From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (133 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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