RUN LIKE REAGAN, GOVERN LIKE NIXON:

Our Worst Ex-President (Joshua Muravchik, February 2007, Commentary)

[H]e took pains to position himself somewhat to the dovish side of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hero of the Democratic hawks. In particular, he denounced the Jackson-Vanik amendment that linked trade privileges for the Soviet Union to freedom of emigration. In a 1975 speech blaming Jackson for a Soviet crackdown against emigration, Carter sounded a theme that echoes in some of his pronouncements to this day:

I think that the so-called "Jackson Amendment" was ill-advised. . . . Russia is a proud nation, like we are, and if Russian Communist leaders had passed a resolution saying that they were not going to do this or that if we didn't do something domestically, we would have reacted adversely to it.

As this episode suggests, Carter was also initially cold to the subject of human rights. His 1975 book, Why Not the Best?, issued as a launching pad for his presidential campaign, makes no mention of it. Nor did he utter a word about human rights during the 1976 primaries. It was only in the course of hammering out the Democratic party's platform that his interest was kindled. By that time, with the nomination in hand, Carter's overriding goal was to unite his fissiparous party for the general election. With the Jacksonites animated against Communist regimes and the McGovernites against rightist ones, a possible common ground emerged. As Carter's chief speech writer, Patrick Anderson, explained, human rights "was seen politically as a no-lose issue. Liberals liked human rights because it involved political freedom and getting liberals out of jail in dictatorships, and conservatives liked it because it involved criticisms of Russia."

Not only was the subject a common denominator among Democrats, it helped Carter to put his Republican opponent, incumbent President Gerald Ford, on the defensive about the "realist" policies of his administration and especially of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. As the New Yorker's Elizabeth Drew reported: "Human rights was an issue with which you could bracket Kissinger and Ford on both sides. . . . [I]t was a beautiful campaign issue, an issue on which there was a real degree of public opinion hostile to the administration."

On Kissinger's advice, Ford had refused to receive the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Soviet dissident, upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union. In an ironic reprise of his gubernatorial campaign promise to invite George Wallace to speak to the Georgia legislature, Carter now announced that he would invite the Russian writer to the White House. He also caught Ford in a fatal gaffe when, in their televised debate on foreign policy, the incumbent declared that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." Ford probably meant that he would not recognize Soviet domination there, but whatever he had in mind, he sounded hopelessly naive, and Carter pounced. The effect was that by election day, Carter was positioned as tougher on Communism than Ford.

But just as he had once reversed himself dramatically on the subject of race, so now, upon his election as President, Carter began at once to lay the groundwork for foreign policies that were the opposite of those he had led the voters to believe he intended to pursue. This was made manifest even before his inauguration as he went about staffing his administration. George McGovern was quoted as saying that most of Carter's State Department appointees were "quite close to those I would have made myself." Meanwhile, Carter excluded the Scoop Jackson wing of the party almost entirely from his administration. His surprising tilt away from anti-Communism was made explicit in his first major foreign-policy address when he proclaimed: "we are now free of th[e] inordinate fear of Communism. . . . We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water."

Actually, the tragedy of the Cold War is that we never used fire.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2007 8:38 AM