From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (132 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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Smelling blood, congressional rebels set out after bigger game—the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente with the Soviet Union.