18
Foreign Policy in an Age of Dissonance, 1974–1981

"This is not the alliance as it once seemed," the venerable London Economist fretted in a somber article entitled "The Fading of America" printed just days before the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The Economist found solace in its belief that Europe remained important to the United States while Vietnam had always been "at the farthest stretch of the American arm." But obvious changes in the national mood on the eve of defeat in war still raised fears that "the pulling in of burned American fingers could affect Europe too."¹

The Economist correctly detected major shifts in the American temper and rightly traced them to the Vietnam War, but the changes went much deeper than it allowed or likely understood. Old dangers seemed to be receding in the 1970s, new ones rising, the world less easy to comprehend. At home, Americans suffered the most serious and prolonged economic crisis since the Great Depression. National priorities underwent their most dramatic shift since Pearl Harbor. Where a crude consensus had prevailed through much of the Cold War, dissonance was the hallmark of a very different decade. Bitter debates over Vietnam and the cultural revolution at home had opened deep fissures in the body politic. While liberal doves challenged Cold War verities from the left, conservatives and neo-conservatives attacked the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger from the right. The illusion of American omnipotence first exposed by the fall of China and the Korean War was graphically manifested again in the 1970s. A people accustomed to having their way in the face of recurrent failure felt frustrated and impotent and vented their fury on their tormenters—and their leaders. To complicate matters still further, a newly emboldened Congress in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate challenged more than three decades of presidential dominance in foreign policy. Against this backdrop of division and disarray, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter struggled to implement foreign policy after Nixon's resignation. Ford tried to perpetuate detente and ended up presiding over its demise; Carter sought to escape the Cold War and became its captive.

I

U.S. foreign policy experienced greater domestic shocks in the 1970s than at any other time since the 1930s. By easing the most obvious threats to the nation's security, Nixon's agreements with the Soviet Union and steps toward reconciliation with China cut away at support for continued Cold War sacrifices and commitments. As the Vietnam War dragged on, costs skyrocketed, and the domestic debate raged, Americans grew increasingly wary of overseas entanglements. Polls taken shortly before the fall of Saigon produced the stunning revelation that a majority was willing to send troops abroad only to defend Canada. "Vietnam has left a rancid aftertaste that clings to almost every mention of direct military intervention," the columnist David Broder observed in March 1975.2

Spiraling economic problems reinforced already strong tendencies to turn inward. Cold War expenditures had sustained a period of unprecedented economic expansion, but by the early 1970s that bubble had burst. Competition in world markets from a resurgent Western Europe and Japan hindered economic growth, especially in key areas such as steel and automobiles. The Vietnam War triggered runaway inflation—in July 1974 alone prices rose 3.7 percent, the second largest monthly jump since 1946. The 1973 Arab oil embargo—an "economic Pearl Harbor"—triggered an energy crisis marked by soaring prices for gasoline and fuel oil.³ Inflation had customarily meant high employment, but the 1970s brought the new phenomenon called "stagflation." While lines at gas stations lengthened and inflation rose, unemployment mounted. A once vibrant economy plunged into full-fledged recession. The five issues that most concerned Americans in 1965 all involved foreign policy; nine years later, the top three were domestic.⁴

As it turned inward, the nation also shifted to the right politically. Conservatism seemed dead after the Goldwater debacle of 1964, but from the depths of defeat the movement's leaders over the next decade led a remarkable resurgence. They preached to an increasingly receptive audience; polls taken in the early 1970s revealed that Americans as a whole had become more conservative. The change reflected postwar affluence and a vast expansion of the middle class. It also represented a reaction against the social, cultural, and political radicalism of the 1960s, a gut response on the part of those Nixon labeled the Silent Majority to the perceived excesses of the anti-war movement, the counterculture, black power, feminism, and gay rights. The Supreme Court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion infuriated Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, spurring the rise of a religious right that would assume growing political importance. Conservatives blamed the Great Society for the nation's economic woes and railed against high taxes, big government, and social engineering. In foreign policy, they attacked the liberal do-goodism of Johnson and the amoral realism of Nixon and Kissinger. Some pressed for rebuilding U.S. power, taking a harder line against the Soviet Union, and reasserting America's moral leadership in the world.5

Attitudes changed and institutions crumbled as fears grew and priorities shifted. At the height of the Cold War, Americans expressed greater trust in their government than any other people in the world. As a result of the Johnson/Nixon credibility gap, a once compliant media subjected the most innocent official statements to the most searching scrutiny. Nixon's abuses of power, revealed sensationally to an already agitated nation through the televised Watergate hearings, widened the gap to a chasm. The release of his White House tapes exposed a meanness and crudeness that degraded the office—"shabby, disgusting, immoral," Republican senator Hugh Scott fumed.⁶ The imperial presidency, a foundation stone of Cold War foreign policy, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate plummeted to its lowest point in prestige since the Harding scandals of the 1920s. Involvement of former CIA operatives in the Watergate burglary led to congressional investigations that produced sensational exposés of the agency's illegal surveillance of journalists, infiltration of the anti-war movement, assassination plots against Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, and role in the overthrow of the Allende government. A once sacrosanct institution was badly tarnished in reputation and subjected to congressional oversight.⁷ Cynicism and self-doubt marked the national mood.

Gerald R. Ford reaped the whirlwind sowed by his predecessors. A native of Michigan and star football player at the state university, Ford turned down a chance at pro football for Yale Law School. At Yale, he belonged to the isolationist America First organization, but, like many of his generation, he was converted by World War II. Whether "I was in Congress, vice president, or president," he later recalled, "I was an internationalist in foreign policy."⁸ As president, he was often lampooned by television comedians—also a sign of the times—as a slow-witted stumble-bum who, in Lyndon Johnson's words, could not walk and chew gum at the same time. That image concealed a smart and tough politician who as House of Representatives minority leader understood the art of the deal. A respected, veteran congressman before replacing the scandal-besmirched Spiro Agnew as vice president, he had a vast knowledge of the workings of government. The only unelected president was honest and reliable, by his own admission a "Ford, not a Lincoln." Upon taking office he saw his essential tasks as healing the deep wounds opened by Vietnam and Watergate and maintaining continuity in foreign affairs.9

To the latter end, he retained Kissinger as national security adviser and secretary of state. The beneficiary of artful self-promotion and Nixon's self-destruction, "Super-K," then at the height of his prestige, was widely viewed as the essential person, the peerless diplomatic navigator needed to guide an unschooled president through troubled foreign policy waters. Kissinger had survived Watergate—no mean feat—but he had also made countless enemies who were ready to pounce at the first sign of vulnerability. In the Ford administration, he came under attack from liberals and conservatives inside and outside the administration. The tweedy, pipe-smoking Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, his Harvard classmate and fellow academician, was equally intelligent—and vain. He needled Kissinger relentlessly and conspired against him with Congress. Schlesinger's replacement, the youthful Donald Rumsfeld, by Kissinger's own admission, was at least his equal in the cutthroat game of bureaucratic politics.¹⁰ Mainly because of his role as an architect of detente, the indispensable man of 1974 two years later turned out to be a political liability for a president seeking election in his own right in a rapidly changing political environment.

The most dramatic change in the making of foreign policy in the mid-1970s was the role of Congress. Customarily in American politics, the legislature in postwar periods has sought to reclaim powers surrendered under military exigencies. With the Cold War seemingly in remission and Vietnam nearing an end, this was especially true of the Ford years. Dominated by Johnson, often stonewalled by Nixon, Congress set out with a vengeance to reinsert itself into the policy process. The rebellion began in the late 1960s with major challenges to the long-sacrosanct defense budget and assorted resolutions to end the war and limit its expansion in Indochina. Its first phase culminated with the 1973 War Powers Resolution that sought to restore to Congress some control over the executive's ability to commit military forces abroad by requiring that they be withdrawn within sixty days of deployment in the absence of legislative authorization.11

The rebellion had partisan undertones. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and were naturally disposed to flex their muscles. It also reflected the growing potency of single-issue groups such as the powerful Israel lobby and a smaller but still influential organization of Greek-Americans. It was also ideological. Conservatives from both parties joined forces to challenge detente. But the initial thrust came from liberal internationalists, mostly Democrats, who sought to democratize U.S. foreign policy and restore its traditional idealism. Reacting against what they saw as the militarization of Cold War policies, these so-called new internationalists challenged exorbitant defense spending, military aid programs, overcommitment and interventionism abroad, and U.S. support for right-wing dictators. They favored economic cooperation and cultural exchanges and pressed for the defense of human rights in other countries. They used subcommittees to get around senior legislators who had long dominated major House and Senate committees, proposed amendments to appropriations bills to advance their agenda, and even paid for television time to promote their causes. They came very close to blocking Nixon's ABM proposal in 1969. They exposed secret U.S. military operations in Laos and Cambodia and sought to shut down the Pentagon's worldwide arms bazaar.¹²

In the broadest sense, a Congress that had generally rubber-stamped presidential initiatives since World War II now sought a position of "code-termination" in making foreign policy, by which it meant early and full consultation and even active participation in making decisions.¹³ Increasingly assertive legislators opposed initiatives Ford and Kissinger considered vital and enacted their own measures undercutting established policies. Schooled in the realist tradition of European politics that emphasized insulating foreign policy from the destructive whims of public opinion and accustomed to having his way with Congress, Kissinger was especially ill suited to deal with the rebellion on Capitol Hill. He later lamented the supreme "irony that the Congress [Ford] genuinely loved and respected had harassed his foreign policy unmercifully from the beginning and encumbered it with unprecedented restrictions."14

Ford's ability to deal with Congress was significantly weakened during his first months in office. He assumed the presidency amid an outpouring of goodwill. His plain-spoken, down-to-earth manner and personal warmth won widespread praise. He set out at once to heal wounds left by Vietnam and Watergate. In his first speech, he vowed to be truthful and solemnly proclaimed that "our long national nightmare is over."¹⁵ Making good on his promises of healing, he offered clemency to those Vietnam War draft evaders who submitted their cases to a federal board. Although well-intentioned, the move infuriated conservatives and fell short of what many liberals wanted, especially in light of his second major step, a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for Richard Nixon. Ford saw Nixon's pardon as essential to relegating the "long national nightmare" to the past. He was probably right, but the haste with which it was done and the lack of political preparation brought down a firestorm of criticism, including baseless but lingering charges of a sordid deal in which Ford gained office by promising to pardon his predecessor. Angry protestors shouted, "Jail Ford." The new president's approval rating plunged twenty-one points in less than a week—the worst drop in the history of the Gallup Poll. In the fall elections, the Republicans lost forty-three seats in the House and three in the Senate, increasing sizeable Democratic majorities to 147 and 23 respectively. An already rebellious Congress was further emboldened to take on Nixon's successor. The Ford presidency was crippled at the outset.¹⁶

II

Ford and Kissinger set relatively straightforward foreign policy goals: to uphold and where possible expand detente with the USSR; to protect America's international position against threats from enemies abroad and challenges from left and right at home. They achieved some early and ephemeral successes in negotiations with the Soviet Union, but little else. From the beginning, they waged a desperate and ultimately futile rearguard action to defend established policies.

The new president had scarcely settled into the White House when Congress first thrust itself into a sensitive and significant foreign policy matter, setting the tone for the next two years. Since its independence in 1957, the ethnically divided island of Cyprus off the southern coast of Turkey had been the object of bitter conflict between NATO allies, Greece and Turkey. In June 1974, pro-Greek rebels overthrew a government that had attempted to maintain a precarious balance between the island's Greek majority and Turkish minority. Turkey responded a month later by invading Cyprus, using military equipment provided by the United States exclusively for self-defense. Angry Greeks attacked the U.S. embassy in Nicosia and killed the ambassador. Just two weeks after Ford assumed the presidency, the Cyprus crisis threatened the solidity of NATO. Even in the age of detente, some officials feared that Moscow might intrude in the strategically important eastern Mediterranean. When Kissinger could not resolve the dispute, the administration backed Turkey, an indispensable ally that provided essential military bases and a vital listening post for Soviet military activities. Ford and Kissinger also blamed Greece for provoking the Turkish invasion.17

Breaking with Cold War precedent, a rebellious Congress for the first time since the 1930s took foreign policy into its own hands. The ostensible reason was to uphold the letter of the law on military assistance. Congress was also responding to pressures from the Greek lobby. But what mainly drove the legislators was a pervasive post-Watergate distrust of the presidency and a determination to influence major foreign policy decisions.¹⁸ The House of Representatives in the fall of 1974 twice voted to terminate military aid to Turkey. Ford both times vetoed the legislation, but he eventually accepted a compromise delaying the cutoff until early 1975. Turkey predictably retaliated by shutting down all U.S. military and intelligence installations except for one NATO air base. Ford later called it the "single most irresponsible, short-sighted foreign policy decision Congress had made in all the years I'd been in Congress."¹⁹ The embargo lasted three years. It did nothing to solve the Cyprus conflict. In 1983, the northern part of the island established a separate government under Turkish rule. The Soviets did not exploit the crisis. Turkey and Greece both remained in NATO, but the embargo seriously damaged U.S. relations with Turkey for the short term. This huge early defeat for the Ford administration made plain the weakening of the imperial presidency. Kissinger's most serious foreign policy crisis, wrote pundit Robert Pastor, was not abroad but "in Washington with Congress."20 Smelling blood, congressional rebels set out after bigger game—the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente with the Soviet Union.

In truth, detente was in trouble when Ford took office. Soviet and American leaders held sharply divergent views of what it meant and became disillusioned when their unrealistic expectations were not met. The United States expected the Soviet Union to be content with the status quo once it became an accepted member of the world community; still certain that revolution was the wave of the future, Moscow saw no contradiction between its support for revolutionary groups and detente. In assessing the other's actions, each side applied what has been aptly called a "one-sided double standard." United States officials who had expected that detente would mitigate Soviet expansionist tendencies came to blame it for encouraging them. They failed to see how things they did might be viewed as threatening in Moscow. The two nations also fundamentally misunderstood each other's political processes. Soviet leaders placed excessive faith in U.S. presidents to work their will with Congress. Congress greatly exaggerated the United States' ability to influence Soviet internal policies.²¹

The congressional challenge to detente brought together hard-core Cold Warriors, human rights advocates, and friends of Israel. Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson assumed leadership of this unwieldy coalition. With a bland personality and plodding demeanor, Jackson appeared an unlikely candidate for the role of political firebrand. Known as the "senator from Boeing" for his close ties to the military-industrial complex in his home state of Washington, the doggedly persistent senator was moderately liberal on domestic issues but a hard line anti-Communist in foreign policy. He was egged on by his young staff assistant, Richard Perle, a charming—and ruthless—right-wing zealot and one-man pro-Israel lobby known as "the Prince of Darkness" for his take-no-prisoners approach to bureaucratic warfare.²² Jackson hoped to ride anti-Soviet zeal and passionate support for Israel to the presidency in 1976. It was he and Democratic representative Charles Vanik of Ohio who had wrecked the 1972 Soviet-American trade agreement by securing passage of the amendment requiring the USSR to permit unlimited emigration of Jews in return for most-favored-nation treatment. With Watergate consuming the nation's attention, Kissinger struggled to save a key component of detente by renegotiating with the Soviets—and Jackson—an agreement he thought had already been completed. He deeply resented congressional intrusion. He questioned the wisdom, indeed the legitimacy, of seeking to shape the internal policies of a sovereign state. The Soviets had already significantly increased the number of exit visas for Jews, and he protested—correctly—that his quiet diplomacy had produced major concessions. Nor was the issue important enough in his view to justify scuttling a major foreign policy venture. But the challenge was too serious and potentially too costly to ignore.

After months of complicated and prickly discussions—Jackson repeatedly caused problems by upping the ante—and with Ford now in the White House, Kissinger in the fall of 1974 finally patched together a characteristically convoluted deal in which Moscow would offer verbal assurances, to be set forth through an exchange of letters in which it was not directly involved, that sixty thousand Soviet Jews would be given exit visas each year. This quite extraordinary way of conducting diplomacy reflected the rising power of Jackson and Congress and the desperation of Ford and Kissinger. It was not enough. In a move driven by mischief or sheer ambition—perhaps both—Jackson destroyed Kissinger's handiwork by publicly claiming victory and making the Soviet assurances seem more definitive and binding than they were. The senator's feckless grandstand play naturally infuriated the Soviet leaders. They were further outraged when his congressional allies tacked on to the Soviet trade bill a $300 million limit on Export-Import Bank credits. In January 1975, they rejected the agreement. They subsequently stopped payments on their lend-lease debt. It was another stunning blow to Kissinger's reputation as a master diplomatic fixer, executive control of foreign policy, and, most important, detente.23

Fallout from the failed trade agreement contributed to the eventual breakdown of strategic arms limitations talks. SALT I had frozen the production of missiles at existing levels. This left the USSR with a sizeable advantage in numbers of ICBMs. But U.S. weapons were more accurate, and the United States had a much larger arsenal of MIRVs, a weapon described by one writer as "a hydra-headed beast that carries two or more nuclear warheads, each programmed to hit a different target."²⁴ Certain that Nixon and Kissinger had again given away too much and perhaps opposed to the very idea of limitations on strategic arms, Jackson secured passage in late 1972 of a resolution requiring that future SALT agreements be based on the principle of equal numbers of missiles. On the surface, equality seemed equitable, but it was very difficult to implement because the two nations had quite different weapons systems. Soviet missiles were land-based, larger, and slower and required launchers with higher throw-weights. The U.S. weapons were smaller, faster, and more mobile and could be launched from aircraft and submarines. Working alone as always and without building a consensus behind him, Kissinger for nearly two years tried to get the Soviets to accept various formulas based on Jackson's principle of equality.25

Remarkably, in his first summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Ford seemed to achieve miracles. The two met near Vladivostok in late November 1974 in a military sanitarium Ford compared to "an abandoned YMCA camp in the Catskills." They got along famously, regaling each other with tales of their athletic exploits as young men. When Brezhnev readily accepted the president's proposal for an equal number of missiles, the shocked Americans adjourned outside to the bitter cold away from Soviet bugging devices to ponder what was going on and how to respond. Ford was "euphoric." After additional negotiations, the two sides seemed to achieve a huge victory for detente by agreeing that each should have 2,400 strategic delivery vehicles and 1,300 MIRVs.²⁶

Like the trade agreement, the Vladivostok understanding ran into a political buzz saw at home. Kissinger and Ford had tailored their proposals to meet specifications set down by Jackson and hawks in the Pentagon, but the senator had no compunctions about opposing a deal based on principles he himself had demanded. In another of those concessions he must have come to regret, Kissinger had agreed before Vladivostok that the Soviet Backfire bomber, an aircraft Moscow insisted did not have strategic capability, be excluded from the negotiations. Jackson and other hawks now pinpointed that omission as a fatal flaw, again accusing the administration of selling out. Some Democratic liberals insisted that the numbers of missiles and MIRVs allowed were so high as to make the agreement meaningless. Kissinger's efforts to wriggle out of the Backfire concession infuriated his Soviet counterparts and did nothing to appease his congressional critics. The concurrent collapse of the trade talks created ill will on both sides that further damaged negotiations on strategic weapons. While Jackson and his Senate allies delayed a vote on the agreement, subsequent discussions bogged down in differences over details. Largely because of problems with Congress, detente by the beginning of 1975 was in shambles.27

As Kissinger and Ford struggled to keep detente alive, America's eight-year war in Vietnam came to a painful end. Despite Nixon's claims of peace with honor, the January 1973 agreement, which permitted 150,000 North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South, was fatally flawed. Fighting continued. Negotiations for a new government quickly stalled. Nixon had hoped to enforce the agreement by keeping alive the threat of U.S. air intervention, but his ability to do so was increasingly limited by the paralyzing effects of Watergate and surging popular opposition to any form of reintervention in Indochina. Reflecting the mood of the nation, a war-weary Congress in 1973 cut off funds for air operations in Indochina. In September 1974, despite Kissinger's urgent warnings of a "corrosive effect on our interests beyond Indochina," Congress drastically reduced military and economic aid to South Vietnam. Runaway inflation at home evoked insistent demands for reducing expenditures. Critics pointed to the endemic waste and corruption in Saigon. It was time to terminate America's "endless support for an endless war," Democratic senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts proclaimed.²⁸

Cuts in U.S. aid demoralized South Vietnam and encouraged North Vietnam to challenge a precarious status quo. The inescapable signs of waning U.S. support had a devastating effect on morale in a South Vietnamese army already reeling under enemy blows. The aid reductions heightened President Nguyen Van Thieu's already considerable economic and political difficulties. In late 1974, North Vietnamese regulars seized Phuoc Long northeast of Saigon. Encouraged by their success and by U.S. failure to respond, they struck the Central Highlands in March 1975. The end came with a suddenness that shocked even the leadership in Hanoi. When Thieu ordered an ill-considered withdrawal from the highlands, panic ensued. Much of the South Vietnamese army was captured or destroyed; thousands of civilians perished in a tragic mass retreat known as the "convoy of tears." Duplicating in the coastal cities of Hue and Da Nang its easy success in the highlands, North Vietnam threw all its forces into the "Ho Chi Minh Campaign" to "liberate" Saigon.²⁹

The United States was stunned by the sudden collapse of South Vietnam but resigned to the outcome. The disinclination for further involvement was obvious. On the day Ban Me Thuot fell, Congress rejected Ford's request for an additional $300 million in military aid for South Vietnam. War-weary, pinched by recession at home, skeptical that any amount of U.S. assistance could alter the outcome, most Americans felt no generosity. The fall of Da Nang and Hue did nothing to alter such views. Ford gave no thought to employing U.S. air and naval power. To stiffen South Vietnamese morale and shift some of the blame to Congress, he asked for $722 million in emergency military assistance, setting off a final, bitter debate on the war. Clinging to the self-delusion that had marked U.S. involvement from the outset, the administration held out the chimera that additional aid might yet bring about a stalemate and negotiated settlement. Kissinger reiterated the shopworn warning that the impact of the fall of South Vietnam "on the United States in the world would be very serious indeed." Legislators retorted that no amount of money could save an army that refused to fight. Congress eventually appropriated $300 million and endorsed Ford's request to use U.S. troops for the evacuation of Americans and for humanitarian purposes. But it would do no more. "The Vietnam debate has run its course," Kissinger commented with finality on April 17.30

The certainty that the United States would not intervene extinguished the last glimmer of hope in South Vietnam. North Vietnamese troops advanced from Da Nang to the outskirts of Saigon in less than a month. Thieu resigned on April 21. "It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend," he lamented.³¹ On April 30, 1975, enemy tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and National Liberation Front soldiers triumphantly ran up their flag over a quickly renamed Ho Chi Minh City. A week earlier Ford had formally pronounced at Tulane University what had already become obvious: The Vietnam War was "finished as far as the United States was concerned." When he uttered the word finished, the crowd of mostly students jumped to its feet and erupted in prolonged cheering and applause.³² Through Operation Frequent Wind, the United States extricated its own people from South Vietnam, along with, at Ford's insistence, 130,000 South Vietnamese who had supported U.S. efforts. Because of botched plans for withdrawal, many of those seeking to flee could not. The spectacle of U.S. Marines using rifle butts to keep frantic South Vietnamese from blocking escape routes provided a tragic epitaph for a quarter century of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Ford recalled April 30, 1975, as "one of the saddest days in my life"; journalist Evan Thomas labeled it a "low moment in the American century."33

The fall of Saigon had a profound impact in the United States. For a people accustomed to ending wars with ticker tape parades, April 30, 1975, left a deep residue of frustration and anger. Americans generally agreed that the war had been a dark moment in their nation's history. Some comforted themselves that the United States should never have become involved in the first place, others that the war could have been won if properly fought. Still others regarded the failure to stand by an ally as a betrayal of American ideals. "It was the saddest day of my life when it sank in that we had lost the war," a Virginian lamented.³⁴ The fall of Vietnam came when the nation was preparing to celebrate the bicentennial of its birth, and the irony was painfully obvious. "The high hopes and wishful idealism with which the American nation had been born had not been destroyed," Newsweek observed, "but they had been chastened by the failure of America to work its will in Indochina."³⁵

Ford showed admirable courage in dealing with the first influx of refugees from South Vietnam, part of the fallout from a lost war. American war-weariness, sometimes tinged with racism, evinced itself in often ugly antipathy to some of the most tragic victims of the war. Bucking popular opinion, the president set aside $2 million in emergency funds to help transport two thousand orphans to the United States. When Congress as part of its general assault on presidential prerogatives rejected a bill providing $327 million in aid for refugees, a furious president flew to San Francisco amid extensive publicity to personally welcome a flight of orphans. He gave a series of eloquent speeches appealing to Americans to live up to their own ideals of fair play and compassion. At least for the short term, he muted opposition in the country and Congress, helping to smooth the arrival of the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants.³⁶

The administration was not so charitable in dealing with the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In an anomalous instance where the loser of a war imposed punitive terms on the winner for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, the United States continued to treat Vietnam as an enemy. Few Americans were interested in reconciliation. On the other hand, a deep-seated bitterness, the legacy of frustration and defeat, posed a major obstacle to restoration of ties. Kissinger set the tone. Privately condemning the Vietnamese as "the most bloody minded bastards" he had ever dealt with, he insisted that the United States make no concessions. Geopolitical realities in time would force Hanoi to accept U.S. terms. The Ford administration thus extended to all of Vietnam the embargo applied during wartime to the North. It refused to consider the aid secretly promised by Nixon in the 1973 agreement and vetoed Vietnam's application for membership in the United Nations. Under pressure from Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, the normally easygoing Ford played to the galleries while campaigning in 1976, denouncing the Vietnamese as "pirates." It would be almost twenty years before the United States would establish relations with the nation that had defeated it.37

The humiliation, frustration, and anger that gripped the administration after the fall of Saigon was also manifest in its response to an incident in the Gulf of Thailand less than two weeks later. Claiming that the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez had ventured into its territorial waters, the new, revolutionary government of Cambodia seized the vessel and its crew of forty. Suffering from post-Vietnam trauma and haunted by memories of North Korea's capture of the Pueblo in 1968, Ford and his advisers agreed they must act decisively: There "wasn't a dove in the place," one official recalled.³⁸ An embattled president saw a chance to prove his mettle. As always, Kissinger sought to mend tattered U.S. credibility. The administration never seriously considered negotiating with a Communist regime it had not recognized. It denounced Cambodia's "piracy," demanded return of the vessel and crew, mobilized military forces in the area, and heatedly debated whether to bomb Cambodia itself.

The United States recovered the ship and crew, made its point, and even enjoyed a moment of triumph, but as the result of a botched and costly operation that brought no real improvement to its international or domestic political position. Mistakenly believing that the crew was held on Koh Tang island off the southern coast of Cambodia, U.S. Marines landed on May 15, met unexpectedly fierce opposition from local Cambodian forces, and suffered heavy casualties in the initial assault: Eight helicopters were shot down, eighteen Marines killed—and it could have been much worse. Mainly as a punitive measure driven by political exigencies, the United States also bombed the Cambodian mainland—"Let's look ferocious," Kissinger snarled—a feel-good move that had no impact on the outcome.39 The navy recovered the Mayaguez. At precisely the time the marines landed on Koh Tang, Cambodia voluntarily released the crew, permitting the administration to claim victory, a rare occurrence in those gloom-filled days. Ford's poll numbers shot up. For once, Congress praised his decisiveness: "It's nice to win one for a change," Kentucky representative Carroll Hubbard exclaimed.⁴⁰ The president's firm response probably helped secure release of the crew, but the bombing and invasion of Koh Tang obviously had no effect. The cost—carefully concealed from the American public—was high: a total of ninety casualties, including forty-one killed, three of them marines left behind and executed. The administration may have demonstrated its willingness to use force, but the glory was fleeting, and nothing changed in terms of its tattered global image and its shaky control over foreign policy.⁴¹

Congress asserted itself again later in the year with Angola, a most revealing case study of Cold War diplomacy in the era of detente and foreign policy in the Ford years. One of the last imperial powers to come to terms with decolonization, Portugal in 1975 finally conceded independence to its Angolan colony in southwest Africa. As with many other newly independent states, the heady reality of freedom left unresolved who would be in charge. Three major factions, divided along tribal as much as ideological lines, vied for power. As so often in the Cold War, a local conflict quickly escalated into a regional and then international crisis. Zaire and South Africa supported factions in the Angolan civil war, as did the Soviet Union and later Cuba, China, and the United States. Although Angola was rich in oil and minerals, neither the United States nor the USSR had major interests there. But a fear of Sino-American collaboration—which did not in fact exist—in support of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) faction spurred increased Soviet aid for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Cuba seems to have intervened on its own initiative and in response to U.S. actions, although it undoubtedly consulted with the Soviet Union, eventually sending fifteen thousand troops. "The American stake was not threatened by the Soviet-Cuban involvement on the other side," author Raymond Garthoff has observed, "it was created by it."⁴² Washington increasingly feared an MPLA victory. Ford and Kissinger believed that the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam must vigorously oppose Soviet adventurism and make clear its willingness to use force. The administration in July 1975 secretly and without consulting Congress approved $32 million for a CIA covert operation in collaboration with South Africa to bolster the FNLA and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and prevent an MPLA victory.

Congress had other ideas. When U.S. involvement came to light in the fall of 1975, Angola quickly became a volatile issue. The CIA had just been branded a "rogue elephant" by a congressional investigating committee headed by Idaho senator Frank Church for earlier covert operations and assassination plots. It was at this time in grave disrepute. United States cooperation with South Africa provoked loud protest. Congress saw yet another opportunity to challenge the administration's foreign policy. In an early example of what would be called the Vietnam Syndrome, liberals issued dire warnings that seemingly small-scale and innocent involvements in remote areas like Angola could produce Vietnam-like quagmires. Thus in December 1975, Congress by solid majorities passed legislation cutting off aid to Angola. Ford and Kissinger were outraged at this most blatant challenge to their authority, but Congress had the votes to override a veto, and they acquiesced. For the first time, Congress had stopped a covert operation.43

Angola had numerous important consequences. It provided another dramatic example of how weary the nation was of Cold War involvements and how eager Congress was to take on the executive. It revealed very different Soviet and American views of detente. The Kremlin saw itself acting as the United States had in Chile and the Middle East, continuing to expand its influence while pursuing detente. United States officials saw Soviet engagement in Angola and especially the use of what they viewed as Cuban proxy forces as exceeding the permissible bounds of detente. Kissinger's public highlighting of Soviet-Cuban involvement in Angola and a subsequent MPLA victory provided ammunition for those American conservatives who wanted a tougher line with Moscow. Angola was of no real importance to the United States. Additional U.S. aid would not have changed the outcome, and getting out caused no substantive damage to American interests. But from this point, Ford and Kissinger found themselves increasingly squeezed between liberals who wanted to curb the nation's involvement abroad and conservatives who sought to end detente, build up U.S. military power, and stand firmly against Soviet expansion.⁴⁴

During the last year and a half of his short presidency, Ford lost ground at home and abroad. His commendable efforts to ease Cold War tensions became a political liability, a barrier to his efforts to secure election in his own right. A highly politicized summer 1975 flap over Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn set the tone. The brilliant if irascible novelist's damning portrayal of Soviet crimes against their own people earned him a Nobel Prize for literature, a worldwide reputation as the regime's most eloquent dissident—and eventually expulsion. He was immediately adopted as a hero by hard-line anti-Communists in the United States. In June 1975, shortly before a scheduled meeting with Brezhnev at Helsinki, a group of right-wingers led by Senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in a blatantly political move declared Solzhenitsyn an honorary U.S. citizen and pressed Ford to receive him at the White House and attend a much publicized dinner in his honor. Heeding Kissinger, who warned of a threat to the upcoming summit, rather than his political advisers, Ford declined to meet with Solzhenitsyn on the grounds of a tight schedule, although he did extend an open invitation once he had returned from abroad. Having compelled Ford to put diplomatic expediency above principle, Helms and Thurmond dropped the issue, and Solzhenitsyn never sought a visit. The president's refusal to meet with the novelist did him no good at Helsinki and gave hard-liners at home another stick to flog him with.45

The Helsinki summit of July 30–August 1, 1975, is a classic example of a pivotal event whose short- and long-term consequences were strikingly different, even contradictory. Although it would eventually play a crucial role in ending the Cold War, its immediate effects were to further weaken detente and damage Ford at home. One of the largest such meetings ever, the conference included representatives from thirty-five nations and ratified the results of almost three years of intensive negotiations. Through the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the Soviet Union sought recognition of its position in Eastern Europe. The Western Europeans hoped to advance the relative stability that had grown out of detente. With the United States, they also pushed for human rights and a freer flow of ideas, people, and information. Out of this mélange of often conflicting aspirations emerged by 1975 three sets of agreements, in diplomatic parlance, "baskets." A security basket included agreements to uphold basic human rights and "refrain from assaulting" the European boundaries established after World War II, a tacit concession to the Soviet position that stopped short of recognition. An economic basket provided for breaking down inter-European barriers by tourism, expanded trade, and scientific and technical exchanges. A "Humanitarian and Other Fields" basket called for the freer flow of information, ideas, and people through travel, better access to media information, and reunification of families separated by the Cold War. A "Final Act" provided for monitoring observance of the agreements. The Soviet Union, Western Europeans, and United States were unhappy with some of the provisions but accepted the entire package to secure those items they considered most important.46

For Ford, Helsinki was a disaster. He had hoped to rejuvenate the SALT negotiations in private discussions with Brezhnev. In contrast to Vladivostok, however, their often angry exchanges produced nothing. Speaking to both Brezhnev and conservatives at home, he affirmed upon signing the CSCE agreements that the human rights provisions were for Americans "not clichés or empty phrases" but fundamental principles to which they were deeply devoted. Helsinki was warmly received in the Soviet Union and Western Europe but not in the United States. Before the meeting, conservatives had pleaded with Ford not to dignify it with his presence—even the New York Times had called the trip "misguided and empty."⁴⁷ Upon his return, Eastern European ethnic groups, still an important voting bloc, condemned him for a Yalta-like "betrayal of Eastern Europe." Reagan insisted that all Americans should be "against it"; Jackson denounced "yet another example of the sort of one-sided agreement that has become the hallmark of the Nixon-Ford administrations" and warned that the human rights provisions were unenforceable.⁴⁸ To Ford's dismay, members of his staff refused to defend Helsinki and sought to blame Kissinger. The effects of Helsinki were compounded later in the year when conservative critics twisted an informal, private explanation of U.S. Eastern European policy by Kissinger's deputy Helmut Sonnenfeldt into a so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine that, in Reagan's words, "put the seal of approval on the Red Army's World War II conquests."⁴⁹

Instant appraisals of historical events are rarely on target. In this case, the attacks on Helsinki were also politically charged. In truth, the agreements so scorned in 1975 had the opposite effect of what was predicted. Instead of confirming Soviet control of Eastern Europe, they helped to undermine it and indeed eventually to bring about the fall of the USSR itself. West Germany negotiated at Helsinki a seemingly innocuous provision that would facilitate the reunification of Germany. The CSCE agreements encouraged rather than stifled dissident movements in Eastern Europe; they gave the governments of these countries some room to maneuver against the USSR and the means to chip away at Soviet control. Ironically, Reagan, one of the most bitter critics of Helsinki, as president would use it to press the Soviets to live up to the human rights principles contained in basket three. Although Ford could see the future no better than his critics, he later boasted that an agreement so viciously maligned was the "spark" that helped bring about the "demise of the Soviet Union."50

Facing a stiff electoral challenge the following year, Ford set out after Helsinki to regain control of U.S. foreign policy, restore popular confidence in his leadership, and head off a possible conservative challenge from Reagan. In October 1975, in what came to be known as the "Halloween Day Massacre," he asked Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, anathema to party conservatives, to take himself off the ticket for 1976. He fired the arrogant and cantankerous Schlesinger, who had publicly questioned detente and fed information to conservative critics such as Jackson. He replaced Schlesinger with White House chief of staff Rumsfeld. CIA director William Colby, who had spilled the agency's beans at the Church Committee hearings, gave way to Texan George H. W. Bush. Kissinger's star had fallen sharply since Ford took office. To balance the firing of Schlesinger, the president on November 2, 1975, appointed Gen. Brent Scowcroft national security adviser, leaving a disgruntled and no longer Super-K holding only the portfolio of secretary of state.⁵¹

These personnel changes brought no more than token political gains. Foreign policy issues were not in the forefront in 1976. The nation was spared foreign crises. The president clung doggedly to an internationalist foreign policy shed of detente, but he continued to be squeezed hard between left and right. Liberal Democrats were determined to destroy the imperial presidency and challenge old and new commitments abroad. But the mood of the country and Congress had shifted markedly to the right. Ford and Kissinger perceived only belatedly that conservative Democrats and especially Republicans represented the more serious immediate threat. Jackson's presidential campaign quickly imploded, but within the Republican Party Reagan mounted a formidable challenge and especially targeted Ford's foreign policy. He attacked detente, sneered that "Henry Kissinger's recent stewardship of U.S. foreign policy has coincided with the loss of U.S. military supremacy," and warned that the administration had all but recognized Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. After a strenuous primary campaign, the president held off Reagan's challenge by a mere 117 delegate votes, squandering much money, energy, and political capital in the process.52

Foreign policy was not the decisive issue in the presidential campaign, nor even a major one. Americans had long since turned inward. A faltering economy that had not responded to Ford's initiatives loomed much larger in the minds of voters. The president could not shed the heavy baggage he still carried from the Nixon years. His opponent, the relatively unknown Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, cast himself as a Wilsonian moralist, sparing Ford further attacks from the right. But a colossal blunder in the debate with Carter on foreign policy did hurt Ford late in the campaign. Although he had prepared carefully for questions on detente, the president to the shock of his advisers—and listeners—answered a question regarding Helsinki by affirming that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" and that the United States did not "concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union." What he meant, of course, was that the United States did not concede Soviet domination. But it came out wrong, and when given a chance to correct his blunder he compounded it by listing individual Eastern European countries that did not "consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union." A media newly committed to "gotcha" journalism played up into a major issue a mistake that might otherwise have passed with little notice. Carter could not let pass a golden opportunity to attack Ford for the amorality of detente. The president stubbornly refused to issue a correction. Ford's statement, one of the great political blunders of recent years, cost him the debate and votes from Eastern European ethnic groups, although probably not the election—economic issues appear much more significant. It certainly raised doubts about his understanding and stewardship of U.S. foreign policy.⁵³ He lost to Carter in a very close contest.

III

By the time Carter took office, detente was moribund if not dead, and two competing views of U.S. foreign policy had emerged. The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) pressed for military superiority and a tough stance toward the USSR. Originally formed in 1950 to lobby for NSC-68, it was reborn in 1976 with Gerald Ford, ironically, as midwife. Responding to shrill conservative charges that the CIA had repeatedly underestimated Soviet capabilities and intentions, the president established a group called Team B to take another look. Composed of hard-liners such as Paul Nitze, Harvard historian Richard Pipes, and arms control official Paul Wolfowitz, Team B concluded in its report that the Soviet Union was seeking military superiority and indeed global hegemony and was exploiting detente to that end. As an outgrowth of Team B, the CPD sprang back into action. It was composed of retired military officers, conservative politicians, labor leaders, Jewish intellectuals, and an emerging group of so-called neo-conservatives, former liberals who had rebelled against the perceived cultural excesses of the 1960s. The CPD agitated for a massive defense buildup along the lines of NSC-68 that would give the United States absolute military superiority. Amply funded and very well connected, the group viewed Communism as an unmitigated evil, advocated its containment and ultimate destruction, and urged active steps to promote democracy abroad.54

The Trilateral Commission took a very different tack. Founded in 1973 by banker David Rockefeller, then chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, the commission was an informal network of thoroughly establishmentarian business executives, academics, and government officials from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. United States trilateralists believed that their country must adapt to recent changes in world politics and economics. The age of U.S. supremacy was over, they insisted, a new era of "complex interdependency" under way. The USSR was a sated superpower with enormous internal problems and an outdated ideology. Learning from America's failure in Vietnam and France's in Algeria, they insisted that military power had limited utility in a changing world. They believed that Nixon and Kissinger, in particular, had focused too narrowly on Soviet-American relations to the exclusion of other, more important matters. They set out to rebuild relations, neglected in the Nixon years, among the Western European nations, Japan, and the United States. To promote global stability and economic prosperity and check nuclear proliferation, the advanced nations must work together to promote human rights and to help Third World countries meet their economic needs, thus shifting the focus from East-West to North-South issues. The trilateralists also identified new "transnational" problems such as a looming scarcity of critical resources, the environment, and worldwide inflation. The subject of numerous conspiracy theories from the political left and right—the most exaggerated warned that the Trilateral Commission comprised a consortium of the industrial giants who sought to run the world—the group had its day briefly in the Carter years, when the president and many of his top foreign policy advisers were members.55

Where Ford had sought continuity in U.S. foreign policy, Carter was committed to change. A born-again Christian, surrounded by advisers scarred by Vietnam, he set out to restore morality to America's dealings with other nations and the United States to its customary position of world leadership. The first president elected in what some experts prematurely designated the post–Cold War era, he hoped also to shift the focus from East-West concerns to relations with the developing world. Carter attained some major successes. More than was appreciated at the time, he redirected U.S. foreign policy in important and enduring ways. By the end, however, his achievements were lost in an administration afflicted by mismanagement, burdened with unrelenting political opposition, and simply overwhelmed by events.

Carter's rise from obscurity to the presidency is a remarkable success story. A native of rural Georgia, he attended the U.S. Naval Academy, served in the navy, and became a protégé of the celebrated submariner Adm. Hyman Rickover. He returned to Georgia in 1953 to go into peanut farming and then politics. Elected governor in 1970, he served capably but gained little national attention: When he appeared on the popular television show What's My Line? the panelists could not guess what he did! The ambitious, upstart Georgian effectively exploited his status as a political outsider with a population weary of Beltway insiders and appealed to a broadly felt popular need for honesty in government. He took advantage of the Democrats' new and more open nominating process to win a series of primary victories over lackluster opponents such as Senators Jackson and Edward Kennedy. His southern origins, centrist politics, and lack of Washington connections helped him eke out a win over Ford. He brought to the White House no foreign policy experience. His views were formed in a crash course provided through Trilateral Commission meetings. A devoted Baptist and Sunday school teacher for much of his life, he still used in private the salty language learned in the navy. Intelligent, hardworking, and devoted to public service, a person of firm moral standards, he had a tendency, as president, to micromanage and bog down in details. He lacked a sense of history and the ability to see how events and issues were connected. He did not have the charisma and persuasive powers to sell a nervous public on policies that were often sensible and realistic. At times, he manifested a shocking lack of political savvy.56

Carter's appointments to key foreign policy positions created additional problems. A West Virginian by birth, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance became a card-carrying member of the eastern foreign policy establishment. He served capably as secretary of the army and McNamara's top deputy under Johnson. A public servant of great integrity, he was deeply influenced by the Vietnam War. He was firmly committed to improving relations with the Soviet Union and Third World nations. Quiet in demeanor, discreet, he took a cautious and conciliatory approach toward the world and was alert to the complexity of international events. He was a consummate pragmatist and problem solver.⁵⁷ His White House counterpart, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, was in many ways his polar opposite. A Columbia University professor and prolific writer on international relations, Zbig, as he was known, brought to the position a résumé much like Kissinger's, although he lacked his predecessor's nimble mind, trademark wit, and ability to charm the media. Born in Poland, the son of a diplomat, he boasted, so the joke went, of being "the first Pole in 300 years in a position to really stick it to the Russians."⁵⁸ His butch haircut in an age of floppy hairstyles and sharp features gave physical evidence of the aggressive posture toward the Kremlin he would relentlessly push. Prickly and arrogant, he scorned Vance's "gentlemanly approach to the world." He advocated "architecture" in foreign policy, by which he meant clarity and certitude, as opposed to Kissinger's "acrobatics." He had served as executive director of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission and helped to shape its views. He had a tendency to make grand geopolitical pronouncements, a "flair for making little fishes talk like big whales," according to former undersecretary of state George Ball.⁵⁹ A Vance-Brzezinski feud broke out early in the administration and worsened throughout, creating an institutionalized schizophrenia in policymaking, especially on Cold War issues, an unfortunate situation with a foreign policy neophyte as president. With the resurgence of Soviet-American tensions late in Carter's term, the national security adviser gained the upper hand.

Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, and First Lady Rosalynn Carter deserve special mention. A youthful and prominent civil rights leader and follower of the late Martin Luther King Jr., Young was among the first African Americans to hold a top-level diplomatic position, an appointment of great symbolic importance for people of color at home and abroad. Like many other African American leaders, he linked the struggle for freedom in the United States with the fight against colonialism abroad, especially in Africa, and he was one of the first U.S. diplomats to disentangle southern African issues from the Cold War. Often far out in front of Carter and the diplomatic establishment, outspoken and at times quite undiplomatic in demeanor, Young sometimes got his boss in trouble with his candor. His unconventional behavior ultimately forced his resignation. While in office, however, he helped to improve U.S. relations with the Third World and to engineer a major shift in policies toward Africa.60 The first lady also assumed an important role in her husband's administration. Rosalynn Carter sometimes took part in NSC briefings, sat in on top-level meetings, and advised the president on major issues. In the summer of 1977, she conducted an official mission to Latin America, meeting with leaders of seven nations and discussing sensitive matters such as commercial issues, human rights, disarmament and nuclear proliferation, and the drug trade.⁶¹

Carter came to office promising basic changes in how things were done and what was to be done. He went to great lengths to distinguish himself from his discredited predecessors. He would play the dominant role in shaping policy—there would be no Kissinger in his White House. Instead of the obsessive secrecy, ultra-Byzantine processes, and undemocratic methods of the Nixon-Kissinger era, he promised open diplomacy, adherence to American democratic principles, and cooperation with Congress. He sought to formulate policies consistent with the values he believed Americans held dear. He firmly believed that a more moral and democratic foreign policy would win strong popular support.62 He vowed to work closely with the European allies and Japan. He recognized that the Cold War would continue to command U.S. attention, but he planned to give equal weight to other issues and to view the world through other than a Cold War prism. He hoped to redress what he considered the legitimate grievances of Third World nations, especially in Latin America and Africa. He placed enormous emphasis on promoting human rights and on curbing the lethal arms trade that threatened the peace and inflicted misery on the innocent. In short, Carter set out to change the policies that had been created in the late 1940s and modified only slightly thereafter.

By seeking to do too much too fast—and doing it in a notably amateurish manner—the administration got off to a singularly bad start. One of the president's first moves was to announce the beginning of troop withdrawals from South Korea. It is not clear exactly how he came to that decision. It reflected a widespread post-Vietnam aversion to military involvement abroad and Carter's personal desire to liquidate seemingly outdated Cold War commitments. He believed that the troops were more needed in Western Europe and that if necessary the United States could defend South Korea with air and naval power. The Park Chung Hee government exemplified the sort of repressive ally Carter found repugnant. South Korea's recent bribery of U.S. congressmen in a scandal known as "Koreagate" created the right climate for a drastic policy change. Carter's stubborn commitment to the policy after doubts were raised seems to have been based on his determination to carry out a campaign pledge.⁶³

Thus, shortly after taking office—and without full consultation with allies—he announced the first withdrawal, setting off a firestorm in East Asia. South Korea naturally protested that the removal of U.S. troops would invite another North Korean invasion. Japan feared instability in Northeast Asia, fretted about its sizeable investments in South Korea, and questioned the reliability of U.S. security commitments. Many members of Congress opposed the decision and in light of Koreagate refused to appropriate funds for the military aid Carter hoped would palliate South Korea for the removal of troops. Within the bureaucracy, there was all-out rebellion. Carter would not reverse his decision, but in the face of rampant opposition at home and abroad Brzezinski developed a plan to delay the first withdrawal and reduce its size, making subsequent withdrawals unlikely. This early misstep had importance consequences, weakening Park's stature, leading eventually to his assassination, and making it impossible to reconsider withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea for years to come.64

Carter also acted impulsively in the Middle East. Certain that bold measures were needed to move the interminable negotiations off dead center and minimizing the depth of the antagonisms among the various parties, he proposed a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement rather than continuing Kissinger's step-by-step approach. Reducing an enormously complex dispute to the simple formula of peace for land, he proposed that Israel's right to exist be guaranteed in return for its withdrawal from the occupied territories. Ignoring Vance's advice to move slowly and living up to his personal pledge for open diplomacy, he also came out publicly in May 1977 for a Palestinian homeland. His forthright if foolish approach to the most intractable of diplomatic problems won guarded support from some Arab leaders. Predictably, however, it provoked outrage in the American Jewish community and more importantly in Israel, where it helped produce an electoral victory by hard-liners led by former terrorist Menachem Begin and a subsequent toughening of Israeli policy on the West Bank. Carter's rash foray set back the peace process he had hoped to advance.⁶⁵

Nowhere was Carter's early impulsiveness and ineptitude more on display than in relations with the Soviet Union. His approach was riddled with contradictions. He deliberately set out to downplay the centrality of Soviet-American relations while at the same time pursuing major negotiations with Moscow. He was undoubtedly sincere in his desire to decrease tensions. What he did not grasp was that other initiatives he was taking would inevitably increase them.⁶⁶ His Soviet policies were also complicated by sharp disagreements between Vance the pragmatist and Brzezinski the hard-liner.

Arms control was the first casualty. While vowing to look beyond the Cold War, Carter pushed ahead with a typically bold—and as it turned out wildly impractical—proposal to move beyond SALT and achieve reductions of rather than limits on nuclear weapons. However praiseworthy his commitment to openness, the real world of diplomacy requires at least a modicum of secrecy or at least discretion, and he infuriated Soviet leaders at the start by announcing his proposal publicly before explaining it to them privately. He proposed deep cuts in land-based missiles, where the USSR had a clear-cut advantage, creating the impression that he was not serious.67 This reckless plunge into an old Cold War thicket delayed serious negotiations on arms control and complicated dealings on other matters.

Carter also learned the hard way what should have been obvious: that his campaign for human rights could be a huge impediment to negotiations on arms control and other issues. The president somehow assumed that he could compartmentalize such matters. The Soviet leadership, not surprisingly, viewed protests about human rights violations as blatant interference in their internal affairs. Carter's timing could hardly have been worse. The administration first criticized the Soviet and Eastern European governments and praised dissidents at the very time it set forth its arms control proposals. It escalated support for dissidents and began issuing "report cards" on observance of Helsinki human rights provisions precisely when a nervous Kremlin was cracking down on dissent at home and within the satellites. Soviet leaders responded with more arrests and imprisonment of leading dissidents. They even expelled an American newsman covering dissent and charged Jewish dissenters with working for the CIA. The spat further strained relations already tense from the breakdown of detente in the Ford administration. Along with the deadlock over SALT, it delayed for several years a summit that might have headed off emerging problems. It set the tone for a steady deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations over the next four years. Brzezinski later conceded that the administration in its early days tried to do "too much all at once."⁶⁸

IV

Although Carter never quite mastered the intricacies of diplomacy, his administration did achieve some major successes in different parts of the world, moving boldly in new directions and taking important initiatives. The problem was that some of his achievements were not the sorts of things that brought visible and tangible benefits to the United States. Sometimes, in fact, he paid a high political price at home for doing the right thing abroad.

The Panama Canal treaties are a case in point. Negotiations to replace the one-sided Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903 had been going on sporadically since the 1964 riots, and the canal had become an issue in the 1976 campaign. Carter, ironically, had vowed that he would never surrender U.S. control, but once in office, he changed his mind. Experts persuaded him that the canal, while still useful, was no longer vital to U.S. trade and security. Diplomats warned that without a settlement unrest in Panama could threaten U.S. control of the canal. Vance had witnessed firsthand the 1964 riots and was deeply committed to negotiations. Carter increasingly saw a treaty as an essential element of his new and more conciliatory approach to Latin America and the Third World in general, an "auspicious beginning for a new era," in his words.69

The United States secured an acceptable treaty in part because Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos needed one as much as it did. His nation's economy was in shambles; unemployment had soared. Under fire from left-wing protestors on one side and the National Guard on the other, Torrijos desperately needed the treaty revenues to solidify his shaky position. In August 1977, Washington thus concluded a treaty favorable enough to present to a skeptical American public. Panama would take over territorial jurisdiction of the canal once the treaty was ratified and legal jurisdiction over a period of three years, but the United States would continue to operate the canal and be responsible for defending it until December 31, 1999. The ten thousand anxious "Zonians" could retain their jobs until they retired or died. Panama's major concession—crucial to the success of the treaty as far as North Americans were concerned—was that even after January 1, 2000, the United States could defend the canal's neutrality. Washington paid $40 million to sweeten the deal and threw in an attractive aid and trade package. Although it made significant concessions, the United States plainly gained from the treaty.⁷⁰

In diplomacy as in war, Americans are disposed to accept nothing less than total victory, and the treaty proved a very hard sell. Public opinion polls showed powerful opposition; foes of the treaty were much more outspoken than its defenders. "The only people who give a damn are the ones who oppose it," a White House aide conceded.⁷¹ The very idea of giving up the canal was anathema to most conservatives. "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours and we're going to keep it," Reagan often roared, an applause line that blithely ignored late twentieth-century realities but touched deeply felt emotions. The U.S. military saw the treaties as yet another sign of the nation's weakness, offering further encouragement, in New York Times columnist Hanson Baldwin's words, to "penny-dictators and minor aggressions everywhere."72 Conservatives mounted a furious lobbying campaign against the treaty. On the other hand, major business organizations backed it as a way of promoting trade in Latin America. Religious groups supported it in order to shed "colonial positions of the nineteenth century."⁷³ A fierce debate raged across the country from August 1977 to April 1978 and in the Senate through the first months of 1978. The key to the administration's eventual narrow victory was the passage of two amendments carefully crafted and shepherded through the upper house by Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Republican Howard Baker of Tennessee. The first gave the United States explicit rights after the year 2000 to intervene militarily to keep the canal open and for U.S. ships to move to the head of the line in times of crisis. Originally a memorandum of understanding, this amendment was formally incorporated into the treaty after quite extraordinary negotiations between Senator Baker and Torrijos. Pro-treaty forces turned back seventy-seven amendments designed to cripple the document and ratified it by one vote more than the necessary two-thirds.⁷⁴

Carter deserves much credit for the canal treaties. To be sure, the administration bungled its efforts to promote Senate approval. A massive public relations campaign had little impact; a major presidential speech promoting the treaties was labeled by one newspaper a "dud." Efforts to sway senators were typically disorganized and ineffectual. The administration also erred by acquiescing in an amendment giving the United States the right to take any action to keep the canal open.⁷⁵ This said, where his predecessors had equivocated, Carter fully committed the prestige of his office to negotiating and ratifying treaties giving up control over one of his nation's signal accomplishments. He showed great courage in going to Panama City for a signing ceremony in June 1978. Despite the political price he would pay, giving up the canal was the right thing to do, and Carter had the common sense and decency to see this. The treaties "symbolize our determination to deal with the developing nations of the world . . . on the basis of mutual respect and partnership," he proudly proclaimed.⁷⁶

Carter also completed the process of normalizing relations with China. Ironically, this long-overdue abandonment of an outdated Cold War position was driven in part by new Cold War considerations and itself significantly inflamed Soviet-American tensions in the late 1970s. Vance had hoped to pursue a balanced approach toward the two Communist powers, but Brzezinski relentlessly promoted closer ties with Beijing as a means to threaten Moscow. He skillfully maneuvered to wrest control of China policy from his archrival. As Soviet-American relations steadily deteriorated, he won over the president. The timing was right. A new Chinese leadership headed by Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping needed normalization with the United States to pursue its own domestic and foreign policy agenda. On a visit to Beijing in the spring of 1978, Brzezinski signaled U.S. interest in teaming up against a "common Soviet threat" and offered as bait indirect arms sales through Western Europe. He also expressed U.S. willingness to sever official relations with Taiwan, a crucial concession long demanded by Beijing. Without making formal pledges, China in oblique diplomatic language indicated it would not seek to absorb Taiwan by force, clearing away another major obstacle. Deng's visit to the United States in early 1979 was a major event. Carter hosted the most elegant gathering given for any foreign dignitary during his entire presidency. The diminutive Chinese leader appeared in a Washington arena with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, put on six-shooters and a huge ten-gallon hat at a Houston rodeo, and even visited Disneyland, a privilege denied Nikita Khrushchev. On March 1, 1979, almost thirty years after the Communists took power, diplomatic relations were officially restored.77

A diplomatic revolution of such magnitude was bound to have major repercussions. The U.S. ambassador awakened Chiang Kai-shek's son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo at 2:30 A.M. to give him several hours' notice before official announcements were made halfway across the world. Anti-American riots broke out in Taiwan. When Undersecretary of State Warren Christopher traveled to Taipei on a mission of mollification, his car was attacked by angry mobs throwing stones and sticking bamboo poles through the broken windows.⁷⁸ By contrast, normalization enjoyed broad support in the United States. In economic hard times, Americans again dreamed of tapping China's vast market. Some conservatives were seduced by the prospect of China joining an anti-Soviet coalition. But the remnants of the China lobby, joined by Sen. Barry Goldwater and Reagan, charged sellout of a loyal ally, denounced Carter's appeasement of an old foe, and warned that the sordid deal with China called "into question the honor—the very soul—of America's word in the field of foreign relations."79 Congressional friends of Taiwan failed in a constitutional challenge to the president's authority to abrogate a treaty without the consent of the Senate, the Supreme Court once again upholding presidential prerogative. They did secure passage of a law guaranteeing future U.S. sales of defensive weapons to Taiwan and vaguely pledging U.S. support for its defense, embarrassing the Carter administration and infuriating the Chinese.

With Brzezinski in the driver's seat, the Carter administration in 1979 moved full throttle toward closer ties with China built around mutual opposition to the Soviet Union. The NSC ignored Vance's continued calls for balance and shut the State Department out of China policy. The administration stopped short of the alliance Deng apparently preferred but collaborated closely to thwart Moscow's perceived hegemonic aspirations. The USSR had become Vietnam's closest ally and chief benefactor after the fall of Saigon, arousing fears in Beijing. Even before normalization was consummated, Carter appears to have given Deng the green light to invade Vietnam—an ironic twist in that a decade earlier the United States had gone to war there to stop Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia. China became a major outpost for snooping on the Soviet Union. The United States removed export controls and sold China modern technology and eventually weapons. In a move of enormous symbolic importance, the administration in the summer of 1979 ignored the Jackson-Vanik amendment, winked at China's human rights violations, and offered most-favored-nation status and Export-Import Bank credits. Normalization was an obvious move, but in taking it the administration lost a necessary sense of balance and was enticed into a connection that compromised its ideals and damaged broader global interests. Mutual antipathy toward the Soviet Union proved a flimsy basis for a lasting Sino-American relationship.⁸⁰

Carter also achieved a breakthrough of sorts in the Middle East, a treaty between Egypt and Israel negotiated under his direction, remarkable more for the fact that it happened than for its contents. Following his initial, disastrous descent into the quagmire of Middle Eastern diplomacy, a chastened president pulled back. A new opportunity seemed to present itself in September 1977 when Egypt's Anwar Sadat stunned the world by journeying to Jerusalem for talks with Begin and a speech to the Knesset. But in the months that followed, the two sides seemed more at odds than ever. Sadat and Begin stopped speaking to each other. Fearing that any hope of negotiations might be lost, Carter staked his presidency on a bold diplomatic gambit, inviting Sadat and Begin to join him for a summit at Camp David. He also violated the first rule of summitry by bringing heads of state to a meeting to negotiate rather than to ratify agreements already worked out by others. He even drafted in his own hand the outlines of a possible settlement.81

Over thirteen days (September 5–17, 1978) of arduous and intense negotiations conducted under Carter's watchful eye, an agreement was finally reached. The participants worked in an environment "as self-contained as an ocean liner and as assertively American as Carter could make it," historian David Schoenbaum has written.⁸² The president engaged the two antagonists in direct discussions until it became clear that their mutual antipathy rendered such an approach untenable. He and Vance then adopted the extraordinary technique of negotiating with their technical experts, who in turn dealt with their bosses. Real progress remained elusive. Sadat and Begin did agree that Israel would pull out of the Sinai in return for a peace treaty with Egypt. But the two sides quickly deadlocked over the explosive West Bank issue, Sadat insisting upon a homeland for Palestinians, Begin refusing to dismantle West Bank settlements or agree to a Palestinian state. With the talks near collapse, Carter pulled out a last-minute agreement. Sadat and Begin finessed the knotty West Bank problem by agreeing to work "for the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its respects" over a five-year transitional period. Carter believed he had secured from Begin a promise not to build new settlements in the disputed area. The signatories also vaguely agreed, without specific reference to a Palestinian homeland, to "recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" and that "elected representatives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza should decide how they shall govern themselves."⁸³

Camp David marked a significant milepost in an ancient conflict whose modern roots stretched back three decades. Egypt was the first Arab nation to recognize Israel's right to exist; Israel made important if vague and sharply qualified concessions. Carter viewed it as the most important achievement of his presidency; the world hailed a major step forward. Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize. Such settlements are rarely definitive, however. They are no more than individual steps in an ongoing process, as the Camp David Accords, to Carter's great disappointment, subsequently attested. It took another six months and a last-ditch Carter trip to Cairo and Tel Aviv simply to secure approval of what had previously been worked out. Begin reneged on his settlements "promise." As soon as the Israel-Egypt peace agreement was signed in March 1979, Israel resumed building settlements and refused even to talk about a Palestinian homeland until the Palestinians had conceded its sovereignty over the West Bank. Carter's public protest brought down on him the wrath of the Israel lobby. Sadat was bitterly disappointed with the outcome and isolated at home and among his Arab compatriots. The hopes of Camp David were thus crushed months before its author left office. The agreement starkly displayed the limits of the most dedicated and intense diplomacy. "This remarkable adventure in summit diplomacy achieved more than most its detractors have been willing to acknowledge," participant William Quandt has concluded, "and less than its most ardent proponents have claimed."84

Carter also pointed U.S. policy toward southern Africa in new directions. A product of the rural South, he had lived and worked with people of color since childhood. As an aspiring politician in an age of racial conflict, he had initially accommodated to segregation, but he grew with the times. His religion, basic morality, and sense of fairness brought forth a firm commitment to racial equality. As governor of Georgia, he actively promoted integration. The votes of African Americans helped him win the South—and thus the presidency—and he felt an obligation in domestic and foreign policy to push issues they considered important. Carter thus brought to the White House a firm commitment to improving U.S. relations with the non-white world. Like JFK, he took an especially keen interest in Africa. His 1978 trip to oil-rich Nigeria was the first visit to that continent by a sitting president. A newly potent African American political constituency, with whom Young had especially close ties, linked freedom at home and abroad, provided the president crucial support, and, on occasion, held his feet to the fire.⁸⁵

In marked contrast to its predecessors, the Carter administration from the outset stood forth against apartheid and for black majority rule in southern Africa. It stopped short of economic sanctions against the government of South Africa, recognizing the importance of U.S. investments there and rationalizing that American businesses in South Africa might help eliminate apartheid. Carter and his advisers also feared that a hard line could provoke more repression. At the same time, upon taking office the president publicly denounced white minority rule. In May 1977, Vice President Walter Mondale sternly scolded South Africa's prime minister, John Vorster, and warned that continued brutal enforcement of apartheid would seriously damage relations with the United States. When Pretoria tightened repression, the House of Representatives, with administration backing, passed a resolution sharply critical of apartheid. Young voted for a UN Security Council resolution calling for a mandatory arms embargo on a "racist regime" that threatened the peace, the first time sanctions had been imposed on a member nation.86

The administration took an even stronger and ultimately more decisive stand on Southern Rhodesia. In 1965, the white minority had defiantly declared independence from Britain to maintain its dominance over four million blacks. No nation recognized the rebellious Ian Smith regime. In marked contrast to policies toward South Africa, the United States joined Britain in imposing sanctions. On the other hand, die-hard southern segregationists like Democrats Helms and Virginia senator Harry Byrd Jr. sympathized with Smith and even compared Southern Rhodesia to their beloved Confederacy. In 1971, they joined conservatives like Goldwater in passing the Byrd Amendment that undercut sanctions by permitting imports of strategic materials such as chrome. Shortly after taking office, Carter boldly asked for and gained repeal of the Byrd Amendment as a "kind of referendum on American racism," in Young's words. The administration was not fooled by Smith's clever ploy to preserve white rule by adding moderate blacks to his government. Insisting that the elections had not been free and fair, it stood forth against Senate conservatives by refusing to lift the sanctions even after a Methodist bishop became the first black prime minister. It dismissed conservative arguments that Robert Mugabe's Popular Front was dominated by Communists. Carter held firm until September 1979, when new elections brought to power a government of Zimbabwe headed by Mugabe.⁸⁷ Southern Africa was the last bastion of white rule over people of color. By standing firmly for principle in Southern Rhodesia, Carter led a successful assault against it.88

In Zaire and Angola, more conventional Cold War imperatives held sway. Invasions in March 1977 and May 1978 of Zaire's mineral-rich Katanga province, newly renamed Shaba, by Katangan rebels based in Angola assumed the form of classic Cold War crises where essentially local conflicts took on international implications and realpolitik prevailed over principle. In each case, the Carter administration backed the venal and brutally oppressive Zairean regime of Joseph Mobutu against insurgents allegedly controlled by the leftist government of Angola, the Soviet Union, and, most disturbing to Americans, Cuba. The incursions are still shrouded in uncertainty. The instigators were definitely anti-Mobutu Katangans who had sided with the victorious MPLA in Angola. They claimed to have leftist political views, but their interests were mainly local. The MPLA likely knew what they were doing and assisted them, but the Soviet role appears to have been quite limited. Careful study based on Cuban documents concludes that Castro did not instigate the invasions but rather sought to stop them for fear of provoking a Western response that might bolster the visibly shaky Mobutu regime or even topple the infant Angolan government.⁸⁹

Alleged Cuban involvement eventually provoked a vocal U.S. response. Although Mobutu played the usually reliable red card, the Carter administration's reaction to the first invasion was notably cautious. The president had no use for the repulsive Mobutu. In the aftermath of Vietnam, no thought was given to direct U.S. intervention. The Cuban role was not clear. On the other hand, the United States had important economic interests in Zaire, and the administration was loath to do nothing. It thus provided Mobutu $2 million in non-lethal military supplies and encouraged French and Belgian support. By the second invasion, much had changed. Carter was under fire at home for his alleged weakness in foreign policy, the Cold War was heating up, and the hard-nosed Brzezinski had gained control. The Cuban role was still murky, but top U.S. officials cherry-picked from inconclusive intelligence those items emphasizing Cuban involvement. Carter used Cuba as a whipping boy to prove his toughness. Americans were eager to believe the worst of their insolent southern neighbor. The administration thus publicly and noisily blamed Cuba for the second Shaba invasion and provided limited aid to Mobutu. "This may be a defensible enterprise," the New York Times opined, much too charitably as it turned out, but it "is not a noble or holy one."90

The Carter administration is remembered for its focus on human rights, and historians disagree sharply in assessing its record. Carter's defenders cite his emphasis on human rights as a major achievement of his presidency. Liberal detractors insist that he applied the policy inconsistently and often let expediency and geopolitics triumph over principle. Realists claim that a naive, do-gooder president permitted human rights concerns to interfere with more urgent national security considerations.⁹¹

Carter's human rights policy built on the work of others. A growing interest in the issue emerged out of 1960s activism. It spread across the world in the 1970s through private networks that reflected a phenomenon—what would be called globalization—that would dominate international life in the late twentieth century. Non-governmental organizations (NGO) such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch first began to define and call attention to the inviolable rights of individuals against state-sponsored repression. They employed the new technologies of the information age to collect, disseminate, and publicize information on abuses across the world. They pioneered direct mail fund-raising to expand their membership and operations and enlisted the support of benefactors such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. In an age of celebrities, they used prominent figures to get across their message. Congress passed legislation in the mid-1970s declaring it a "principal goal" of U.S. foreign policy "to promote the increased observance of internationally recognized human rights by all countries." It began to link the dispensing of foreign aid to the human rights records of recipient nations. "Human rights is suddenly chic," an activist proclaimed in 1977.⁹²

Carter set out to put human rights at the top of the government's agenda. His interest in the issue sprang naturally from his Christian faith and his missionary impulse to do good in the world. It also seemed good politics given the post-Vietnam reaction against imperialism and realpolitik and the growing attention given human rights by liberals and conservatives. America's real strength, he insisted, resided more in what it stood for than its vast military power. He firmly believed that the nation must pursue policies consistent with its traditional principles. He later recalled his hope that human rights "might be the wave of the future of the world" and his determination that the United States "be on the crest of the movement."93 The Cold War, in his view, had forced compromises that undermined these principles, including the support of repressive dictatorships and anti-Communist interventionism. The nation's "commitment to human rights must be absolute," he affirmed in his inaugural address.⁹⁴

It was, of course, much more difficult to implement human rights policies than to talk about them. The president and his advisers were not naive in their approach to the issue, as has often been charged. They recognized the difficulties of application in specific cases. They were painfully aware of the limits of U.S. power and understood that intrusion into the domestic affairs of other states could make things worse for victims of repression. They saw the need to balance human rights concerns with national security imperatives. Inevitably, there were inconsistencies and contradictions. The United States continued to make much of Soviet repression of Jews while turning a blind eye to China's human rights violations. It remained silent about the repression by important allies such as the Philippines, South Korea, and most notoriously Iran. Ignoring protests from human rights advocates and legislators, the administration did nothing to stop the murderous Pol Pot regime from committing genocide in Cambodia. Indeed, as part of its larger strategy of containing Soviet influence in Southeast Asia, it provided covert support to the Khmer Rouge after they were driven from power by the Soviet-backed government of Vietnam.⁹⁵

The Carter administration focused on Latin America and especially its three largest countries, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina—with very limited results. The hemisphere appeared no longer threatened by Communism, and Carter hoped to shift there from a Cold War orientation to the North-South approach he preferred. All three countries were ruled by authoritarian governments notorious for their assault on human rights. Breaking sharply from Kissinger's tacit support, the Carter administration criticized Augusto Pinochet's gross human rights violations and cut back military aid. Pinochet responded by refusing to extradite three Chileans charged with murdering a political opponent in Washington. In Brazil, President Ernesto Geisel terminated the U.S. military aid program before it could be used as an instrument of pressure. Only in Argentina did the new approach achieve even limited gains. Human rights violations were especially egregious there, and Carter shortly after taking office cut U.S. foreign assistance by almost one-half. Responding to liberals in Congress, the administration also reduced military aid, blocked loans from an inter-American fund, and imposed trade restrictions. General Jorge Videla promised to restore civilian government, a commitment he did not keep. He did free some political prisoners.96 In terms of changing conditions in individual countries, the Carter human rights campaign, much as in Latin America, had very limited impact. To its credit, the administration put human rights issues high on its agenda and institutionalized them by creating units in the bureaucracy to monitor abuses and recommend action. In 1978, it drafted a comprehensive statement of policy. Carter's emphasis on human rights contributed to improving the global image of the United States. It gave the issue international credibility, helping to set the agenda for world politics for the next decade.⁹⁷

V

The beginning of the end for the Carter administration came in the fall of 1978 when revolution erupted in Iran. This first U.S. clash with Islamic radicalism—an unmitigated disaster for the nation and especially its president—was totally unexpected.⁹⁸ When Carter took office, Iran appeared one of America's closest and most reliable allies. Put in power by a U.S.-British sponsored coup in 1953, Reza Shah Pahlavi had used his nation's oil revenues to build up a modern military machine and initiate a top-down "White Revolution" that seemed to bring Western-style modernization to one corner of the turbulent Middle East. The shah maintained close ties with his U.S. patron and used Iran's strategic location and precious oil reserves to extort massive aid. Nixon had made Iran a pillar of American security interests in the Persian Gulf, fueling the shah's ambitions and filling his arsenal. Iran served as a key U.S. listening post to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and missile launches. Forty-five thousand Americans worked there. Carter had aroused concern in Tehran with his talk of promoting human rights and curbing arms sales, but, as in other geopolitically important areas, practicality trumped principle. Shortly after taking office, he approved the sale of seven high-tech AWAC intelligence aircraft and 160 F-16 fighters. The shah visited Washington in late 1977 and greatly impressed the president, although on one ceremonial occasion they had to fight off tear gas wafting across the street from Lafayette Park, where police combated anti-shah demonstrators, most of them Iranian students. On New Year's Eve 1977, at the shah's sumptuous palace, Carter offered an effusive toast whose words would come back to haunt him: Iran, "under the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world."99

Even as Carter spoke, rumblings could be heard of the revolution that within little more than a year would sweep the shah from power. The White Revolution enriched the few at the expense of the many. A lagging economy caused widespread distress among Iranians. Popular anger was fueled by opulent displays at the shah's court, rampant corruption among his inner circle, and the brutality of his secret police. Westernization threatened Islam and angered the clergy. A profound religious revival brought forth emotional protest; many Iranians in the face of rampant societal change turned to Islam for order and spirituality. Rioting broke out in 1977 in several cities and gradually spread across the country. The shah's attempts to silence dissent with brute force brought thousands of deaths and further outrage. His efforts to contain unrest by shuffling top officials, in the words of one of his diplomats, was like using first aid "where immediate surgery was required."¹⁰⁰ Because the United States had put the shah in power, helped keep him there, and encouraged his modernization policies, it became a handy target for revolutionaries. America was the "Great Satan" in the eyes of Islamic militants; the shah was "the American king."¹⁰¹ Ill with cancer, the shah fled to Egypt exactly one year after Carter's toast, leaving behind a caretaker government. By this time, Iran verged on anarchy. Students ran the universities, workers the factories, and armed mobs exacted retribution. A series of moderate governments presided uneasily over the political maelstrom. Behind them loomed the scowling visage of the charismatic and bitterly anti-American Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then in exile, the nation's most revered religious leader and increasingly its most powerful political figure.

"President Carter inherited an impossible situation," historian Gaddis Smith has written, "and he and his advisers made the worst of it."¹⁰² Americans initially assumed that the shah, as before, could control the uprising. They disagreed whether he should use force or conciliation, Brzezinski not surprisingly favoring the former, Vance the latter, a debate that quickly became irrelevant. Even after the shah left the country, some top officials expected him to return; others counted on the military to take power. When neither happened, the administration sought to maintain contact with the moderates who succeeded the shah, not perceiving their lack of staying power or that ties with the United States could be fatal to them. The dispatch of a U.S. Army officer on a typically confused mission perhaps with the goal to engineer a military takeover seemed to confirm Iranian suspicions. The Islamic component of the revolution was beyond American comprehension. Ambassador William Sullivan urged the president to "think the unthinkable," but he refused to authorize contacts with Khomeini. As things went from bad to worse, U.S. officials played the blame game with each other. In truth no one knew what was happening or how to respond. With the country virtually in a state of anarchy, Khomeini returned to Tehran on February 1, 1979, to the adoring cheers of millions of well-wishers.103

Although probably nothing could have been done to head off or control the revolution, the United States might have done more to mitigate its anti-Americanism. It could have minimized its presence in Tehran—no more than "six men and a dog," one sensitive diplomat quipped.¹⁰⁴ It could have remained silent. But as Iranians increasingly denounced the United States, Americans responded in kind. Top U.S. officials issued threats. Congress passed anti-revolutionary resolutions. Senator Jackson again demonstrated a penchant for the perfectly mistimed misstatement by publicly proclaiming the revolution doomed. The most damaging mistake, made for the most humane of reasons and after months of agitation by such luminaries as Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and John McCloy, was Carter's reluctant October 1979 decision to admit the dying shah to the United States for medical treatment. That ill-fated move aroused profound suspicions among paranoid Iranian radicals of another 1953-like countercoup and provoked wild demonstrations in Tehran. Shortly after, Brzezinski met with moderate Iranian leader Mehdi Bazargan in Algiers, fueling revolutionary outrage and anxiety.¹⁰⁵

The revolution abruptly changed from a serious problem for the United States to an all-out crisis on November 4, 1979, when young radicals stormed the U.S. embassy—the "Den of Spies"—and took hostage the sixty-six Americans still residing there. The immediate provocation was Carter's decision to allow the shah into the United States, but the hostage-takers also feared a CIA plot to restore him to power, suspicions encouraged by Jackson's statement and the Algiers meeting. Some former hostage-takers now admit, moreover, that their real purpose was to push the Bazargan government in more radical directions. They had no idea the takeover would lead to a prolonged crisis; some now concede it to have been a mistake.106 Khomeini at first opposed the takeover, but when he recognized its popularity he exploited it to get rid of Bazargan and solidify his own power.

The crisis quickly took on a life of its own. Iran made demands for the hostages' release that Washington could not have met if it had wanted to, including the return of the shah for "revolutionary justice" and the surrender of his fortune. Threats from the United States only exacerbated tensions; the cessation of oil purchases and freezing of Iranian assets accomplished nothing. The crisis became the object of close international media scrutiny, keeping it constantly in the public eye. United States television news broadcasts solemnly counted off each day of captivity. Carter unwisely staked his political future on the outcome, vowing not to rest until the hostages were safely home. The more importance Carter attached to it, the more valuable the crisis became to the revolutionaries and the less likely any kind of settlement.¹⁰⁷ While Brzezinski pushed him to use force, the president explored without success every conceivable diplomatic channel. Americans at first rallied around their leader, as at the start of a war. His approval ratings rose. But as the crisis dragged on with no sign of an end, popular anger surged. Coming on top of America's failure in Vietnam and a steadily worsening economy, the hostage crisis came to symbolize for Americans a rising sense of impotence and belief that the nation had lost its mooring. The United States itself seemed hostage to forces it could not control.¹⁰⁸ The crisis aroused a fury that Americans directed first toward Iran and especially Khomeini, then against their unlucky president.

The hostage crisis came at a low point of Carter's chronically embattled presidency. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised oil prices four times in five months in 1979. Shortages forced hour-long waits at gas stations. Increases in gasoline prices fueled price hikes across the board, causing inflation to rise at an annual rate of 14 percent. The liberal wing of his own party denounced Carter's budget proposals calling for austerity to combat inflation. Congress routinely shredded the administration's domestic programs. First brother Billy Carter, who carefully nurtured his redneck image and exploited his family connections, caused a mini-scandal (called, naturally, "Billygate") by maintaining dubious—and profitable—contacts with terrorist-sponsor Libya and speaking critically about Jews on national television.109

The president's efforts to deal with the emerging crisis only highlighted his seeming inability to do anything about them. In the early summer, the White House announced a major speech on the energy crisis only to cancel it thirty minutes before airtime. When finally given on July 15, the so-called malaise speech offered a remarkably candid assessment of what the president called a "crisis of confidence"—a "crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul of our national will." The speech earned good reviews from pundits, but its gloomy tone did nothing to lift the nation's spirits. A clumsily executed reshuffling of the cabinet and White House staff in the summer of 1979, while getting rid of troublemakers and incompetents, seemed further evidence of a government in disarray. Polls for the Democratic presidential nomination showed potential challenger Edward Kennedy leading Carter by a wide margin. The Carter presidency was "malleable and weak," pundits complained. The president would likely be a lame duck before the primaries began.¹¹⁰

Carter's foreign policy also came under fire. The administration did register major accomplishments in 1979, completing the process of normalization with China and making progress on SALT II negotiations with the USSR. But each of these gains came with domestic political costs. Chaos in the global economy, the Iranian revolution, the assassination of U.S. ambassador Adolph Dubs in Afghanistan in February, China's invasion of Vietnam later the same month, and the subsequent outbreak of civil war in Nicaragua created for Americans the sense that the world was both dangerous and hostile, the United States increasingly vulnerable.¹¹¹

During the last half of 1979, Carter's critics zeroed in on SALT II. At a Vienna summit in June, Carter and Brezhnev finally signed the long-delayed treaty. Upon returning home, the president launched a major campaign for its ratification. Critics wasted no time responding. Liberals protested that the treaty did not do enough to reduce nuclear armaments. Carter's inclusion of a new and enormously expensive missile system to appease Senate conservatives further angered liberals. The Committee on the Present Danger led the conservative charge. The CPD included leading hard-line Democrats, such as Nitze, who had been passed over by Carter for top-level positions and went after the treaty with a vengeance. Critics warned that SALT II put the United States at a disadvantage militarily and might lull Americans into a false sense of security. They questioned whether it could be properly monitored. In the Senate, the balance of power had shifted from those liberal internationalists who had bedeviled Ford to a loose, bipartisan coalition of conservatives whose ranks were strengthened by Republican and conservative gains in the 1978 elections. Howard Baker, who helped secure passage of the canal treaty, came out against SALT before Carter returned from Vienna. Democrat Sam Nunn of Georgia demanded sharp increases in overall defense spending in return for his support. Jackson predictably denounced the treaty as "appeasement in its purest form." Approval of the treaty was doubtful from the start; the embassy takeover further lowered its chances.112

Liberals' efforts to save their political skins added to Carter's difficulties. In September, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Frank Church of Idaho, facing a strong conservative challenge for reelection, announced the "discovery" in Cuba of a brigade of Soviet troops that in fact had been there since 1962. Already on the ropes over Iran, Carter sought to ease popular fears by affirming that the brigade had "evidently" been in Cuba "some time" and in any event did not threaten the United States. To show their toughness, he and Vance insisted that it could not stay and beefed up U.S. military capabilities in the Caribbean, thus stoking the very fears they had attempted to calm. This tempest in a Cuban teapot dragged on for weeks, doomed SALT, infuriated the Soviets, and left the administration more vulnerable to conservative attack.¹¹³

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, pushed Carter into the camp of the hard-liners and provoked him to escalate the Cold War into its climactic phase. During most of the Soviet-American conflict, that isolated, landlocked nation had remained non-aligned. A 1973 coup brought to power a pro-Western government, which, five years later, was overthrown by leftist army officers. Following firmly established Cold War patterns, Moscow promptly sent aid and advisers to a potential client. Still in a detente frame of mind, the United States at first responded with remarkable equanimity, maintaining relations with the pro-Soviet regime and even sending limited assistance. United States policy changed in 1979. Allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia pushed Washington to do something. In January, Carter authorized a covert operation providing aid to Islamic rebels, even though Brzezinski warned it might prompt large-scale Soviet intervention. Both men saw advantages in luring the USSR into the "Afghan trap."114 By late 1979, Afghanistan's government was teetering from destructive internal rivalries and Islamic insurgents. Fearing its collapse, the Soviet Union intervened. The Kremlin acted reluctantly to protect what it viewed as a crucial buffer state. The Islamic revolution in nearby Iran seemed to endanger its own Muslim "republics." It especially feared China, which had close ties to Afghanistan's eastern neighbor, Pakistan. Perhaps more paranoid than their U.S. counterparts at this time, Soviet leaders took seriously alarmist KGB reports that the Afghan prime minister sought ties with the United States. Moscow thus sent a brigade of troops. Soon after, it overthrew the government and launched a costly and ultimately suicidal war against the insurgents.¹¹⁵

Viewing Soviet moves from a worst-case standpoint, Carter responded with a decisiveness quite out of character for his presidency. He was angered by the Kremlin's action, perhaps even took it personally since it seemed to prove that his original assessment of Soviet motives and goals had been wrongheaded. Already under fire at home from Cold Warriors and facing a tough campaign for renomination, he may have concluded that a hard-line policy was necessary to give him any chance for reelection. Whatever the precise reason, henceforth he was squarely in Brzezinski's camp. With the Middle East and crucial Persian Gulf region in turmoil, he viewed a Soviet takeover of Afghanistan as a dire threat to vital U.S. interests. In a notably alarmist speech on January 4, 1980, he condemned Soviet "aggression" and warned of the danger to Persian Gulf oil fields.¹¹⁶

To combat the Soviet intervention, he took a dazzling variety of steps. He drastically stepped up U.S. covert aid to the mujahideen rebels, laying

the basis for an assistance program that, as he and Brzezinski hoped, would in fact help make Afghanistan the Soviet Union's Vietnam.117 He tabled the long-delayed SALT II agreement. Without giving much thought to their possible effectiveness, implications, or consequences, he instituted an array of punitive sanctions, embargoing the shipment of new technology to the Soviet Union and, over the loud protest of farm states, banning further grain sales. He later boycotted the Olympic Games scheduled for Moscow that summer. In his State of the Union address, he proclaimed what came to be called the Carter Doctrine, sternly warning that any attempt by an "outside force" to gain control of the Persian Gulf region would be "regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States" and would be "repelled by force." To back up his warnings, he initiated registration for the draft, asked for a 5 percent increase in military spending, proposed major aid for Pakistan, and beefed up the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.118 Much like Truman at the onset of the Korean War, he set out to shore up U.S. alliances, even in cases like the Western Hemisphere and South Asia where his actions compromised established policy on human rights and nuclear non-proliferation.

In a move that sent shock waves all the way to Moscow, Carter in January 1980 dispatched Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to Beijing to discuss the establishment of military ties. The United States to this point had scrupulously—and sensibly—avoided such steps. Some Americans hesitated to bolster Chinese military power while the status of Taiwan remained unresolved. Vance also correctly warned that, instead of forcing Moscow to be cooperative, cozying up to China would make working with the Soviet Union much more difficult.¹¹⁹ Egged on by Brzezinski, Carter after Afghanistan threw caution to the winds. Brown made clear on arrival that he hoped to deal with "complementary actions in the field of defense as well as diplomacy." He arranged for the sale of non-lethal military equipment including radar and other high-tech electronic items long sought by the Chinese and denied the Soviets. He proposed that the two nations cooperate in sending arms to the Afghan insurgents and take joint action should Vietnam invade Thailand. The Chinese happily accepted U.S. electronic equipment but stopped well short of the de facto alliance Brown advocated, agreeing only to step up covert aid to the Afghan rebels. Later in the year, the United States opened preliminary discussions for the sale of military equipment. Disguised with a mustache grown especially for the occasion, CIA director Stansfield Turner secretly traveled to Beijing to discuss the sharing of intelligence. The 1980 tilt toward China ended any semblance of balance in U.S. relations with the two Communist powers.¹²⁰

In July 1980, Carter approved Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59), a fundamental reassessment of U.S. nuclear strategy. The doctrine of mutual assured destruction had provided a measure of deterrence through the grim certainty that each nation could destroy the other's primary population centers. Nervous U.S. strategists increasingly feared, however, that an apparent Soviet lead in conventional weapons as well as qualitative and quantitative improvements in their nuclear arsenal gave them the means to target U.S. military installations and wage nuclear war short of annihilation. Their conclusion, outlined in PD-59, was equally disturbing but to them unavoidable: The United States must develop a strategy and the instruments to strike military as well as civilian targets. It must be able to fight and win a nuclear war. As significant for its era as NSC-68 for the 1950s, PD-59 also called for a huge boost in military spending and for the largest buildup of conventional and nuclear arms since the Truman years.121

The U.S. response to Afghanistan marked yet another major turning point in the Cold War. Carter's early 1980 initiatives constituted a clean break with policies pursued since the mid-1960s. The United States relegated detente to the scrap heap, sharply reescalated its Cold War rhetoric, and reinstituted policies of global containment reminiscent of the early days of the Soviet-American struggle. The sanctions initiated in haste took on a life of their own. Along with the scrapping of SALT II, the development of new missile systems, and the U.S. deployment of missiles to Europe, PD-59 appeared to Moscow to represent a menacing U.S. quest for nuclear superiority—"madness," Tass screamed; "nuclear blackmail," according to Pravda—reigniting the arms race and sending it to its most fearful level.¹²²

As with the Korean War and other Cold War crises, the flare-up of 1979–80 stemmed at least in part from misperception and miscalculations on both sides. The Soviets saw themselves acting defensively in Afghanistan. The last thing they wanted was to spur a major U.S. rearmament program and drive Washington further into the arms of Beijing. Their move into Afghanistan thus took the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, making a reality of the Sino-American collaboration that in their imagination had aroused grave concern about Afghanistan. The Soviet incursion deserved to be condemned and opposed. But at least in the beginning it was not truly an "invasion," as U.S. officials repeatedly charged. Nor did it represent the "greatest threat to world peace" since World War II, as Carter often affirmed, or the first step in a drive to the Persian Gulf. Americans seem to have found in Afghanistan an outlet for the frustrations that had built up in recent months. They were more comfortable with the clarity and certitude of a new era of confrontation than with the confused and uncertain state of detente. Whatever the cause, the Soviet move into Afghanistan and the U.S. overreaction provoked a new and especially dangerous phase of the Cold War.

Carter's political fortunes got no more than a short-term boost from his decisive moves. As in the first stages of the hostage crisis, the public initially rallied to their president. His poll numbers shot up. Although the grain embargo threatened to hurt farmers, Iowans overwhelmingly voted for Carter over Kennedy in that state's Democratic caucuses. But the president could never really overcome his reputation for indecisiveness. Indeed, Republicans and conservative Democrats insisted that his weakness and naïveté had brought about the situation he was forced to respond to.123

More important, during Carter's last months in office, everything seemed to fall apart. A crippling recession proved impervious to the numerous countermeasures attempted by Ford and Carter. In the summer of 1980, corporate profits dropped by almost 20 percent, one of the biggest downturns in the postwar period. Unemployment rose to almost 8 percent with forecasts that it might hit 10 percent by the end of the year. A sagging economy sparked racial violence from Boston to Miami. Eight years of hard times with no end in view left the nation in a surly and angry mood.¹²⁴

There were more foreign policy setbacks. The European nations questioned Carter's hawkish response to Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, opening new rifts in the Western alliance. The Camp David Accords, one of the president's major achievements, came apart at the seams. Israeli prime minister Begin defined Palestinian autonomy as narrowly as possible, stopping far short of the self-determination to which Sadat was committed. During 1980, Carter made several futile efforts to salvage his handiwork only to recognize that the agreements whose negotiation he had so painstakingly overseen were fundamentally flawed.¹²⁵ Closer to home, the administration's efforts to channel the Nicaraguan revolution in a moderate direction failed badly. The United States was no more successful using carrot and stick with embattled dictator Anastasio Somoza than it had been with the shah. Wisely, it refused to bail out his despicable regime when it crumbled, but its attempts to control the revolution through an unwieldy electoral device that would have limited the power of leftist rebels had no chance of success. The president at first tried to work with and even secure assistance for a new government headed by the Sandinistas, the dominant group whose choice of name (for rebel leader Augusto Sandino) made clear its political orientation and attitude toward the United States. While Congress dawdled with Carter's request for aid, the new government shifted to the left, secured assistance from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and established ties with leftist groups elsewhere in Central America. Carter came under fire from conservatives for allowing another Cuba in the hemisphere.126

The hostage crisis that at first worked in Carter's favor by the spring of 1980 had also turned against him. The crisis became the media event of its time. For months, it dominated the headlines and filled television screens, even late-night viewing, where ABC's new Nightline news program sometimes outdrew popular variety shows. Television especially played the story for maximum dramatic effect. Images of young Iranian women in strange clothing and bearded young men shouting anti-American slogans and burning U.S. flags piqued the emotions of an already frustrated and angry public. The loud demands of Iranian students in the United States that the shah be returned to Iran provoked from Americans counterdemands that all Iranians be deported. In time, the crisis became a rallying point for a bitterly divided people. It inspired popular songs such as "Go to Hell Ayatollah" and the more somber "Hostage Prayer." To show solidarity with the hostages, Americans kept their car lights on, rang church bells, and, following the example of another popular song, tied yellow ribbons around trees and light poles. In the early months, the solidarity extended to Carter, whose approval ratings soared. The president was the first to appreciate that American patience was limited, however, and by late March, with no end to the crisis in sight, he was in trouble again. It was in this context that he approved the ill-fated hostage rescue mission.¹²⁷

No single event did more to highlight the nation's sense of impotence and destroy the Carter presidency than the botched attempt in April 1980 to rescue the hostages. Carter approved the plan out of desperation. It was the longest of long shots and risked the hostages being killed in retaliation or even escalation into a bloody war. In what was dubbed Operation Eagle Claw, eight helicopters from the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman were to rendezvous with C-130 transports at Desert One in the Iranian desert. A newly formed Delta Force rescue team would proceed to Tehran by helicopter and truck, seize the hostages, and return to an airfield for evacuation. In execution, a plan with virtually no margin for error turned out to be Murphy's Law in operation, self-destructing almost from the start. In a bizarre and totally unexpected development, the would-be rescuers, landing at midnight, stumbled upon some Iranians crossing the desert in a ramshackle bus, blowing their cover. A blinding dust storm—the Iranians called it a haboob, and Khomeini hailed it as an act of Allah—hampered the desert landing and along with mechanical problems crippled all but four of the helicopters, forcing the mission to be aborted. To add to the embarrassment and tragedy, a helicopter crashed into a C-130 during evacuation, killing eight Americans, all of whom had to be left behind.128

The desert debacle had a huge impact for the unfortunate Carter. In terms of the immediate problem with Iran, it completely backfired, confirming America's hostile intentions, strengthening the position of Khomeini and the extremists, and providing a huge boost to Iranian nationalism.¹²⁹ At home, the nation once again initially backed the president, but as time went on and the details became known, frustrated Americans increasingly turned their anger against him. The Congress and allies complained about not being consulted. Vacationing in Florida, Vance had been deliberately and entirely left out of the loop because of his known opposition to any military action. He quickly resigned, the first secretary of state since William Jennings Bryan in 1915 to leave office on a matter of principle and only the third in U.S. history. Carter's approval rating plunged to 40 percent. "As things now stand," Newsweek opined, "the President's uncertain diplomatic strategy has left allies perplexed, enemies unimpressed and the nation as vulnerable as ever in an increasingly dangerous world."¹³⁰

The nation's lack of confidence in Carter's ability to lead cost him reelection. Given all the misfortunes that beset him, he hung remarkably close to Republican challenger Reagan up to Election Day. Had he been able to secure release of the hostages early in the campaign, he might still have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. He seemed to achieve a breakthrough in negotiations that promised to gain freedom for the hostages several days before the election, but it did not produce immediate results and was of dubious value anyway since Republicans had warned of an eleventh-hour trick to sway the election. Reagan proved a more adept campaigner than Carter. He and his simple and sunny conservative message, delivered with charm, wit, and at times eloquence, contrasted sharply with a sitting president who seemed unable to present a vision of any sort. Economic issues continued to loom largest with the voters. In this area also, Carter failed the test. The result was a Republican victory that in its magnitude shocked the experts. The actor-turned-politician won 51 percent of the popular vote, 489 electoral votes to a mere 49 for Carter. Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since the early 1950s and made big gains in the House.131

CARTER HAS BEEN MUCH MALIGNED over the years for his handling of U.S. foreign policy. Conservative publicists have made him, along with 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, into living symbols of the Democratic Party's alleged weakness on national security issues, an image that has dogged the party at election time for more than thirty years. Like other such political myths, this one distorts the record. Carter had the misfortune to serve in a complex and confusing time of transitions—in foreign affairs, from Cold War to detente and back again, at home from the liberal consensus to a more conservative outlook. Upon taking office, he hoped to shift the focus of U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to North-South problems and human rights and to restore the United States to what he considered its rightful position of moral leadership in the world, a not unreasonable agenda in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America. He sought also to further detente. His administration from the start was hampered by his own inexperience and sometimes naïveté. His goals were sometimes contradictory, and the Vance-Brzezinski feud gave a certain schizophrenic quality to some of his initiatives. Unschooled in the complexities of international relations, he initially underestimated the difficulties of dealing with the Soviet Union. His clumsy efforts to resolve differences with Moscow were also repeatedly undercut by conservatives in Congress. In part responding to their pressures, he overreacted to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, reescalating Cold War tensions. It was he, in fact, who initiated the military buildup, confrontational approach, and covert action in Afghanistan that the Republicans took credit for and claimed to be decisive in America's Cold War victory. Carter was thus also unlucky. He did not even get the satisfaction of having the embassy hostages released on his watch. Not until shortly after Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1980, would they be set free.