From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (134 page)

The administration was not so charitable in dealing with the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In an anomalous instance where the loser of a war imposed punitive terms on the winner for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, the United States continued to treat Vietnam as an enemy. Few Americans were interested in reconciliation. On the other hand, a deep-seated bitterness, the legacy of frustration and defeat, posed
a major obstacle to restoration of ties. Kissinger set the tone. Privately condemning the Vietnamese as "the most bloody minded bastards" he had ever dealt with, he insisted that the United States make no concessions. Geopolitical realities in time would force Hanoi to accept U.S. terms. The Ford administration thus extended to all of Vietnam the embargo applied during wartime to the North. It refused to consider the aid secretly promised by Nixon in the 1973 agreement and vetoed Vietnam's application for membership in the United Nations. Under pressure from Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, the normally easygoing Ford played to the galleries while campaigning in 1976, denouncing the Vietnamese as "pirates." It would be almost twenty years before the United States would establish relations with the nation that had defeated it.
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The humiliation, frustration, and anger that gripped the administration after the fall of Saigon was also manifest in its response to an incident in the Gulf of Thailand less than two weeks later. Claiming that the U.S. merchant ship
Mayaguez
had ventured into its territorial waters, the new, revolutionary government of Cambodia seized the vessel and its crew of forty. Suffering from post-Vietnam trauma and haunted by memories of North Korea's capture of the
Pueblo
in 1968, Ford and his advisers agreed they must act decisively: There "wasn't a dove in the place," one official recalled.
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An embattled president saw a chance to prove his mettle. As always, Kissinger sought to mend tattered U.S. credibility. The administration never seriously considered negotiating with a Communist regime it had not recognized. It denounced Cambodia's "piracy," demanded return of the vessel and crew, mobilized military forces in the area, and heatedly debated whether to bomb Cambodia itself.

The United States recovered the ship and crew, made its point, and even enjoyed a moment of triumph, but as the result of a botched and costly operation that brought no real improvement to its international or domestic political position. Mistakenly believing that the crew was held on Koh Tang island off the southern coast of Cambodia, U.S. Marines landed on May 15, met unexpectedly fierce opposition from local Cambodian forces, and suffered heavy casualties in the initial assault: Eight helicopters were shot down, eighteen Marines killed—and it could have been much worse. Mainly as a punitive measure driven by political exigencies, the United States also bombed the Cambodian mainland—"Let's look
ferocious," Kissinger snarled—a feel-good move that had no impact on the outcome.
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The navy recovered the
Mayaguez
. At precisely the time the marines landed on Koh Tang, Cambodia voluntarily released the crew, permitting the administration to claim victory, a rare occurrence in those gloom-filled days. Ford's poll numbers shot up. For once, Congress praised his decisiveness: "It's nice to win one for a change," Kentucky representative Carroll Hubbard exclaimed.
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The president's firm response probably helped secure release of the crew, but the bombing and invasion of Koh Tang obviously had no effect. The cost—carefully concealed from the American public—was high: a total of ninety casualties, including forty-one killed, three of them marines left behind and executed. The administration may have demonstrated its willingness to use force, but the glory was fleeting, and nothing changed in terms of its tattered global image and its shaky control over foreign policy.
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Congress asserted itself again later in the year with Angola, a most revealing case study of Cold War diplomacy in the era of detente and foreign policy in the Ford years. One of the last imperial powers to come to terms with decolonization, Portugal in 1975 finally conceded independence to its Angolan colony in southwest Africa. As with many other newly independent states, the heady reality of freedom left unresolved who would be in charge. Three major factions, divided along tribal as much as ideological lines, vied for power. As so often in the Cold War, a local conflict quickly escalated into a regional and then international crisis. Zaire and South Africa supported factions in the Angolan civil war, as did the Soviet Union and later Cuba, China, and the United States. Although Angola was rich in oil and minerals, neither the United States nor the USSR had major interests there. But a fear of Sino-American collaboration—which did not in fact exist—in support of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) faction spurred increased Soviet aid for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Cuba seems to have intervened on its own initiative and in response to U.S. actions, although it undoubtedly consulted with the Soviet Union, eventually sending fifteen thousand troops. "The American stake was not
threatened
by the Soviet-Cuban involvement on the other side," author Raymond Garthoff has observed, "it was
created
by it."
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Washington increasingly feared an MPLA victory. Ford and Kissinger believed that the United States in the aftermath of
Vietnam must vigorously oppose Soviet adventurism and make clear its willingness to use force. The administration in July 1975 secretly and without consulting Congress approved $32 million for a CIA covert operation in collaboration with South Africa to bolster the FNLA and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and prevent an MPLA victory.

Congress had other ideas. When U.S. involvement came to light in the fall of 1975, Angola quickly became a volatile issue. The CIA had just been branded a "rogue elephant" by a congressional investigating committee headed by Idaho senator Frank Church for earlier covert operations and assassination plots. It was at this time in grave disrepute. United States cooperation with South Africa provoked loud protest. Congress saw yet another opportunity to challenge the administration's foreign policy. In an early example of what would be called the Vietnam Syndrome, liberals issued dire warnings that seemingly small-scale and innocent involvements in remote areas like Angola could produce Vietnam-like quagmires. Thus in December 1975, Congress by solid majorities passed legislation cutting off aid to Angola. Ford and Kissinger were outraged at this most blatant challenge to their authority, but Congress had the votes to override a veto, and they acquiesced. For the first time, Congress had stopped a covert operation.
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Angola had numerous important consequences. It provided another dramatic example of how weary the nation was of Cold War involvements and how eager Congress was to take on the executive. It revealed very different Soviet and American views of detente. The Kremlin saw itself acting as the United States had in Chile and the Middle East, continuing to expand its influence while pursuing detente. United States officials saw Soviet engagement in Angola and especially the use of what they viewed as Cuban proxy forces as exceeding the permissible bounds of detente. Kissinger's public highlighting of Soviet-Cuban involvement in Angola and a subsequent MPLA victory provided ammunition for those American conservatives who wanted a tougher line with Moscow. Angola was of no real importance to the United States. Additional U.S. aid would not have changed the outcome, and getting out caused no substantive damage to American interests. But from this point, Ford and Kissinger found themselves increasingly squeezed between liberals who wanted to curb the nation's involvement abroad and conservatives who sought to end detente, build up U.S. military power, and stand firmly against Soviet expansion.
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During the last year and a half of his short presidency, Ford lost ground at home and abroad. His commendable efforts to ease Cold War tensions became a political liability, a barrier to his efforts to secure election in his own right. A highly politicized summer 1975 flap over Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn set the tone. The brilliant if irascible novelist's damning portrayal of Soviet crimes against their own people earned him a Nobel Prize for literature, a worldwide reputation as the regime's most eloquent dissident—and eventually expulsion. He was immediately adopted as a hero by hard-line anti-Communists in the United States. In June 1975, shortly before a scheduled meeting with Brezhnev at Helsinki, a group of right-wingers led by Senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in a blatantly political move declared Solzhenitsyn an honorary U.S. citizen and pressed Ford to receive him at the White House and attend a much publicized dinner in his honor. Heeding Kissinger, who warned of a threat to the upcoming summit, rather than his political advisers, Ford declined to meet with Solzhenitsyn on the grounds of a tight schedule, although he did extend an open invitation once he had returned from abroad. Having compelled Ford to put diplomatic expediency above principle, Helms and Thurmond dropped the issue, and Solzhenitsyn never sought a visit. The president's refusal to meet with the novelist did him no good at Helsinki and gave hard-liners at home another stick to flog him with.
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The Helsinki summit of July 30–August 1, 1975, is a classic example of a pivotal event whose short- and long-term consequences were strikingly different, even contradictory. Although it would eventually play a crucial role in ending the Cold War, its immediate effects were to further weaken detente and damage Ford at home. One of the largest such meetings ever, the conference included representatives from thirty-five nations and ratified the results of almost three years of intensive negotiations. Through the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the Soviet Union sought recognition of its position in Eastern Europe. The Western Europeans hoped to advance the relative stability that had grown out of detente. With the United States, they also pushed for human rights and a freer flow of ideas, people, and information. Out of this mélange of often conflicting aspirations emerged by 1975 three sets of agreements, in diplomatic parlance, "baskets." A security basket included agreements to uphold basic human rights and "refrain from assaulting" the European boundaries established after World War II, a tacit concession to the Soviet position that stopped short of recognition. An economic basket provided for breaking
down inter-European barriers by tourism, expanded trade, and scientific and technical exchanges. A "Humanitarian and Other Fields" basket called for the freer flow of information, ideas, and people through travel, better access to media information, and reunification of families separated by the Cold War. A "Final Act" provided for monitoring observance of the agreements. The Soviet Union, Western Europeans, and United States were unhappy with some of the provisions but accepted the entire package to secure those items they considered most important.
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For Ford, Helsinki was a disaster. He had hoped to rejuvenate the SALT negotiations in private discussions with Brezhnev. In contrast to Vladivostok, however, their often angry exchanges produced nothing. Speaking to both Brezhnev and conservatives at home, he affirmed upon signing the CSCE agreements that the human rights provisions were for Americans "not clichés or empty phrases" but fundamental principles to which they were deeply devoted. Helsinki was warmly received in the Soviet Union and Western Europe but not in the United States. Before the meeting, conservatives had pleaded with Ford not to dignify it with his presence—even the
New York Times
had called the trip "misguided and empty."
⁴⁷
Upon his return, Eastern European ethnic groups, still an important voting bloc, condemned him for a Yalta-like "betrayal of Eastern Europe." Reagan insisted that all Americans should be "against it"; Jackson denounced "yet another example of the sort of one-sided agreement that has become the hallmark of the Nixon-Ford administrations" and warned that the human rights provisions were unenforceable.
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To Ford's dismay, members of his staff refused to defend Helsinki and sought to blame Kissinger. The effects of Helsinki were compounded later in the year when conservative critics twisted an informal, private explanation of U.S. Eastern European policy by Kissinger's deputy Helmut Sonnenfeldt into a so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine that, in Reagan's words, "put the seal of approval on the Red Army's World War II conquests."
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Instant appraisals of historical events are rarely on target. In this case, the attacks on Helsinki were also politically charged. In truth, the agreements so scorned in 1975 had the opposite effect of what was predicted. Instead of confirming Soviet control of Eastern Europe, they helped to undermine it and indeed eventually to bring about the fall of the USSR
itself. West Germany negotiated at Helsinki a seemingly innocuous provision that would facilitate the reunification of Germany. The CSCE agreements encouraged rather than stifled dissident movements in Eastern Europe; they gave the governments of these countries some room to maneuver against the USSR and the means to chip away at Soviet control. Ironically, Reagan, one of the most bitter critics of Helsinki, as president would use it to press the Soviets to live up to the human rights principles contained in basket three. Although Ford could see the future no better than his critics, he later boasted that an agreement so viciously maligned was the "spark" that helped bring about the "demise of the Soviet Union."
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Facing a stiff electoral challenge the following year, Ford set out after Helsinki to regain control of U.S. foreign policy, restore popular confidence in his leadership, and head off a possible conservative challenge from Reagan. In October 1975, in what came to be known as the "Halloween Day Massacre," he asked Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, anathema to party conservatives, to take himself off the ticket for 1976. He fired the arrogant and cantankerous Schlesinger, who had publicly questioned detente and fed information to conservative critics such as Jackson. He replaced Schlesinger with White House chief of staff Rumsfeld. CIA director William Colby, who had spilled the agency's beans at the Church Committee hearings, gave way to Texan George H. W. Bush. Kissinger's star had fallen sharply since Ford took office. To balance the firing of Schlesinger, the president on November 2, 1975, appointed Gen. Brent Scowcroft national security adviser, leaving a disgruntled and no longer Super-K holding only the portfolio of secretary of state.
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