Detente did not die with the end of Nixon’s presidency, but it was encountering stiffer opposition. Vice President Gerald Ford succeeded Nixon and vowed to continue the foreign policies lain down by Nixon and Kissinger. Kissinger remained secretary of state and national security adviser.
In the first few months of Ford’s presidency, he pressed forward with US-Soviet negotiations on strategic arms. The new president met Brezhnev at the Siberian city of Vladivostok in late November and early December 1974, and the two men promised to sign a SALT II agreement within a year. This treaty would limit each side’s nuclear delivery vehicles (ICBM’s, SLBMs, and long-range bombers) to 2,200. Ford told Brezhnev that a signed SALT II agreement before the 1976 election would strengthen detente and prevent "people such as Senator Jackson" fTom undercutting favorable trends in US-Soviet relations.556
But support for detente, diminishing in 1974, declined even more over the remainder of Ford’s term. A series of events at home and abroad undermined Ford’s public standing and seriously shook the confidence of administration officials. Opposition Democrats, already in the majority in both houses of Congress, made large gains in the congressional elections of November 1974. In 1975, the Ford administration was preoccupied with the deteriorating situation in Vietnam. In March, the armed forces of North Vietnam intensified an offensive against the South, and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam retreated in disarray from positions it held in the northern part of the country. In late April, North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front troops surrounded Saigon, forcing the last Americans to leave. On April 30, the Communist forces captured the presidential palace in Saigon and declared victory in the war. The mood in Washington was grim in the wake of the revolutionaries’ triumph in Vietnam. Philip Habib, one of Kissinger’s top deputies, said in May 1975 that long-time allies who had prospered under US military alliances and support "are all concerned that the U. S. shield does not provide them the protection they think is necessary for their own development. "557
For the remainder of 1975, the Ford administration became more confrontational toward the Soviet Union and its allies. In July, Kissinger insisted that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provide additional financial and military aid to the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), one of three armed factions trying to supplant the Portuguese authorities in that West African country. Kissinger advocated intervention in the Angolan civil war as a counter to the Soviet Union which supported the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a rival faction. Kissinger believed that the Soviets supported the MPLA because they felt emboldened by the American defeat in Vietnam. US intervention in Angola generated public fear ofinvolve-ment in another distant war, similar to Vietnam, and in December, Congress blocked additional CIA funding for the FNLA.
In the summer of 1975, Ford was criticized when he continued Nixon’s policy and did not ridicule the Soviets’ record on human rights. Ford declined to meet with expelled Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The novelist was widely admired in the United States for his vigorous condemnations of the Kremlin’s history of repression. Domestic foes of detente accused Ford of hurting the cause of human rights in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn then further eroded American support for detente when he denounced the upcoming CSCE meeting in Helsinki as a "betrayal of Eastern Europe."558
The Helsinki ceremony of August 2, 1975, at which representatives from thirty-five states in Europe and North America signed the Final Act of the CSCE, reflected the culmination of years of negotiations. The Soviets had originally proposed a meeting to resolve all disputes in Europe in the mid-1950s, and they agreed to US participation in the talks in the early 1970s. At the insistence of several Western European and neutral countries, the scope of the discussions expanded fTom traditional security concerns over borders and the use of force (what came to be known as Basket I of the Helsinki Final Act) to include trade and scientific cooperation (Basket II), and humanitarian and other fields (Basket III).
American foes of the Helsinki agreements did not like the Final Act’s recognition of prevailing territorial borders in Europe. Many Americans of Eastern European ancestry were fiercely anti-Communist and opposed to Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. They complained that the acknowledgment of current borders validated the 1940 Soviet occupation and annexation of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. These criticisms of the Helsinki Final Act made Ford’s trip to the conference unpopular, and he sought to recover by adopting a more confrontational stance toward the Soviet Union. When he spoke to the delegates there, he reversed Nixon’s practice of refraining from criticizing Soviet domestic policies. He looked directly at Brezhnev during his speech and insisted that the Soviets "realize the deep devotion of the American people and their government to human rights and fundamental freedoms."559
Still, Ford’s statements at Helsinki did not calm critics of CSCE. To Helsinki’s opponents, it seemed that the Final Act condemned the Eastern European and Baltic states to permanent domination by the Soviet Union. Senator Jackson predicted that the human rights provisions of Helsinki were "so imprecise and so hedged" that they would never be implemented. Former California governor Ronald Reagan, who was preparing to challenge Ford for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, asserted that "all Americans should be against" the Helsinki Final Act.560
The attacks on detente and on Kissinger as the architect of US foreign policy continued after Helsinki. Some of them came from within the administration. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger sided with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who argued that the arms-control agreements of recent years had left the United States in a militarily inferior position to that of the Soviet Union. In early November, Ford replaced Schlesinger as secretary of defense with White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. To assuage the concerns of Kissinger’s opponents, Ford replaced him as national security adviser. Kissinger remained secretary of state, but his authority was clearly diminished. Reagan continued to assail detente as a "one way street” and complained that "Henry Kissinger’s recent stewardship has coincided with the loss of U. S. military supremacy.”561 In February 1976, Ford explained that officials in his administration would no longer use the word "detente” to characterize US-Soviet relations.
Brezhnev did not visit the United States after the Vladivostok meeting of November 1974. Nor did the United States and the Soviet Union sign the SALT II Treaty by 1976, as they had promised at Vladivostok. Presidential politics interfered with further progress toward detente. The way in which Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger conducted detente became a contentious issue during the presidential election campaign of 1976. Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party’s candidate, assailed the three leaders for acquiescing to the Soviet Union’s mistreatment of its own citizens. Carter condemned Ford for declining to meet with Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 1975. Carter said that the Soviets had known what they wanted to achieve from detente, but "we have not known what we’ve wanted and we’ve been out-traded in almost every instance.”562 Ford blundered in a televised debate with Carter when the president, attempting to defend the Helsinki Final Act, denied that the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. The Democratic challenger retorted that he would like to see the president convince Hungarian-, Czech-, or Polish-Americans that their former homelands did not live under Soviet control. Carter defeated Ford in November 1976, and he owed his election in part to the public’s sense that detente gave unfair military advantages to the Soviet Union while betraying traditional American commitments to expand human rights abroad.
World History
