Penguin History of the United States of America (128 page)

But it was hardly possible that, in a society which was still so conservative
in many respects (though its dynamism made it also a perpetual fount of radical change), this spectacular transformation could be universally accepted. Too much change of too many kinds had already affronted too many Americans; things, they felt, had gone far enough. Prejudices of all kinds had their effect. There was much bitterness against the so-called youth culture, and as it became clear that the newest teenage generation was not going to give up such pleasures as pre-marital sex and smoking marijuana, the religious Right prepared for another battle. There was resentment between the classes, between city, suburb and country, between the races, between West Coast and East Coast and Middle West, between unbelievers, modern believers and fundamentalists. Above all, a great many women and men were simply not prepared to accept the feminist revolution if they could help it.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was one subject of battle – it finally lapsed in 1982, its supporters having narrowly failed to persuade the necessary number of state legislatures to endorse it – but abortion came to be the central issue, with repercussions far beyond the women’s movement. Perhaps it was not surprising: the anti-abortionists genuinely believed that abortion was a form of murder.
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They ignored the sorry medical record of the years when it was illegal (many doctors, familiar with the results of back-street abortions, had been early supporters of legalization). Their opponents believed that women should be free to choose; anyway, they had no choice but to fight back, if the whole women’s movement was not to be exposed as limited and ineffectual. There could be no compromise, for on both sides the question was seen as one of absolute rights, not of practicalities. Matters were not helped when the ‘antis’ began to turn to violence in their attempts to close down abortion clinics, and their opponents got Congress to strip them of their right to demonstrate near the clinics.

Those particular developments lay far in the future during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but intense pressure was applied to Congress, the courts, the political parties and the President. Carter, the very embodiment of the middle way, who liked to describe himself as an economic conservative and a liberal on social issues, found himself under assault from both sides, who despised his honestly expressed opinion: ‘I am personally opposed to abortion… I am opposed to a constitutional amendment to alter the Supreme Court’s decision [in
Roe
v.
Wade]
by prohibiting abortion or giving states local option authority… I am personally opposed to government spending for abortion services. However, as President, I will be bound by the courts.’
¹³
It is hard to see that such a sincere Southern Baptist could say more, and he would need the South (where the antis were numerous)
to be re-elected; on the other hand, he could not afford to alienate the women activists, now very strong in the Democratic party. At the Democratic convention in 1980, half the delegates were women; before it met, Eleanor Smeal, president of NOW, threatened to support an independent candidate unless the Democrats committed themselves both to making federal funds available for poor women wanting abortions, and to withhold party funds from candidates who did not support ERA: ‘We do not feel the commitment level of the past three and a half years has been strong enough to guarantee our support.’
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Carter might well feel aggrieved: he had supported ERA constantly and effectively, and had appointed more women to posts in the federal government than any of his predecessors. But he knew when he was beaten, and the Democratic platform of 1980 was much more radical than he, the candidate, would have liked. This helped to consolidate conservative opinion round the Republican candidacy of Ronald Reagan.

Abortion alone was not an issue which was going to determine who won the presidential election, but Carter’s inability to find an effective position was all too expressive of his central political weakness. It is tempting to say that he was too quiet and unassuming, when what America wanted was a bold leader. He was certainly no Pied Piper. Yet where the issues which at last destroyed him were concerned, he acted boldly and decidedly; too much so, perhaps.

Carter had come to power preaching a new kind of foreign policy, one which eschewed the cynicism (which they called realism) of Nixon and Kissinger, one which insisted on the importance and universality of human rights, one which, in accordance with Carter’s constant preferences, sought comprehensive, not piecemeal, solutions. It was a revival of Woodrow Wilson’s approach to diplomacy (though Carter never mentioned this predecessor, of whom he was a downmarket version). It was a noble project, but fraught with difficulties, and provoked the same sort of opposition as that which had defeated Wilson; but in the light of subsequent world history it may be seen as prophetic. Even at the time it had its successes. Unfortunately Carter, as with his domestic policies, wanted to have it both ways: as well as human rights he believed in containment, that is in the doctrine that the competition with the Soviet Union was the overriding concern of the United States, necessitating both a ‘forward’ foreign policy and heavy defence expenditure. This contradiction, blended with Carter’s own lack of judgement, was to bring his administration to disaster.

The contradiction was embodied in the rivalry between the Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, a veteran diplomatist and firm believer in the human rights policy, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser, a refugee intellectual of the Kissinger type (he was a Pole) with many of Kissinger’s attitudes and opinions. Had Carter been prepared to back either man firmly, or, failing that, to knock heads together until he was master,
his diplomacy might not have been such a failure (though it must be remembered that the times were such that US policy was bound to be beset with great difficulties). As it was, he did neither, and muddle became the administration’s keynote as it blundered from crisis to crisis.

Kissinger had not much overrated the importance of relations with the Soviet Union. In his view the USSR was a ‘mature’ power which had given up its ideological crusade; Washington could negotiate successfully with Moscow as issues arose. The Carter team was not so sure. Some of its members held that the Russians had never got over the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis, and had since 1962 made attaining military equality with the US their central objective; on secondary matters they were merely opportunists.
¹⁵
Others, led by Brzezinski, believed that the USSR was as intent as ever on extending its power and ideology. In practical consequences these opinions were not very different: both entailed watching the Soviet Union closely and renewing America’s military strength – defence expenditure increased steadily during the Carter years. But Carter’s central objective, to the degree that he had one, was to safeguard the peace of the world by negotiating arms reduction agreements with Russia, and that could only be achieved if the Americans and the Russians trusted each other. Unfortunately the Carter administration’s record might have been calculated to make the Russians suspicious. The Helsinki accords and the human rights policy stimulated resistance in the Soviet Union to communist policies: in particular, large numbers of Jews demanded the right to emigrate to Israel, and when this was refused they staged protests which caught the world’s attention. To build on one of the Nixon administration’s few unquestionable successes, and also in pursuit of that old mirage, the balance of power, Carter pursued negotiations with China that in 1979 culminated in the exchange of ambassadors with Peking; Russia thought that her two most dangerous enemies were ganging up on her. And the Soviet Union could not resist trying to extend its influence into Africa, supporting the revolutionary Mengistu regime of Ethiopia in its war with Somalia. Carter in his turn grew distrustful. Then, at Christmas 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, and Carter said that his opinion of the Russians had changed more dramatically in a week than it had in ‘even the previous two and a half years’. The invasion, he announced, was ‘the most serious threat to peace since World War II’ (a quite preposterous statement). He resorted to dramatic action. Sales of American grain to the USSR were suspended, America withdrew from the forthcoming Moscow Olympic Games, registration for the draft was reintroduced (but Congress rejected the President’s proposal to register women as well as men), a proposed arms limitation treaty was withdrawn from consideration by the Senate, the defence budget was sharply increased, and the independence of ‘the Persian Gulf region’ was declared to be a vital interest of the United States (because of all that oil). This sabre-rattling
only had four disadvantages: it took no account of the fact that Afghanistan had been a Soviet satellite long before the invasion;
¹⁶
it ignored the likelihood (quickly becoming actuality) that the Soviet Union would find that its Afghan adventure was a cruel, unmanageable quagmire, like America’s war in Vietnam; it did nothing to free Afghanistan; and it was a total reversal to the purest Cold War attitudes. Carter does not seem to have remembered the restraint that the Soviet Union had shown during the Vietnamese imbroglio; but then, election year had begun in the United States, and his actions improved his standing in the opinion polls. Carter was sufficiently a politician to think that ample justification.

His behaviour raises certain questions. He had swung over entirely to the containment view; in part, perhaps, because that was the only policy which the Washington establishment was able to execute, or even understand. But in part his excitability was a personal trait, reflecting both his evangelical outlook on the world and his taste for bold, if inappropriate, action. He was not by nature a quietist: he had to school himself to practice patience. He lost his cool again, even more disastrously, in the affair of the Tehran hostages.

The Shah of Iran, a long-standing client of the US, was overthrown by his discontented subjects in January 1979. He was replaced by a so-called ‘Islamic Republic’, which was really a dictatorship of clergy, dominated by the Ayatollah Khomeini, an elderly provincial bigot well characterized by a British journal as ‘an old man deaf to pity’. Khomeini and his militants were incompetent at everything except holding on to power, which they did by the usual means of revolutionary terror; before long they blundered into a long war with Iraq which they ought to have won, or at any rate which they ought not to have lost; but lose it they did, after suffering stupendous battlefield casualties because tactics were deemed un-Islamic. Washington should have been able to handle such an opponent, but it turned out that nothing had been learned from the Vietnam experience (at any rate, not by Jimmy Carter). When, during a characteristic revolutionary tumult, a mob overran the US embassy in Tehran and took the occupants prisoner, Carter tried to retaliate dramatically, without considering that in a game of poker it is unwise to raise the stakes when you have a poor hand, unless you are a master bluffer, which he was not. He expelled Iranian students from the United States and froze Iranian assets there. He stopped purchases of Iranian oil. He wrote off the Ayatollah as ‘apparently deranged’, and referred to the captives ceaselessly as hostages (at this unhappy time the practice of kidnapping Westerners was all too common in the Middle East). He did nothing to calm, everything to increase, the natural alarm and rage of the American people. The Iranians, seeing how highly he valued
the prisoners, decided to extort a high price for their release: they demanded, for instance, that the exiled Shah be returned to them for trial and execution, which the Americans could not in honour or prudence possibly agree to. So Carter, over the objections of Secretary Vance, who therefore resigned, sent an airborne force to rescue the hostages. The expedition was calamitously bungled; eight Americans died when their helicopters crashed into each other on the ground. The combination of the embargo on Iranian oil with America’s still-increasing demand for energy meant that there was a second ‘oil shock’: energy prices had already risen by 25 per cent in 1979; in 1980 they rose by 80 per cent. Unemployment and inflation soared, and suddenly there was a deficit in the federal budget of $74 billion.

It is hardly surprising that Carter was not re-elected, the first sitting president to be denied a second term since that other earnest engineer, Herbert Hoover (his critics in the Democratic party had taken to referring to ‘Jimmy Hoover’); but he might not have lost so badly if election day had not happened to be the first anniversary of the Iranian hostage-taking. The people turned out and delivered a landslide for Reagan and the Republicans: Carter carried only five states and the District of Columbia, and the Democrats lost control of the Senate for the first time since 1955. The hostages continued in captivity until the very day of Reagan’s inauguration, when the patient diplomacy which Cyrus Vance had always favoured finally secured their freedom in return for the unfreezing of the Iranian assets.

Carter’s presidency must be reckoned a failure. His successes were few, and not always worth the political price he paid for them. As an outsider he saw clearly certain changes that he wished to bring about in the way that Washington did things, but he did not understand the system well enough to go the best way about achieving this. But his central failure was political. He wanted to move the Democratic party to the right, and could not understand, let alone respect, those many Democrats who resisted the idea: ‘My main political problem was with the so-called liberal wing of the Democratic party,’ he complained in 1981; but without those liberals he would have fared far worse than he did. He had a tin ear for the music of American politics. ‘I have no new dream to set forth today,’ he remarked in his inaugural address, and it was all too true. His message was not what the American people wanted to hear. Their native optimism was fundamentally intact, in spite of the Vietnam years; they did not want to be told that ‘we cannot afford to live beyond our means’. They preferred to think that the march to the Big Rock-Candy Mountain could be resumed at once, and their new leader had promised that it would be, just as soon as the dismal Democrats were out of office.