A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter

Scott Kaufman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118907580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

With 30 historiographical essays by established and rising scholars, this Companion is a comprehensive picture of the presidencies and legacies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

• Examines important national and international events during the 1970s, as well as presidential initiatives, crises, and legislation
• Discusses the biography of each man before entering the White House, his legacy and work after leaving office, and the lives of Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and their families
• Covers key themes and issues, including Watergate and the pardon of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, neoconservatism and the rise of the New Right, and the Iran hostage crisis
• Incorporates presidential, diplomatic, military, economic, social, and cultural history
• Uses the most recent research and newly released documents from the two Presidential Libraries and the State Department

Chapter One
Détente’s Limits
Caught Between Cooperation and Confrontation

Vanessa Walker

The United States entered the 1970s with an international status significantly different than that which it had held a generation earlier. At the start of the post-war era, Washington possessed unsurpassed military and economic might alongside significant political clout. By the 1970s, that standing faced a multitude of challenges. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of US troops found themselves mired in a war lacking clear strategic objectives to defend the abstraction of US credibility as much as an unviable South Vietnamese government. Western Europe and Japan had recovered from the ravages of the world’s last global conflict, had grown more powerful militarily, and had started to contest America’s supremacy diplomatically and economically. The Soviet Union, while not posing an economic threat to Washington, had developed an atomic arsenal on par with that of America. Communist China too had begun to demonstrate its growing power on the world stage, threatening to fight the United States if American troops invaded North Vietnam and testing its first atomic bomb in 1964.

US officials, led by President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor—and later secretary of state—Henry Kissinger, sought to address these new realities by trying to implement a modus operandi in the US–Soviet relationship that would reduce tensions (and costs), while China, Japan, and Western Europe played an enlarged (though still subordinate) role. Although Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in developing a détente with the Soviet Union, that policy had its limits. Moreover, by the time the president left the Oval Office in disgrace as a result of the Watergate scandal, détente showed serious signs of weakness.

Détente

Although scholars have credited the Nixon administration with establishing détente with the Soviet Union, the idea of a more cordial relationship was not, as Wilfried Loth (2002) and Edward H. Judge and John W. Langdon point out, a new idea. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s had taken some steps to ameliorate superpower tensions, but with limited success. Nor had much progress taken place under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev. “By the time Nixon came into office, then,” write Judge and Langdon, “little real headway had been made” (Judge and Langdon, 1996: 212).

The conditions for achieving a true détente had changed by the late 1960s. Superpower tensions had eased for a time after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the United States, the so-called “Cold War consensus” had begun to break down, and Americans increasingly questioned whether it made sense for their country to make such an open-ended commitment to containing communism globally. Nixon agreed with this sentiment, declaring in what became known as the “Nixon Doctrine” of July 1969 that it was time America’s allies did more to defend themselves. Furthermore, there were now in the White House officials who appeared determined to play down ideology in favor of a balance-of-power concept aimed at maintaining world stability. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States, but it did not want to see the nuclear arms race get out of control. Additionally, the relationship between Moscow and its one-time ally, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had soured to the point that in 1969, the two nations engaged in military skirmishes along their border. Finally, the Soviet economy had begun to languish; Western trade and technology could assist the Kremlin in turning that situation around (Judge and Langdon, 1996).

To assume, however, that détente was solely a superpower construct would not be correct. Ralph Levering writes that “the most important agreements” between Moscow and Washington in the late 1960s and early 1970s “involved lessening tensions in Europe, stabilizing the arms race, and increasing US–Soviet trade. In the first area, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt took the lead and the Nixon administration, despite some misgivings, followed” (Levering, 1994: 125). Brandt, who assumed his country’s leadership position ten months after Nixon’s inauguration, rejected his predecessors’ call for unifying noncommunist West Germany with its communist neighbor, East Germany; Brandt realized that that goal was premature to pursue. Instead, he promoted Ostpolitik, which called for improving economic and cultural relations between East and West. Between 1969 and 1971, he signed nonaggression pacts with the Soviet Union and Poland, as well as the Berlin Accords, which guaranteed West Germans access to West Berlin. That at first the US government looked upon Brandt’s machinations with suspicion has been addressed by a number of authors. Dana Allin comments that Kissinger feared Ostpolitik could fail, allowing “the Communist world [to] wind up in the stronger position” (Allin, 1997: 39); this point is seconded by Holger Klitzing (2009). But, writes Jean-Francis Juneau (2011), the Nixon administration could not stop Brandt without deleteriously affecting US–West German relations. Instead, the White House did its best to use Ostpolitik to support its own vision of détente.

The Nixon–Kissinger vision of détente focused more heavily upon arms control (Dockrill and Hopkins, 2006). In June 1969, the president sent his secretary of state, William Rogers, to Moscow, stating that the United States was prepared to open Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks, which had first been proposed by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. It would take three of years of negotiations before the superpowers signed SALT I, which froze until 1977 the number of missile launchers both countries could possess. The superpowers also signed the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which restricted the United States and Soviet Union to two antiballistic missile systems each for an unlimited duration.

Additionally, the superpowers promised to hold a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Long a goal of the Kremlin, the CSCE would bring together the United States and numerous European powers and, Moscow hoped, would lead to agreements that would sanction the existing borders in Europe. In so doing, the Soviet Union would obtain recognition for the territory it had gained from World War II and, in turn, greater international legitimacy.

The Rapprochement with China

One of the key reasons for the breakthrough in 1972 on arms control talks with the Soviet Union was the changing nature of US relations with communist China. Sino-American relations had been strained since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 won a two-decade-long civil war against the noncommunist Kuomintang (KMT). Washington refused to recognize the new leadership in Beijing, fought against Chinese and North Korean military forces in the Korean War, and imposed an embargo on trade with the PRC. Simultaneously, the United States offered economic and military aid to the KMT leadership, which had fled to the island of Taiwan, and successfully protected Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations, arguing that the KMT and not the CCP was the rightful representative of China. The PRC charged Washington with supporting a government that did not represent the Chinese people and which had situated itself on an island that rightfully belonged to the mainland.

Even before becoming president, Nixon had expressed the need to reconsider the United States’ China policy, and he did just that after entering the White House. He relaxed the embargo, began referring to communist China by its official name, acquiesced to having the PRC rather than Taiwan represent China in the United Nations, and sent secret backchannel messages through third parties to the CCP’s leadership indicating his desire for better ties. The PRC responded in kind. This back-and-forth culminated in Nixon’s trip to Beijing in February 1972. There, he and Kissinger held talks with the PRC’s leadership, including Premier Mao Zedong and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai. Afterward, the two countries issued the Shanghai Communiqué, in which they pledged to improve economic and cultural contacts, and to seek a normalization of relations. Although the two countries established liaison offices prior to Nixon’s departure from office, formal normalization had to wait until 1979.

There are a large number of works on Sino-American relations that include the change in policy toward China that began in the late 1960s. Focusing solely on the connection between US public opinion and America’s China policy, Leonard Kusnitz (1984) finds that Nixon’s decision to seek better ties with Beijing diverged from public sentiment and lacked popular support. Kusnitz’s work, which does not use presidential archives or the National Archives, overlooks the complex interplay between policymakers and public opinion, with the former at times shaping the latter. Guangqiu Xu’s Congress and the US–China Relationship (2007) concludes that members of Congress had a significant impact on US China policy, even if at times he presents their diverse opinions and positions with an overly unified voice.

In his path-breaking book Friends and Enemies (1990), Gordon Chang demonstrates that rather than seeing the relationship between China and the Soviet Union as monolithic, US officials from 1949 on believed it was possible to find a way to drive wedges between the two communist superpowers. That effort culminated with Nixon’s junket to Beijing. Victor S. Kaufman (2001) agrees with Chang insofar as driving wedges, but adds that Nixon’s trip to China was facilitated by the stance toward Beijing adopted by President Johnson. Along similar lines, Evelyn Goh (2004) asserts that nearly a decade before Nixon became president, US officials had begun a reassessment of US policy toward the PRC; hence, Nixon’s rapprochement with China was not necessarily something new. Zhang Baijia and Jia Qingguo (2001) and Steven M. Goldstein (2001) take the story even earlier, finding that negotiations which began between US and Chinese officials in 1955 paved the way for the Nixon–Kissinger meetings nearly two decades later. This assessment is supported by Yafeng Xia’s (2006) excellent work on the same. In an exhaustive, blow-by-blow account, S. Mahmud Ali (2005) addresses the collaboration that took place between the United States and China starting in the early 1970s. Much more concise is Chris Tudda’s (2012) description of the events leading up to Nixon’s February trip. Though he relies heavily on English-language sources, his use of the recently declassified Nixon tapes adds value to his work. Michael Schaller’s (2002) short but excellent survey of Sino-American relations is also of value in interpreting and contextualizing these events.

A number of these aforementioned monographs are particularly useful because they include recently released Chinese documents. The same is true of the work of Chen Jian, whose Mao’s China and the Cold War provides new insights on rapprochement from the PRC’s perspective. Chen concludes that Mao’s desire to improve relations with the United States stemmed not just from the threat posed by the Soviet Union, but also the “fading status of Mao’s continuous revolution” (Chen, 2001: 239). Using the hazard posed by “US imperialism” (242), Mao had justified this “continuous revolution,” of which part was the Cultural Revolution, which the Chinese leader had initiated in the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution’s purpose had been to eliminate Mao’s opponents and “mak[e] his power and authority absolute” (244), but it had not gone as well as intended. By 1969, Mao had decided to bring an end to this “continuous revolution” and to seek a foreign policy success that would “boost [his] reputation and authority” (270). Here too, Mao saw rapprochement with the United States as important. How much of a role Mao himself played in the negotiations that led to improved Sino-American ties from the late 1960s into the 1970s remains a matter of debate, as evidenced in essays by Li Jie (2005) and Gong Li (2005).

On the president’s trip to Beijing, there is no work better than Margaret Macmillan’s Nixon and Mao (2007). The strength of her book is less her conclusions and more her ability to weave the primary and secondary literature into an enjoyable read. Both the Americans and Chinese had a desire to improve ties, she concludes. For Nixon and Kissinger, developing a relationship with China would permit the United States to balance Soviet power and convince Moscow to seek a détente with Washington, and further establish Nixon’s credentials as a statesman, which could help him win re-election. To Beijing, a presidentia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Détente’s Limits
• Chapter Two: Beyond Narcissism
• Chapter Three: Gerald Ford
• Chapter Four: From Plains to Atlanta, 1924–1974
• Chapter Five: The Presidency and the Pardon
• Chapter Six: Gerald R. Ford’s Domestic Policy
• Chapter Seven: US Intelligence Agencies during the Ford Years
• Chapter Eight: Détente’s Disintegration, Neoconservatism, and the Ford Presidency
• Chapter Nine: Ford and the Armed Forces
• Chapter Ten: Gerald R. FordThe Press, Popular Culture, and Politics
• Chapter Eleven: Ford and Ford
• Chapter Twelve: Just a Caretaker?
• Chapter Thirteen: Politics and the Public Mood in 1976
• Chapter Fourteen: Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Presidential Campaign
• Chapter Fifteen: The Transition
• Chapter Sixteen: Carter, the Soviet Union, Détente, and SALT II
• Chapter Seventeen: Trilateralism
• Chapter Eighteen: From East–West to North–South
• Chapter Nineteen: Carter’s Domestic Dilemmas, 1977–1978
• Chapter Twenty: Mrs. President?
• Chapter Twenty-One: President Carter and the Press
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Jimmy Carter, Congress, and the Supreme Court
• Chapter Twenty-Three: 1979: Year of Crises
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The Armed Forces during the Carter Years
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Center of the Carter Conundrum
• Chapter Twenty-Six: The Election of 1980
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Get Carter
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Post-Presidential Years of Gerald R. Ford
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Presidency Lost, a Life Gained
• Chapter Thirty: Agendas, Speakers, and Spokesmen
• Index
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