Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (117 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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4. PRESIDENT GERALD FORD
On August 9, incoming president Gerald Ford spoke with great sensitivity, graciousness, and insight, said that “our long national nightmare is over,” and asked for prayers that the man “who had brought peace to the world” would enjoy it himself. He chose for vice president Nelson Rockefeller, who was confirmed after unnecessarily belligerent hearings, and Henry Kissinger continued as secretary of state. These men, with Donald Rumsfeld in defense and William Simon at the Treasury, provided capable and distinguished leadership as the country settled down from the unprecedented hysteria and national neurosis of Watergate. Ford granted Nixon a full pardon on September 8, 1974, as the ex-president fought for his life against blood clots, and the vindictive mood of the country punished Ford in the midterm elections for his decency. The year ebbed uneventfully away.
Inflation soon became the chief preoccupation of the administration, and there was agitation for both spending reductions and tax cuts. The economy was rather uncertain into 1975, and so were many foreign areas. A Portuguese military faction had overturned the semi-fascist dictatorship that had ruled for 42 years, in April 1974, and an internecine struggle between pro- and anti-communist forces seesawed back and forth in senior military circles for almost two years, before the pro-Western faction, with heavy input from the CIA and the Holy See, prevailed.
Turkey had landed forces in Cyprus in the summer of 1974, to protect the Turkish minority, and the always prickly Greek-Turkish relationship put great strains on NATO. At the end of November 1974, Ford and Brezhnev met at the Far Eastern Soviet city of Vladivostok. There was a tentative agreement to try to balance the different throw weights and launch vehicles of strategic nuclear weapons, as so-called nuclear units were devised for negotiating purposes. But the Russians had to face the fact that though they had gross parity, the Americans had superior technology and quality of weapons. The pace of discussions was not assisted by the fact that Brezhnev suffered at least one minor stroke in the course of them. The points of concurrence took many years to aggregate into a serious agreement.
The follow-up discussions with Israel and Egypt after the disengagement were so sluggish, even under the relatively reasonable new premier, Yitzhak Rabin, that Ford informed Rabin in March that he was “reassessing” U.S. policy in the region, and all U.S. aid to Israel stopped from March until there was finally some movement at the end of the summer, and an interim Sinai agreement was arranged under Kissinger’s constant and ingenious efforts, in September.
In the meantime, the North Vietnamese staged their long-awaited third major invasion of South Vietnam. Unlike the first such lunge, at Tet in 1968, there were no U.S. ground forces to repulse them; and unlike the second offensive in April 1972 to disrupt the triangular arrangements Nixon was making with Beijing and Moscow, there was no U.S. air power to assist. And the Democrats, whose war it had been, voted down any military assistance to the South. It was the unalloyed capitulation of America, renunciation of its long war effort, and the abandonment of an ally that had endured over 500,000 war dead fighting a former common enemy. Lack of Democratic enthusiasm for any participation in that war is understandable, but the Senate had ratified the peace agreements when there were explicit promises to assist the South in the event of an enemy breech of the agreement, which was universally anticipated. Nothing short of another massive air campaign was going to save Saigon this time, but this brutal abandonment of the anti-communist cause in South Vietnam 20 years after Eisenhower had sent Nixon there to pledge support for the “first domino” was irresponsible by the standards of great powers.
If Eisenhower had dictated sensible cooperative terms to France in 1954 in exchange for assistance and then arranged just part of the country for Ho Chi Minh and legitimized the rest; or if he or Kennedy had introduced SEATO forces along the DMZ and in Laos to prevent the communist subversion of the South, and Kennedy had not handed Laos to the communists for conversion into the greatest land arms route in history with the agreement of 1962; or if Johnson had entered on a direct congressional authorization, pushed Vietnamization from the start, had soldiers stay for longer tours and, again, followed MacArthur’s and Eisenhower’s advice and stopped the infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail; or if Nixon had done the same as soon as he was inaugurated and after Johnson’s phony peace breakthrough failed to achieve anything; or even, just possibly, if the Senate had not scuttled Indochina in 1973–1975, it would probably, or at least might, have ended satisfactorily.
As it was, tragedy metastasized: hundreds of thousands were massacred in the South, almost a million mainly Chinese Vietnamese fled the South in boats, and hundreds of thousands drowned, and perhaps two million people perished in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Because of the failures of the U.S. political class and military high command, and the ability of the generally weak American left to misrepresent the motives and moral relativism of the powers at war, all Indochina was doomed to a horrible, heartbreaking fate. Nixon, by great dexterity and at times courage, had avoided the defeat of the United States itself. But it suffered a distinct strategic setback, captured graphically by terrible pictures of American helicopters departing the rooftops of Saigon with their erstwhile allies desperately clinging to the runners. It was the hour of America’s greatest ignominy. The United States would ultimately accept about 200,000 Vietnamese refugees (including Nguyen Van Thieu).
Civil war broke out in Angola in earnest at about this time, as the Portuguese empire collapsed and the home country was itself a closely contested battleground between competing communist and pro-Western factions. The Soviet Union and Cuba (which sent tens of thousands of troops, some of them with a refueling stop in Canada) aided one faction, the U.S. another, and the South Africans supported both the U.S. protégés and another faction. This war went on for 15 years, and by the time the originally Russian-sponsored contender won, the Cold War was over, oil had been discovered in Angola, and the standard of living rose swiftly.
The Italian Communist Party made substantial gains and there was a good deal of disturbing speculation about bringing it into government. The Soviets were emboldened in their always teeming efforts to incite communist takeovers of vulnerable countries in Latin America and Africa.
President Ford did put on something of a show of strength when an American merchant ship, the
Mayaguez,
was seized by Cambodian communists in May 1975. He dispatched helicopter forces to retake the ship and liberate the crew, which they did. It was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory, as two of the helicopters crashed, having made some errors in the approach and approximately as many servicemen were killed as sailors were rescued, but it was a successful show of force. A greater success came in August of the following year when North Korean soldiers killed two American soldiers who were routinely pruning a tree in the zone between the two Koreas. Kim Jong II, the dictator’s son, managed to have this accepted by a conference of the unaligned as an attempted invasion of the North. Ford sent heavy military units into no-man’s-land to continue routine gardening, and B-52s repeatedly overflew the parallel at low altitude. It had the desired effect.
Mayaguez,
was seized by Cambodian communists in May 1975. He dispatched helicopter forces to retake the ship and liberate the crew, which they did. It was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory, as two of the helicopters crashed, having made some errors in the approach and approximately as many servicemen were killed as sailors were rescued, but it was a successful show of force. A greater success came in August of the following year when North Korean soldiers killed two American soldiers who were routinely pruning a tree in the zone between the two Koreas. Kim Jong II, the dictator’s son, managed to have this accepted by a conference of the unaligned as an attempted invasion of the North. Ford sent heavy military units into no-man’s-land to continue routine gardening, and B-52s repeatedly overflew the parallel at low altitude. It had the desired effect.
The United States and Canada and almost all European countries participated in the Helsinki Accords in July and August 1975. The effect of the Accords was generally thought to be morally to respectabilize the Soviet Union, and they didn’t really accomplish much except involve the Kremlin in a discussion of the subject. The so-called Decalogue, which was the agreed document from the conference, guaranteed freedom of thought (which is in any case difficult to interdict) and of conscience and religion (slight progress for the communists), but did not refer to freedom of expression or of political leadership selection. It guaranteed nonintervention in the affairs of each country, which was, of course, as much an assurance of untroubled despotism as anything else, but might, in theory, make outrages like Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 more difficult. Helsinki did give rise to Human Rights Watch, an avowedly leftist organization that would surpass even Amnesty International in its whitewash of the international left.
Ford had a cordial but not especially productive visit to China in December 1975. He and Kissinger did their best to hold the line and keep the alliance in good order, but it was a difficult time. The negotiation of the possible handover of the Panama Canal to Panama arose after lengthy agitation by de facto Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos. Panama was (Chapter 7) an artificial country sliced out of Colombia by Teddy Roosevelt because the Colombians were being shirty about what to charge for the right to build an isthmian canal. The whole policy of détente with the USSR, including what was held to be a charade of a human rights conference, the spectacular fall of Vietnam, the alleged over-placation of China, and now the plan to give away the Panama Canal to the original banana republic, revived the fissures in the Republican Party between the old Goldwater and Rockefeller factions. Gerald Ford, a good and brave and conscientious man, was not a sufficiently galvanizing or ingeniously cunning leader, as Eisenhower and Nixon had been, to keep those factions together.
5. THE 1976 ELECTIONThe leader of the liberals, Nelson Rockefeller, was now the vice president and was tarred with the perceived shortcomings of the administration, and Ford, though personally appreciated for his human qualities, was seen by the Nixon-haters as beholden to the former president and too quick to give him a pardon. The Democrats, having buried Johnson and canonized the Kennedys, were now in the hands of pacifistic naifs. Though they would allow Mayor Richard Daley back at their convention and pay him homage as a party elder, unworldly righteousness now reigned. So shaken was the country by the debacle of Vietnam and the shambles of Watergate, so convinced was most of it that both were the result of intolerably sleazy politics and politicians, the Democrats had become an aggregation of innocents and the Republicans a house sharply divided at the bifurcation between left-center and medium-right.
For president, the Democrats nominated the former governor of Georgia, James E. (Jimmy) Carter, who ran effectively as a Washington outsider, never having held a position there. The last president who could claim outsider status was Woodrow Wilson. Humphrey, Johnson, and Kennedy, and even McGovern had been Washington veterans for many years before becoming contenders for the presidency. Carter took Humphrey’s successor as senator from Minnesota, Walter F. Mondale, for vice president, heavily emphasized the alleged corruption and undoubted cynicism of the Watergate Republicans, and opened up a large lead in the polls before the Republicans’ convention, in Kansas City in late August.
The leader of the conservative Republicans was no longer the stolid Goldwater from the relatively small state of Arizona. It was now the twice-chosen governor of California, Ronald Reagan, mocked by his opponents as an ex-actor, but a hypnotic public speaker and public relations genius who sold conservatism as no one else could. He entered the race against Ford and won a number of the primaries. He ran the incumbent president the closest race to the convention of anyone who had attempted the same step since Theodore Roosevelt, a former president after all, running against President Taft in 1912 (Chapter 7). Ford won the convention, but felt obligated to disembark Rockefeller as vice president and chose the sharp-tongued senator from Kansas (where there weren’t many voters and which always voted Republican), Robert Dole. Ford won the nomination, though fairly closely, but Reagan made the convention wait about 15 minutes before he emerged to give one of his rousing political orations, while scarcely referring to the nominee. If Ford didn’t win the election, Reagan would be waiting and ready four years later.
Ford trailed by 33 points as the campaign started but campaigned pluckily and made telling arguments against Carter’s rather simplistic view of the world. It was a mediocre election, fought between uninspiring candidates, who played out the exhausted morality play of bombed-out, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American public life. The country was just starting to recover from deep self-inflicted wounds, aggravated by misplaced sanctimony. (In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation awarded the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Medal to President Ford for pardoning Nixon, who had always got on well with all the Kennedys except Bobby, including the father. In making the award, Senator Edward M. Kennedy said that while he had opposed the Nixon pardon at the time, he now recognized that it was the just and correct decision. Teddy Kennedy, having drowned one of his assistants in a drunken car accident in 1969 and fled the scene of the accident, was not a natural source for Solomonic moral judgments, but in this case he was surely right, and it was a gracious tribute to the 87-year-old Ford.)
The Democrats were accusing the Republicans of being unprecedentedly corrupt (which they weren’t; Kennedy and Johnson, not to mention some old-timers, gave them plenty of precedent), and proposed a cure of puritanical altruism that was going to cause the leaders in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City to split their sides in laughter; the country was see-sawing between the excessively stigmatized and the unpromisingly righteous, while the national media patted itself endlessly on the head and back for exposing (i.e., exacerbating) two of the greatest disasters in American strategic and political history, Vietnam and Watergate.
Jerry Ford made it a close election, as Hubert Humphrey had in 1968, and Harry Truman had in 1948, all gallant fighters. Apart from Watergate and the Nixon pardon, there were only two other issues: Ford was offering Vietnam draft evaders a conditional transfer to an honorable discharge, and Carter offered an unconditional pardon to dodgers and deserters. America, still trying to detoxify itself from the 20-year Indochinese nightmare, leaned to Carter’s proposal. There was a return, for the first time since 1960, to televised debates, and although Ford generally did well, he at one point said that the “Poles don’t consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” Carter and his partisans represented this as unawareness on the part of the president of the presence of the Soviet army in Poland, and of the location of the headquarters of the Warsaw Pact. Ford wasn’t verbally agile (and neither was Carter), and he should have expressed himself more unambiguously, but this was only an infelicitous choice of words. Although Ford was a distinguished athlete and an alumnus of the Yale Law School, he could be caricatured as a bit of an oaf and not overly intelligent. LBJ, the master of the destructive barb, said of Ford on separate occasions that “Jerry played football too often without his helmet,” that he “couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time,” and that he “couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.” Carter wasn’t as amusing as Johnson, but almost as nasty, and perceptions are crucial in politics. Ford paid for his presentational problems.
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