Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (16 page)

The foes of aid insisted that America learn a larger lesson from its blunders: It must never again send its soldiers into quagmires such as those that had swallowed so many young men in Vietnam. This insistence did not lead the United States to retreat into some sort of isolationist shell; in the 1970s, as later, Americans supported far-reaching military commitments, notably to NATO. Consistently resolute in containing communism, the United States stayed the course as the leader of the many nations that waged the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies. This was a perilous struggle that would last until 1990 and that had already helped to kill millions of people, most of them civilians, in Korea and Vietnam. The United States, continuing to dominate the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, also protected, and whenever possible expanded, its economic interests throughout the world. Popular support by Americans for the diplomatic, economic, and political engagement of the United States on a large number of overseas fronts continued after 1974.
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Still, conflict over the lessons to be learned from the war in Vietnam persisted as a potent force in American life, affecting not only popular opinion about foreign policy initiatives but also military planners and diplomats for years to come. It also sharpened partisan divisions. Thanks to the Vietnam War, Democrats, who in the Truman years had been members of the more internationalist party, became more cautious than Republicans about calling for significant military commitments aboard. As the columnist Charles Krauthammer later observed, they came to see the term “Cold Warrior” as pejorative.
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But it was not just liberals who looked at foreign policy through the lens of Vietnam. In the Ford years, as in later decades, wrangling over the “lessons of Vietnam” lay at the root of almost every significant foreign policy and military debate in the United States.

Controlling Congress, Democrats led the way in reducing defense spending, which declined between 1972 and 1975 both in constant dollars and as a percentage of gross national product. In 1980, Army Chief of Staff Edward Mayer lamented, “What we have is a hollow Army.”
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Critics of these cuts complained that the United States would now be able to fight only “Gilbert and Sullivan wars.” America would no longer have the muscle to lead the Free World. But popular fears of another Vietnam remained powerful. In the late 1970s, a number of films concerned with the war—
The Deer Hunter
(1978),
Coming Home
(1978), and
Apocalypse Now
(1979)—revived many of the horrible memories, which continued to foment harsh domestic divisions.
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It is highly doubtful that even massive amounts of United States aid would have saved the pro-American governments of Southeast Asia. Under military siege in 1975, they were riddled with corruption and had little popular following. Communists took control of Laos, remaining in command into the twenty-first century. In Cambodia, an especially brutal Khmer Rouge regime quickly began slaughtering people. Within the next three years an estimated 1.5 million people, close to one-fourth of the nation’s population, were murdered or died of disease or overwork in the infamous “killing fields” of that unfortunate country.

In Saigon, where the South Vietnamese government surrendered on April 29, thousands of panicked supporters of the old regime clamored to flee from their enemies. Communist forces threatened to overrun the American Embassy, leading to desperate scrambles of would-be refugees up a ladder to helicopters perched on a high part of the embassy roof. In order to enable already dangerously overloaded helicopters to leave, American Embassy personnel used clubs and their fists to beat away desperate Vietnamese seeking to climb aboard. Though the operation eventually managed to evacuate more than 1,000 Americans and 5,500 Vietnamese, it took nineteen highly tense hours to complete. It was a mad, miserable, and, for many Americans, humiliating melee that television captured and relayed to viewers around the world.
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The next day, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Within the next few years, a million or so Vietnamese fled their homeland, many of them arriving eventually in the United States.

Only two weeks after the fall of Saigon, Ford and Kissinger sought a measure of revenge. When Khmer Rouge forces seized an American merchant ship, the
Mayaguez
, in the Gulf of Siam, Ford dispensed with diplomacy. Without consulting Congress, he called the seizure an “act of piracy” and dispatched warplanes, air police, and marines to the rescue. American forces that assaulted the island where the ship was anchored lost thirty-eight men and eight helicopters. Ford also authorized air strikes on the Cambodian mainland. When United States forces finally boarded the
Mayaguez
, they learned that the crew of thirty-odd had already been taken away and placed on a fishing vessel. The Cambodians eventually turned them over.

At other times such a venture, which had a comic opera quality to it, might have whipped up a storm of criticism.
Time
noted that the incident “had many of the gung-ho elements of a John Wayne movie.” Critics pointed out that Ford had acted imperiously and had launched attacks that hit the wrong targets and freed no one. More Americans died in the effort than would have been lost if the entire crew of the
Mayaguez
had been killed. Yet most Americans seemed thrilled by Ford’s show of steel. Public opinion polls revealed a surge in his popularity. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a frequent advocate of strong American military action, proclaimed, “It shows we’ve still got balls in this country.”
⁶⁶
No comment better exposed the anger and frustration that gripped many Americans in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Ford encountered special difficulties in trying to manage the Cold War. While this standoff was less frightening than it had been at the time of the missile crisis in 1962, it remained the central issue of American foreign policy. Nuclear weapons had the potential to incinerate much of the world. Following Kissinger’s lead, Ford at first hoped that Nixon’s policy of détente would alleviate tensions. Thus he joined Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in observing the terms of a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I, 1972) that called for a five-year freeze on the testing and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In mid-1975, he signed, as did the leaders of the Soviet Union and of thirty-one other nations, the so-called Helsinki Accords. These called on signatories to seek peaceful solutions to disputes, to cooperate on scientific and economic matters, and to promote the free movement of people and ideas. They also confirmed the existing boundaries of Europe, thereby recognizing the Iron Curtain and infuriating Ronald Reagan and others on the Republican Right.

But détente had not succeeded in promoting warmer relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, it faced determined enemies at home. One of these was Defense Secretary Schlesinger, who thoroughly distrusted the Soviets. Another was Democratic senator Henry Jackson of Washington, who had presidential aspirations. In late 1974 Jackson steered through Congress the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied most-favored-nation trading status to the Soviet Union unless it permitted unlimited Jewish emigration. Brezhnev and others in the Kremlin hotly resented this intrusion into their domestic doings. By the time of the Helsinki conference, at which Brezhnev was icy toward Ford, support for détente was collapsing within the White House.
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Ford, heeding the hawkish advice of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, kept his distance from advocates such as Kissinger and avoided public use of the word during the campaign of 1976.
⁶⁸

Under Brezhnev, moreover, the Soviets added greatly to their arsenal of long-range weapons. By 1975, they were believed to lag behind America in numbers of nuclear warheads and manned bombers but to have 50 percent more intercontinental ballistic missiles than the United States.
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Ford, like his predecessors, felt obliged to step up defense spending, thereby enlarging what critics called the potential for mutual assured destruction, or MAD. Critics of the buildup complained that America was indulging in overkill, and in so doing warping its economic priorities, but they were powerless to stop the arms race or to prevent the United States from selling weapons to anti-communist allies. Fears of nuclear catastrophe continued to loom over the world.
⁷⁰

Liberal critics of the president were equally ineffectual in getting the United States to back away from authoritarian regimes that supported the American side in the Cold War or to show great interest in an international human rights movement that had gathered force during and after the Vietnam War. When Kissinger had served as Nixon’s national security adviser, he had played a key role, along with the CIA, in abetting the violent overthrow on September 11, 1973, of Salvador Allende’s left-leaning democratic regime in Chile. During Ford’s presidency he vigorously resisted congressional efforts between 1974 and 1976 to cut off arms sales to Allende’s brutal successor, General Augusto Pinochet. Kissinger, an advocate of
Realpolitik
in the conduct of foreign relations, also supported the murderous military junta that seized control of Argentina in 1976.
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Cold War rivalries also continued to afflict the Third World, including the many African nations that were finally establishing their independence from colonial powers. One of these was Angola, which was scheduled to become independent from Portugal in November 1975. By then, however, both Ford and Brezhnev had intervened. The United States, allied with the racially discriminatory regime of South Africa, covertly aided one side in a civil war, and the Soviets the other, with the help of 40,000 troops from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. By 1976, at which point pro-Soviet factions had gained control in Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia (where Cuban troops also were operating), many Americans worried that Brezhnev was right when he claimed that the USSR was winning the Cold War.

A
LL THESE DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN PROBLEMS
placed Ford on the defensive as he prepared for the election of 1976. As an incumbent he might have expected an easy run for the nomination, but that was not to be, thanks to the entry of Ronald Reagan into the race in late 1975. An affable man and a formidable campaigner, Reagan had been a popular two-term governor of California between 1967 and 1975. When he challenged Ford, he excited great enthusiasm among the party’s politically engaged right wing, which celebrated his call for school prayer and his emergence (though belated) as an opponent of abortion.
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Polls indicated that Republicans favored him over the president for the GOP nomination. In February, he almost triumphed in the key New Hampshire primary. A staunch anti-Communist, he attacked Ford and Kissinger for advocating détente with the Soviet Union and for contemplating a renegotiation of America’s 1903 treaty concerning the Panama Canal. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it,” he proclaimed.
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Rhetoric like this apparently helped him win big victories in primaries in North Carolina and Texas.

As late as May 1976, it seemed that Reagan might maintain what seemed to be a narrow lead in delegates to the party convention, but Ford fought hard, using presidential patronage to rally people to his side. He won the GOP nomination on the first ballot, but only by the narrow margin of 1,187 to 1,070. He then named Kansas senator Robert Dole, a conservative whom Reagan liked, as his vice-presidential running mate.
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The race for the Democratic nomination ultimately featured eleven contenders, one of whom, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, seemed to be the longest of long shots. When he told his mother that he was going to run for president, she asked, “President of what?” Undeterred, he had jumped into the race as early as 1975. Though only 2 percent of Americans in January 1976 had ever heard of him, he was an intensely ambitious and competitive super-achiever who was determined to win. He recognized shrewdly that the key to victory under Democratic Party procedures that had been developed since 1968 was to make a strong showing in early primaries, the number of which had swelled by then to thirty. He focused especially on the first two contests, party precinct caucuses in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire.

Carter spoke in a soft drawl and wore a big, toothy smile. Identifying himself as a “born-again” Christian, he emphasized his commitment to family life and to high standards of personal morality. People seemed attracted to his down-home manner, which he played up as a way of identifying himself as an outsider to the wicked ways of Washington. Competing effectively in both early contests, Carter was anointed as a probable winner of the presidential nomination by the national media and rocketed ahead from long shot to front-runner. Soon he built up a formidable advantage in campaign contributions, which helped him best challengers such as Senator Jackson of Washington and Representative Morris Udall of Arizona and to win eighteen primaries. He took the nomination on the first ballot and selected Walter Mondale, a liberal senator from Minnesota, as his running mate. When the campaign against Ford opened in earnest, polls indicated that Carter had a lead of twenty percentage points.