affairs, the veteran newspaperman seemed less than impressed. “Because Solzhenitsyn’s views have so little to do with practical American reality,” Kraft opined, “the worship of his presence seems to me slightly ominous. I detect more than well-earned homage to a great artist. I sense a nostalgia for the simple certitudes of the cold war, a hankering … for a time when responsible behavior consisted of taking a stand against communism.”

Kraft continued, “I happen to believe that American leaders have frequently let down their guard in dealing with the Soviet Union. But the application of an intense personal morality to international relations does not yield good policies.”²⁰ Of course, the columnist didn’t know that in private, President Ford had called Solzhenitsyn “a goddamn horse’s ass,” according to press secretary Ron Nessen, who added that “Ford complained that the dissident Russian writer wanted to visit the White House primarily to publicize his books and drum up lecture dates.”²¹ (In a 2003 interview, Ford admitted that his assessment of Solzhenitsyn back then was too harsh. “Maybe I should have met him after Helsinki,” Ford said. “I learned to realize that his dissent was heartfelt and courageous.”)²²

The contentions leading up to Ford’s trip were exacerbated by the opposition, or at least ambivalence, to the Helsinki Congress of many members of his own administration. Henry Kissinger was overheard calling the Helsinki Accords a “bunch of crappy ideas.”²³ Only Jerry Ford seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the talks, as he revealed in a speech just before he left for Europe. “I know there are some honest doubts and disagreements among good Americans about this meeting,” the president acknowledged. “There are those who fear the conference will put a seal of approval on the political division of Europe that has existed since the Soviet Union incorporated the Baltic nations and set new boundaries elsewhere in Europe by military action in World War II … . On the other extreme there are critics who say the meeting is a meaningless exercise because the Helsinki declarations are merely statements of principles and good intentions which are neither legally binding nor enforceable.”

Emphasizing that the CSCE’s proposed agreement did not call upon the West to cede anything that had not already been formalized in previous treaties, Ford laid out the main reason for his participation. “We are getting a public commitment by the leaders of the more closed and controlled countries to a greater measure of freedom and movement for individuals, information and ideas than has existed there in the past and establishing a yardstick by which the world can measure how well they live up to the stated intentions,” he said. “It is a step in the direction of a greater degree of European community, of expanding East-West contacts, of more normal and healthier relations in an area where we have the closest historic ties. Surely this is in the best interest of the United States and of peace in the world.”²⁴

To prove his commitment to the gathering’s goals, Ford dutifully sat through all thirty-four of his counterparts’ speeches over the three days of the conference. Whatever that show of stamina proved, to Ford’s own mind the trip hardly counted as a success because his talks with Brezhnev on SALT II went nowhere. Moreover, the negative reaction to his effort back home—particularly from the GOP right—continued upon his return. “The conference seating was all by alphabet,” Ford recalled. “You know where I sat? With Brezhnev on one side of me and Erich Honecker of East Germany on the other … . The Right lambasted me to pieces.”²⁵ But the long-term results of the CSCE would prove him right to have participated. “Conservatives were upset,” Detroit News columnist Thomas J. Bray wrote in a 2004 profile of Ford, “for the accords seemed to ratify Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in return for vague promises by Moscow to adhere to human rights conventions.”²⁶

“At the same time of the Helsinki Summit,” career U.S. diplomat Sandy Vogelsang wrote in 1979, “much of the U.S. press and many American politicians, disturbed by the apparent blessing to postwar borders in Europe, saw that meeting as a symbol of the Ford Administration’s sell-out to the Soviet Union. Since then, dissidents throughout the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe have seized [upon] the [Helsinki accord] as a means to press their human rights cases or seek escape to the West. The act has thus acquired a momentum of its own.”²⁷ Or, as Ford’s White House chief of protocol, Henry E. Catto Jr., summed up in his memoir Ambassadors at Sea, “The right wing in the United States howled that the agreement was a sellout, which was nonsense, for the Helsinki agreement proved a splendid club with which to whack the Soviets when they violated human rights.”²⁸

Indeed, as a result of the accord, a number of Helsinki Commissions on Human Rights sprang up across the Soviet Union, as well as in its satellites and in other European nations, and proved very effective at shepherding individual cases to justice. The U.S. commission, originally sponsored by Republican representative Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey, investigated not domestic but Soviet human rights violations, indicating the extent to which the Helsinki Accords should focus on Communist states and how to fix them. That certainly wasn’t what the Soviets had in mind when they first suggested a European security conference in 1954. And the Politburo most definitely did not foresee how the Helsinki Commissions’ work would contribute to the fall of communism in 1989 by offering protection to dissident leaders such as Poland’s Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel.

Just before he left for the conference, President Ford noted, “I saw an editorial the other day entitled ‘Jerry Don’t Go.’” (It appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 23, 1975.) “But I would rather read that,” Ford continued, “than headlines all over Europe saying, ‘United States Boycotts Peace Hopes.’”

The Helsinki Accords, signed by the United States, Canada, and most European nations on August 1, agreed to honor human rights, cooperate in humanitarian, scientific, and economic affairs, and adhere to post–World War II national boundaries in Europe. A new era of U.S.-Soviet cooperation appeared to be launched. Around the time of the Helsinki conference, a U.S. Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz docked in orbit. The sight of astronauts and cosmonauts shaking hands in space was interpreted as rapprochement extraordinaire. Less than a year later, on May 28, 1976, Ford and Brezhnev signed the Treaty on Underground Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes, limiting underground testing.

But cooperative space gambits and vodka toasts belied the reality. The Helsinki Accords were Ford’s greatest presidential achievement on the world stage, and an argument can be made that it proved to be the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. “We went to Helsinki, and boy did I catch hell,” Ford recalled in 2003. “Well, that human rights provision was the catalyst that brought about the demise of the Soviet Union because it gave inspiration and justification to the dissidents in the Soviet Union. This provision justified the dissidents doing everything they could to throw the bastards out. We got it started, then Jimmy Carter carried it on. It was the key to the destruction, the elimination of the Soviet Union. Sometimes if you’re right you come out all right in history.”²⁹