President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  This was the antithesis of the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger concept of balance of power as the organizing principle of world order, a policy based not on emotion or morality but on national interest, and insisting on nonintervention in the domestic affairs of another state. It was therefore in the interest of the United States during the Cold War to build alliances with leaders who were bulwarks against Communism—and if this meant military dictatorships in Latin America or apartheid regimes in southern Africa, based on brutal domestic repression, so be it.

  With the Soviet Union, Kissinger pursued détente—a French word implying a relaxation of tension—to establish a productive working relationship; the internal affairs of the Soviet Union were not our business. Well-known human rights abuses in the USSR, specifically concerning the emigration of Soviet Jews, lay outside the Nixon-Kissinger purview, even to a shocking degree. In a recently disclosed White House tape recording, Nixon and his secretary of state were speaking on March 1, 1973, just after a visit by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who made a strong pitch for the cause of Soviet Jewry. Nixon, expressing admiration for her, says to Kissinger that the treatment of Soviet Jews is “none of our business,” to which Kissinger agreed: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy.” Then with exaggeration to make his point, Kissinger says, “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” “I know,” Nixon responded, “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”4

  I know Kissinger well, greatly respect him, and believe that with his record of helping save Israel from defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and his own background as a German Jewish refugee, such talk should not be taken literally. But the exchange reveals a mind-set: The internal actions of states, however repressive, do not count; what matters is only their external conduct. It is that policy Jimmy Carter ran against in his presidential campaign, and he meant to replace it with a human rights policy. At the same time, given Moscow’s aggressive behavior, it proved exceedingly difficult to preserve the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger détente with Russia, even though Carter recognized it could create a more tranquil world.

  A milestone upon which Carter would build his global human rights policy and effectively use it against the Soviet Union was the Helsinki Accords of 1975, negotiated by Kissinger, and his boss, President Gerald Ford. From the Soviet standpoint, this agreement among European and American nations was important for implicitly blessing their domination of Eastern Europe, by affirming Europe’s postwar borders. However, to gain Western support, the Soviets had to make promises on human rights that they thought they could quietly discard later. These were contained in a section called Basket III, involving freedom of speech and the free movement of people and ideas across borders. Although no one realized it at the time, this marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. The Helsinki Accords laid the groundwork and the legal foundation for negotiation with Moscow on abuses within the USSR’s own national borders, of which the Carter administration took full advantage. Although the Soviets formally refused to recognize it, the fact that the Accords had been established as an international norm put significant pressure on Brezhnev to concede to internal reforms. Helsinki Accord monitoring groups cropped up all over the USSR and Eastern Europe in order to hold the Communist governments accountable.

  VANCE VS. BRZEZINSKI

  Carter’s ability to make human rights a major part of his foreign policy critically depended upon his two top foreign-policy advisers. Cyrus Vance, his secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his White House national security adviser. As I had expressed to Carter during the transition, while each was highly able and agreed on many foreign-policy goals, putting them together on the same team was a mistake, because of their major differences in temperament and worldview, particuarly on the Soviet Union.

  Carter’s relationship with Brzezinski was long standing, through his initiative in appointing then governor Carter to the prestigious Trilateral Commission, providing him his first exposure to the foreign-policy elite, and his major help on the election campaign. Every day in the Carter White House officially began with Brzezinski’s 7:30 a.m. foreign-policy briefing, and he also saw the president several times a day, more than any other aide. The president felt nearly as close to Zbig as to Jody Powell and Ham Jordan.5 Brzezinski became his most regular opponent on the White House tennis court, and the Carters and their daughter, Amy, occasionally visited Brzezinski at his home in northern Virginia for quiet dinners with his wife, Emilie, a talented sculptor. Their daughter, Mika, who was close in age to Amy, grew up to be a star television commentator, and their two sons followed in their father’s footsteps in government—Mark, as an ambassador, and Ian as a senior Pentagon official.

  Carter described himself as an “eager student” of Brzezinski’s, particularly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But Carter recognized his weaknesses as well as his strengths. During the campaign “Zbig put together a constant barrage of new ideas and suggestions, and 90 percent would have to be rejected,” Carter said with some exaggeration. He also said that Brzezinski “was always wanting to go somewhere as an emissary, and very seldom did I let him do it. But when he went, he did a good job.”6

  Zbig also was always eager to be the administration’s public face on foreign policy, and liked going on the Sunday talk shows or giving background briefings to the press. Because of the enormous amount of time they spent together, Carter found Brzezinski’s ideas compatible with his own on many issues, but saw his rhetoric as too provocative and his policy as too hard-line about the Soviet Union.

  In many ways the president’s relationship with Vance was the mirror image. While he developed a personal relationship with Vance and his wife, Gay, through dinners in the White House family quarters, where they were joined by Rosalynn, Vance was a diplomat who had a vast department to operate and traveled abroad frequently as the nation’s premier diplomat. Vance was cautious, perhaps to a fault, while Brzezinski was voluble and aggressive. Philosophically, Carter told me that he was a kindred spirit of Vance, whom he described as a “kind of peacenik” like himself, seeking nonconfrontational diplomatic solutions to such critical problems as saving the hostages in Iran. While he said Vance was “no shrinking violet, when we had a controversial policy to be presented to the public, Cy didn’t want to do it.”7

  Carter found Vance valuable in “his orthodox, careful, evolutionary plodding attitude and demeanor,” while Brzezinski’s attitude was more what he wanted from an adviser, in “giving me a whole range of new ideas and letting me sift through them to see if they were good or bad.” Vance was also “extremely protective of the State Department” and would frequently come to see Carter if he felt Brzezinski or his staff was usurping the department’s authority or his influence.8 Carter told me that on four occasions Vance threatened to resign because of some slight, often by Brzezinski. But he saw Vance as a stabilizing factor, a “kind of anchor or screen to hold us back from doing things that were ill-advised; to point out all the reasons why something wouldn’t work; and to make sure we didn’t take any radical steps.”9

  But Brzezinski was equally protective of his turf and position. One story he shared with me speaks volumes about his relations with Vance, who he felt had a “kind of compulsive anxiety that I was playing more of a role than he felt I should be.” On his first day in his office, security officers showed Brzezinski a telephone line he was to answer only when the president called. Then they showed him another special line that would allow the secretary of state to ring him directly in the same way, while other cabinet officers, including the secretary of defense and CIA director, could reach him only through his secretary. Brzezinski asked the security people whether this special line would also ring straight through to Vance if he initiated the call. No, they said, like all the others, any call from Brzezinski would first go through Vance’s secretary. “Yank it out,” he ordered. “I’m
working for the president, not for Vance.”10

  Tensions between the White House and the State Department were nothing new to the Carter administration and persist in every administration down to today. But here disagreements between the two focused mainly on the Soviet Union, which was the central preoccupation of the administration’s foreign policy. Vance was a patrician New York lawyer, who felt problems were best examined and solved on a case-by-case basis. The product of the Eastern foreign-policy establishment, the secretary of state had served in senior positions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was handsome, elegantly turned out, and peered intelligently over half-glasses, regarding a disordered world in a methodical manner, with a large ingrained State Department bureaucracy to help him manage it.

  Vance was neither ignorant of nor naive about aggressive Soviet actions or the massive buildup of the Soviet military-industrial complex, of which Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was a product. But for Vance the Soviets were a problem to be managed separately within the framework of international affairs, and not as America’s main adversary, employing diplomacy to maintain détente as best he could, given Carter’s human rights campaign, which he fully supported. He argued that Carter should seek increased cooperation with the Soviets and find areas of agreement such as nuclear arms reduction, unlinking other problems from arms-control negotiations.

  * * *

  Zbig saw linkages between events that were not obvious to others, and was a sharp bureaucratic infighter for his views. Brilliant and creative, he was an expert on Soviet policy, and his knowledge of history never let him forget how often his ancestral country had been dismembered and occupied by Russia, most recently in the Cold War. He became increasingly concerned about the political implications of growing Soviet military power and feared that Moscow would be tempted to use it either to exploit turbulence in the Third World or to impose its will in a political contest with the United States.

  Zbig constantly urged the president to reject Vance’s concept of separate tracks; he wanted to make Moscow pay a price, by linking its misconduct to normalizing relations with China or delaying completion of SALT. Philosophically the president was closer to Vance’s than to Brzezinski’s line, and tacked away from his secretary of state and decisively aligned himself with Brzezinski only when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, as Carter entered the final year of his presidency. It was this shift, in my opinion, that finally led Vance to resign, and not the mission to rescue the Iranian hostages, which he opposed; that was the last straw of many.

  Zbig maintained that cooperation in the face of Soviet aggression served only to make Carter look indecisive and that the Soviets needed to be stopped in their tracks. He was deeply suspicious of the Soviets; gravely concerned at their major military buildup; and eager to counter their aggressive export of revolution in Africa, through their Cuban proxies, in such far-flung places as Angola, Namibia, and Ethiopia, and their support of Western European Communist parties. He believed that opposing them externally would weaken them internally, and told the president that the Soviets were engaged in a “selective détente,” only where and when it suited them. The proper response, Brzezinski advised Carter, was not to undermine cooperative relationships “but to increase the costs of Soviet behavior in the malignant category.”11 In the briefest form, this meant continued insistence on human rights as part of the ideological competition, heightening the cost of Soviet interventionism, and more affirmative political initiatives in areas of Soviet sensitivity, such as China. So for Zbig, human rights was not mainly a handmaiden of peace, but a weapon in the Cold War.

  Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who worked closely with both Vance and Brzezinski, had a keen analysis of their differences. Vance, he told me, “took a much less confrontational view of the world,” and was a “mediator, a negotiator, and not a confrontational person.” By contrast, “Zbig is an activist, who sometimes delights in confronting people, not so much on a personal basis, but in intellectual terms, and in deliberately saying shocking things.” From Brown’s perspective, Zbig “saw himself as an independent player, not either an alter ego for the president or a sage counselor, but as an intiator of ideas.” They not only held different views on the Soviet Union, but Vance “had a much friendlier view of the third world than Zbig did.”12

  Carter nevertheless felt that the contest between the two was greatly exaggerated. The Friday-morning foreign-policy breakfasts with the president, Vance, Mondale, Defense Secretary Brown, and Brzezinski were a forum for the president to make decisions after full deliberation, and for Zbig to record and circulate them for comment. In addition, Vance and Brzezinski met weekly to thrash out differences, although Vance had a less charitable view. Vance sent Carter a detailed note of developments around the world every night, and Zbig sent a weekly report, often with biting comments. (I have used both of these for the foreign-policy chapters of this book.)

  There are two types of White House national security advisers. In the Kissinger-Brzezinski model the adviser organizes interagency meetings and decisions for the president, but strongly advocates his own ideas. To my mind Brzezinski ran a fair and transparent decision-making process but brought along his own strong views. Brown, for example, never felt Brzezinski suppressed his recommendations.13 The other model is best exemplified by Brent Scowcroft, President Ford’s national security adviser, who saw his role as a coordinator, a synthesizer of inevitable interagency disagreements, but not a forceful advocate. Of course it would have been hard for him to act otherwise with Kissinger also serving as Ford’s secretary of state.

  THE PERSECUTIONS OF SAKHAROV AND SHARANSKY

  Ultimately the split between Vance and Brzezinski gave a Janus-like quality to the Carter administration’s Soviet policy. The former governor of Georgia had not brought a strong worldview to the White House, so he tried to extract the best from his principal advisers and synthesize it, an almost impossible task. Carter appreciated hearing two different sides of an issue, and often believed that both of his advisers’ views had merit. He saw himself as at once a moralist and a realist, and saw no inconsistency between the two positions. In his dealings with the Soviets, Carter agreed with Vance that cooperation was key. However, he also accepted some of Brzezinski’s ideas. In a commencement speech at Notre Dame after only four months in office, he tried to synthetize the elements of a new foreign policy, with human rights as the fundamental tenet, while taking elements from Vance and Brzezinski. “I believe in détente with the Soviet Union,” he proclaimed, but at the same time said he hoped to persuade the Soviet Union that it could not impose its system upon other countries—as Cuban troops in Africa were doing at that moment.

  He was trying to lead public opinion to accept a new strategic nuclear arms agreement with the Soviets, SALT II, while at the same time publicly excoriating Moscow for aggressive military activities in Africa. Carter would later write that he rejected the notion of a forced choice “between idealism and realism, or between morality and exertion of power.”14 The subtlety of this was too much to send a clear message to either the American heartland or the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin.

  Yet Carter’s most controversial line at Notre Dame proved to his conservative critics that he was simply naive about the USSR. In glorifying the virtues of democracy and pointing out that people in India, Portugal, Spain, and Greece had turned their backs on dictatorship within the past few years, he said: “Being confident in our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that’s being changed” [emphasis added].15 Zbig played a major role in drafting that speech, and agreed the charge of naïveté was undeserved. He later told me “Frankly, I think he was right. Communism was a rotten theory which was already declining, and he deserves credit for saying it, and no one should apologize for that; we shouldn’t be fearful of it because it’s a rotten theory. And we have a better one, human rights, and he was right.”16
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  In retrospect Defense Secretary Harold Brown saw the dangers of such rhetoric. He told me that “Jimmy Carter is a do-gooder, you know, and that’s praise, that’s not criticism. I think that the more he allowed his own personality and personal attitudes toward what’s right and wrong in dealing with the world to be seen, the more he was seen as a wimp, both domestically and by foreign leaders,”17 however unfairly. More broadly Zbig warned the president at the end of 1978 that, almost two years into his presidency, “we have not dispelled the notion that we are amateurish and disorganized and that our policies are uncertain and irresolute.” He saw no remedy short of a “significant shake-up” in the State and Defense Departments and in his own NSC.18

  I believe that Carter’s human rights policy as applied to the Soviet Union gave the United States for the first time an ideological weapon to compete worldwide against the Soviet’s tired cry of the international class struggle; and that it began to create fissures in the Soviet Union and its empire that eventually led to its implosion. Far from being a weak and feckless approach to the USSR, it was tougher in some respects than the realpolitik that looked away from Moscow’s repressive policies to preserve relations under détente. Emphasizing human rights attacked the Communists in their most vulnerable spot—mistreatment of their own citizens—and helped save the lives of prodemocracy dissidents, as well as promote the freedom of an unprecedented number of Jews to leave the Soviet Union.

  * * *

  We would not have to wait long before the first test came, and it was dramatic. As soon as Carter took office a wave of human rights abuses swept the Soviet Union, perhaps as a warning and a test. Andrei Sakharov, a renowned nuclear physicist and guiding figure in the Soviet nuclear weapons program, had become a human rights activist. This earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, which the Soviet authorities would not allow him to receive in person. He was attacked by the Soviet press, and his apartment was ransacked. His equally courageous activist wife, Yelena Booner, who founded the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976, was subject to constant harassment. Both would eventually be imprisoned. Russia’s own monitors of compliance with its Helsinki pledge were also harassed, and several other prominent dissidents were arrested.