11 

Commander in Chief

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

May 9, 1975

8:32 to 9:09 a.m.

We believe freedom is a God-given right of man and that it’s a natural state and, therefore, it is worth preserving.¹

Nearing the end of the first full year of his presidency, Gerald Ford was earning respectable marks from the press for his efforts on the world stage, and had received a significant bump up for his successful handling of the Mayaguez incident. But throughout his tenure, he found himself squeezed between two foreign policy impulses, impulses picked over by professors of international relations, but given real-world weight by the sprawling policy infrastructure inside the D.C. Beltway. One was traditional. The other, while it certainly reflected ideals and experiences of the American tradition, represented something distinctly contemporary.

The traditional impulse was the classical realism of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which held that stability in the international realm was best assured by balancing the power of different states. The challenging view, championed prominently on the right by Ronald Reagan—and soon after by writers and scholars who became known as “neoconservatives”—argued that a more aggressive posture, paired with concern for human liberty, was preferred. “Peace through strength,” Reagan would avow as an echo of Eisenhower and Washington before him when challenging Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980.

Looking back, it’s interesting that all five of the presidents preceding Ford and six of the seven following him were considered by historians and journalists to have a foreign policy “doctrine.” With the shortest time as President, it is not surprising that President Ford’s set of beliefs about America’s responsibilities and duties remain less definable. With all the challenges he was facing as one who had never run for the office, President Ford was too preoccupied with the problems of the present to set forth a “long view.” In other words, one of the more significant disadvantages of his instant presidency was that he was never afforded an opportunity to map out his own distinct vision for America’s role.

That is not to say Ford didn’t have strong views when it came to foreign policy. He had a streak of idealism when it came to overseas actors and their motivations. He was concerned by the never-ending strife in the Middle East. He knew war. “War is devastating—destructive—and kills the faith and hope of all mankind,” he lamented to Kissinger in a letter in January 1975. Yet there was no doubt he was in his core an optimist. In that letter, he proposed the creation of a “Middle East Common Market” between Arabs and Israelis that might “give all their peoples a life of peace and tranquility.”²

Because he was President such a short time, he never enunciated a Ford Doctrine. What Ford did do was balance the policies of the inherited Nixon presidency with the growing movement for a stronger tone from the Republican right. But even in his short tenure, Ford made a series of decisions that arguably helped set the stage for America’s Cold War victory. For the better part of his first year in office, President Ford achieved an admirable record on human rights, a record that, to his credit, he built of his own volition—and even more to his credit because more often than not it was forged against the admonitions of some in the State Department. Working closely with Kissinger, whom he respected greatly, he ushered Park Chung-hee aside during his trip to Asia to make known his concern about the South Korean President’s repressive policies. He vocally supported anti-Soviet dissidents in Ukraine, earning him the gratitude of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.³ In January 1975, he signed the controversial Jackson-Vanik amendment into law, a critical reform to trade with nonmarket economies that ultimately allowed more than half a million Soviet refugees to resettle in the U.S. and an estimated one million Jews from behind the Iron Curtain to resettle in Israel.

Much of this, however, was overshadowed by a decision that became among the more memorable moments of the Ford foreign policy and that also demonstrated Ford’s delicate balancing act.

*  *  *

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an acclaimed Russian writer who had been pivotal in raising awareness about the Soviet Union’s extensive forced labor system—perhaps most with his monumental 1973 book, The Gulag Archipelago—visited the U.S. in the summer of 1975. Human rights activists sought a meeting with the President, a request communicated to Ford via a letter from North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms. This raised alarm bells in the Ford White House—Helms was one of the leaders of the Republican right, a hard-liner toward the Soviets, and a periodic critic of the Ford administration, and of Henry Kissinger in particular.

All of this of course was set against the backdrop of Washington, D.C.’s relationship with the Kremlin, and particularly our efforts to reach a SALT II arms control agreement, building on the progress that had been made by Nixon and Kissinger and the progress in Vladivostok the previous summer by Ford and Kissinger with General Secretary Brezhnev. There had been a shimmer of hope for improved relations. That July, Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked in orbit. This link-up, the first ever between U.S. and Soviet spacecraft, was hailed as the end of the space race that had begun in 1957 with Sputnik. “It was the most spectacular event in U.S.-Soviet relations since their troops linked-up at the River Elbe 30 years ago,” wrote Richard Lewis in a July issue of the New Scientist. Scientists from the two countries, he continued, “shook hands; inspected and admired each other’s space vehicles; ate each other’s food; and exchanged gold medals, flags and even (for the sake of science) personal microbes.”⁴

Unfortunately, the good feelings engendered by that historic event eroded. The White House learned that the Soviets were violating at least the spirit of the first SALT Agreement by concealing missile silos and other military infrastructure.⁵ Four days later, The Christian Science Monitor ran an article positing that the Ford administration hadn’t been candid about Soviet violations, citing sources at the Pentagon.⁶ Then another article appeared, this one in The Washington Post and citing sources at the State Department.⁷

The Solzhenitsyn invitation was the last thing some in the administration felt it needed. Jack Marsh reported that the National Security Council, under Kissinger, was advising against a meeting.⁸ Bob Hartmann was seen as opposed as well.⁹ The NSC had logical reasons for their position. The President was scheduled to meet with General Secretary Brezhnev at the end of July, and the NSC staff was convinced that keeping détente intact required not ticking off the Kremlin unnecessarily with what Moscow would undoubtedly see as a provocative act.

Dick Cheney, on the other hand, believed the President should meet with Solzhenitsyn. By this point, the President had come to value Dick as an aide and advisor. This relationship had been built up by design. Early on in the administration, I went to the President and said I thought we needed to institute a deputy system where there was someone in each of the key four or five offices that was number two whom the President would be willing to work with interchangeably. I said that he would have to get comfortable with that or mistakes would get made. It was not possible for the Chief of Staff to go on every trip and keep things moving along at the White House. Balls get dropped. I insisted the President agree, which he did, to work interchangeably between me and Dick Cheney, as well as between two or three other key people he counted on like White House Counsel Phil Buchen and his deputy, Phil Areda.

Ford was impressed by Cheney’s professional, thoughtful demeanor and nearly total unflappability. But the President on occasion liked to test that, for example when he teased Cheney for being quoted in an article in Newsweek. Ford told me, with a laugh, “Every time I mention that article to Dick he turns red.”

“I’ve worked with him for years and never knew he blushed!” I replied.¹⁰

In any event, Dick felt so strongly on the Solzhenitsyn matter that he produced a lengthy memorandum outlining the case. One of several arguments he made was that a decision not to see the Soviet dissident would be “totally out of character for the President.” “More than any President in recent memory,” Dick wrote, implicitly citing Ford’s spokes-of-the-wheel style of management of the White House, “he’s the man who’s willing to see anyone, talk to anyone and listen to anyone’s views, no matter how much they differ from his own.” Cheney also reasoned that rebuffing Solzhenitsyn would lead to “a misreading of détente,” for it would send the wrong signal to the world “that all of a sudden our relationship with the Soviets is all sweetness and light,” and that political concerns triumphed over human ones.¹¹

The President was in a predicament. He was dealing with the great counterweight of a long history of decisions and actions by the Nixon administration to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union. This was at the heart of the approach known as “détente.” Ford had assumed office assuring Americans he would continue those policies, which had won Nixon and Kissinger great popularity and acclaim.

Kissinger raised a more sinister specter with the President—the threat of resuming a more hostile, even dangerous, relationship with the Soviet Union. As Kissinger would later remark to the press, he believed Solzhenitsyn wanted the United States to “pursue an aggressive policy to overthrow the Soviet Union.” “Now I believe that Solzhenitsyn is a man whose suffering entitles him to be heard and who has stood with great anguish for his views,” Kissinger said. “But I do believe that if his views became the national policy of the United States, we would be in a period—we would be confronting a considerable threat of military conflict.”¹²

Not without difficulty, the President sided with Kissinger and Scowcroft. Ford also decided not to attend an AFL-CIO dinner that was convened in Solzhenitsyn’s honor. The situation was further exacerbated by miscommunications to the press, which quickly caught wind of Ford’s “snub.” The White House press office first seemed to indicate that Ford couldn’t meet with Solzhenitsyn due to time constraints and later that the President would prefer “substantive” meetings over “symbolic” ones.¹³ The New York Times wryly noted that when Press Secretary Ron Nessen made such a statement, President Ford had taken the time “to greet the 1974 National Farm Family of the Year, Mr. and Mrs. James Ottoman and their daughter, Dana, of Malin, Oregon. The Ottomans gave Mr. Ford two books, one of which was ‘The Complete Potato Cookbook.’ ”¹⁴

Once the Ford “snub”—as it would be characterized—made its way into the media, as the President himself later stated in his memoir, “the furor began.”¹⁵ The furor went on and on, stoked by the media, by Solzhenitsyn, and, understandably, by anti-Communist hard-liners in the United States. It also annoyed some of the President’s closest friends. “My God!” Mel Laird exclaimed. “The President meets with all kinds of athletes who have all kinds of political philosophies in the world—why the hell can’t he meet with Solzhenitsyn?”¹⁶ A bipartisan group of Senators sought to introduce a congressional resolution urging that the Russian dissident be invited to speak before a joint session of Congress. Democrat Senator Ernest Hollings bluntly labeled the administration’s decision “an embarrassment.”¹⁷

For weeks, the White House staff internally debated whether to eat crow and solicit Solzhenitsyn, who had very publically castigated Ford’s approach to the Soviet Union. The writer had accused Ford of the “betrayal” of Eastern Europe by planning to attend a conference in Helsinki, Finland, to discuss human rights, which some Soviet critics saw as an action that would have the result of giving Communist puppet governments in the Iron Curtain legitimacy.

Initially, in response to Solzhenitsyn’s sharp elbows in the media, the President concluded that it was too late to approach him with hat in hand.¹⁸ He then reversed position, feeling that perhaps it wasn’t too late, and told confidants that he would be glad to see Solzhenitsyn when he had returned from the Helsinki meetings in August. The staff prepared talking points for the President. He would admit that he had botched the situation and praise Solzhenitsyn as a distinguished person and writer.¹⁹

I suggested that the President simply, without any further horsing around, say he would be happy to meet with Solzhenitsyn and move on.²⁰ The President agreed, but several more days passed without action.

Kissinger was undoubtedly concerned about the spectacle and characterized Solzhenitsyn as an unacceptable threat to détente. The White House struggled to answer a series of questions involving détente. Why was the U.S. still engaging with dictatorships that trampled human freedoms? Why was America dealing with the Soviet Union and aligning with Saudi Arabia, even though both nations discriminated against minorities?²¹

America had a wide array of relationships with countries around the world. Given that, and the fact that our country was founded on principles in which we deeply believed, including the preservation of freedom, then weren’t we as a people obligated to be against injustice? To be against injustice meant we should be supportive of our principles through persuasion. At the same time, it would be harmful for us to sever our relationships with every country in the world whose views didn’t align perfectly with our own. Doing so would severely harm our national interest.²²

An editor from Time magazine stepped forward, offering to be an intermediary between the President and Solzhenitsyn, but by then it seemed that the Soviet dissident was not willing to meet with Ford under any conditions. Solzhenitsyn knew well he was a symbol of opposition to détente and had likely decided that meeting with President Ford would have undermined his cachet. When the President became aware of Solzhenitsyn’s position, he felt the dissident had gone too far.²³ Still, the “open” invitation stood, but President Ford was fully aware there was little chance of having a meeting. He also believed—and wrongly in the opinion of some—that the more Solzhenitsyn spoke out against the White House, the more he was discrediting himself.²⁴

In the end, a meeting did not take place. Solzhenitsyn claimed he was too busy to visit Washington, D.C. Regardless, much of the American public—or at least many of those who paid attention to these types of things—judged the President’s “snub” negatively.²⁵ For years it would be referenced by close allies of Ford’s political rival, Ronald Reagan, as spurring the former California Governor on in his uphill battle against the President.

*  *  *

The Ford White House struggled to make up ground after the Solzhenitsyn affair. On August 1, 1975, during a second round of meetings in Europe, the President signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, otherwise known as the Helsinki Accords. Joined by leaders of thirty-four countries, including Soviet leader Brezhnev and UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, this was said to be the largest gathering of European heads of state since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The CSCE agreement was momentous, at least in the eyes of the Europeans and some administration figures.

“Ford, Brezhnev, and the other leaders,” Ron Nessen recollected, “pledged to cooperate with each other; respect the sovereignty, borders, and internal affairs of other countries; refrain from using force to settle disputes, and not violate human rights.”²⁶ Privately, Kissinger and many others, including me, noted that the agreement was not binding and recognized that while it could turn out to be a grandstand play to the left, nonetheless, it made sense to go along with it.

What was expected of the President at Helsinki was affirmation of U.S. support for those behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, as historian Daniel Sargent noted, the President’s address in Finland’s capital showed the “paradox” of the agreement. “Even as it articulated a role for human rights, the CSCE presumed a stable international order of nation-states, divided into Cold War blocs.”²⁷ There wasn’t much proof that the U.S. was eager to actively alter East-West geopolitical dynamics.

Ford himself believed differently, perhaps even presciently, that the Helsinki Accords put the Soviet Union, unwittingly, in a box. As Ford assured the American people, “The Helsinki documents involve political and moral commitments aimed at lessening tensions and opening further the lines of communication between peoples of East and West.” Responding to those Americans and others who believed the agreements were a concession to the Soviet Union, Ford said, “If it all fails, Europe will be no worse off than it is now. If even a part of it succeeds, the lot the people in Eastern Europe will be that much better, and the cause of freedom will advance at least that far.” At least one well-recognized Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis, agreed. Helsinki, Gaddis noted, “gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement.” What the Soviet Union and its Eastern European puppet regimes had agreed to in effect was “that the people who lived under these systems—at least the more courageous—could claim official permission to say what they thought.”

Looking back today, Helsinki in some ways could be said to have marked the birth of the modern human rights movement. It listed individual rights and liberties and the responsibilities of governments to protect them. It recognized universal human rights, including freedoms of thought, conscience, and belief. And it sent an unequivocal message to dissident groups like Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia that individual citizens can monitor and report on the human rights records of their governments.²⁸ Civic groups sprouted up across the Soviet Union in the wake of the Helsinki Accords. What the Helsinki Accords lacked in legally binding terms, Ford could and would argue, it made up by terms that it could be argued were morally binding.

In the meantime, Ford was determined to pursue a historic arms control agreement with the Soviets before his term was over. A sticking point was that military technology was evolving faster than SALT, which had been penned in 1972. When President Ford came into office in August 1974, cruise missiles—aerodynamically guided missiles designed to hit distant targets with high precision—hadn’t yet been demonstrated to be an operational success. Soon after Vladivostok, they became a factor, and the need to distinguish them from more traditional ballistic missiles—missiles with a trajectory that sent them into outer space and that are guided only during brief periods of flight—proved to be a new problem.

Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger had accepted a proposal that placed constraints on new cruise missiles, but avoided certain limitations on the Soviet Union’s recently released Tupolev Tu-22M “Backfire,” a supersonic, long-range strategic and maritime strike bomber.²⁹ The proposal, in effect, accepted the Kremlin’s demand that the Backfire bomber, which boasted a nuclear weapons delivery capability and could fly from the Soviet Union to Cuba without refueling, be defined as a “nonstrategic weapon.”³⁰

Kissinger was bothered by what he perceived as President Ford’s post-hoc concerns, believing the U.S. had to work with the Soviets on the grounds already established.³¹

He was more at ease with some ambiguity about the new military technologies, while those at the Department of Defense were less so. The Soviets had not been forthcoming about the level of their defense expenditures and infrastructure investments, and, therefore, it was an enormous risk not to clearly classify cruise missiles and the Backfire as well as the Soviet’s newly introduced RSD-10 intermediate-range ballistic missile which, with some tweaking, could become a missile capable of being launched from one continent and hitting another.³²

The President was unhappy, and I understood why, given all the internal debates taking place. Kissinger had been successfully working the negotiation for some time and was right insofar as there was a logic to marching forward with the Soviets within the bounds of the original understanding. I believed that the cruise missile was good leverage—the leverage needed—for getting a grip on the Backfire bomber, the full capabilities of which were far from fully understood at that time.³³

The President became quite explicit that he wanted a SALT agreement, and that it was one of the most important efforts of his Presidency. He believed strongly that strategic arms limitations were in the best interest of the U.S., and he argued we would not get an agreement in 1976 if we didn’t act constructively.³⁴

The President knew he needed to build support in the country for whatever ended up in an agreement. He was advised to give addresses and have speeches made by surrogates, including foreign policy leaders such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, with whom he planned to consult prior to or immediately after signing an agreement.³⁵ Without making the case, he understood he would not get the needed support and flexibility from Congress or buy-in from the American people.

The challenges of détente and the existing threats from the Soviet Union were difficult to fully appreciate and, as a result, the details were less than fully understood by the public. Issues surrounded by mystique or silence, can be exploited by one side not least because others don’t force proponents to provide substantive arguments because they themselves may not be sufficiently conversant with important facts.³⁶ Détente had been widely discussed. Some had framed it as a success when in fact it was a continuing evolving process in which the U.S. was trying to ease tensions. It was fair to make a case that, even though America had its own beliefs and the Soviets had notably different beliefs of their own, it could still be to our advantage to try to find ways to relax tensions. But that was true only as long as we were persuaded that doing so was in the interest of preserving peace, while facing allegations that the policy of détente had the unintended effect of seeming to be turning a blind eye to human suffering at the hands of Soviet totalitarianism.³⁷

Secretary Kissinger planned a trip to Moscow for late January 1976 to further discuss limitations on strategic arms with General Secretary Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Gromyko. The timing was complicated by a proxy conflict in the southern African nation of Angola. Three months earlier, Cuba had launched a large-scale military intervention in support of the leftist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which had been supported and supplied by the Soviet Union.

“To my knowledge,” said Brent Scowcroft, “the U.S. government has no direct support there, and we’re not hiring mercenaries.”

Well, I replied, that answer leaves open the possibility that we might be paying for other mercenaries, possibly indirectly or that something could be occurring beyond our knowledge. I asked, “Is that what you mean?” He said he would get an answer, and get it over to the Pentagon so we could get everyone on the same set of facts.³⁸

What we soon learned was that Angola was a nuisance for the Soviets as well. Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the U.S., relayed that his country was willing to break its back to get a SALT II agreement, but they didn’t know how to get the Cubans out.³⁹ Henry’s trip to the Soviet Union had the potential to be a public relations problem.

“I have always said that these are separable parts,” the President said, “that if you can get a plus out of SALT, even though you get a minus out of Angola, that doesn’t mean you don’t take the plus out of SALT.”

I said that the effect could be that Henry goes over there to meet with Brezhnev in the middle of this Angola flap, and the guy sitting here drinking a beer could say, ‘What in the hell is going on?’ ”

I worried the American people were going to see the U.S. doing eight or nine things favorable to the Soviet Union, such as selling them grain and seeming to be making defense concessions, then hear about Kissinger’s cordial meeting with Soviet leadership, and that that could make it extremely difficult to avoid a hostile atmosphere at home. What exactly—the person from Kansas, Michigan, or California might ask—is the U.S. getting out of all this?

“I am not saying he shouldn’t go, not saying we shouldn’t work for SALT,” I told the President, “I am saying we have got one hell of a problem because we have got a policy that the American people either don’t understand or do understand and can’t accept.”⁴⁰

The President said he would never forgive himself if we missed an opportunity to get a decent SALT II agreement. Henry ended up going over, and he and Brent Scowcroft came to terms on a proposal for the Soviets. Newspaper articles being put out in the Soviet Union claimed a secret deal could be in the works.⁴¹

Back at the White House, the President continued to stress that he wanted a good, substantive agreement for the country, pointing out that no agreement would be the worst outcome. We discussed that he meant an agreement within the parameters of the differences we’ve been debating. It would be more desirable to get that agreement than no agreement. But obviously the worst thing would be to get a bad agreement. The President agreed with that sentiment, of course.⁴² I was worried that the President might be leaving an impression to some around him that he wanted an agreement, period, but I knew that was certainly not his position.⁴³

As it happened, the SALT agreement, much like every other issue, was about to become front and center in a divisive political campaign that threatened to further divide the Republican Party.