American Experiment (380 page)

The President saw the two men as balancing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but instead of moving steadily between them, he followed a zigzag path. His aim was still a summit meeting with the Russians for a climactic effort to achieve a second SALT agreement. During 1978, however, playing the “China card” in a manner tantamount to playing with
fire, he allowed Brzezinski to journey to China, where the security adviser urged the not unwilling Chinese to step up their diplomatic and political moves against Moscow. The morbidly distrustful Russians suspected that the Yankees might sell “defensive weapons” to the Chinese.

The summit was further delayed while Carter amid intense publicity received and entertained Deng Xiaoping at the White House at the end of January 1979, only a few weeks after Washington broke formal diplomatic-relations with Taiwan and established full relations with China. Carter and Deng got along famously, signing agreements for scientific and technological cooperation. The Chinese leader even confided to the President his tentative plans to make a punitive strike into Vietnam because of Hanoi’s hostility to Peking. Carter tried weakly to discourage this, but the Chinese attacked within three weeks of Deng’s visit to Washington.

On the eve of flying off in June 1979 for the summit the President announced his decision to develop the MX missile. By the time he and Brezhnev met in Vienna, much of the will in both camps for comprehensive peacemaking had slackened. Brezhnev, old and ailing, seemed to have lost his energy and grasp of issues. The two men signed a package of agreements, elaborately and cautiously negotiated over a period of many months, providing for limitations in land-based missiles, submarine-based MIRVed missiles, bombers equipped with multiple missiles, and other arms. SALT II was still a respectable step forward—if the step could be taken. Following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan shortly after New Year’s 1980, however, the President asked the Senate to defer action. This delay, and Reagan’s condemnation of the treaty during the 1980 campaign, killed SALT II’s chances—the most profound disappointment of his presidency, Carter said later.

Historians will long debate the causes of the malaise that afflicted Jimmy Carter’s presidency about the time he began the last third of his term. Was it largely a personal failure of leadership on the part of Carter and his inner circle at a crucial point in his Administration? Or was the loss of momentum and direction during 1979 more the result of factors that plague every President—intractable foreign and domestic problems, a divided party, a fragmented Congress, a hostile press, limited political resources? Or was it a matter of sheer bad luck—a series of unpredictable events that overwhelmed the Administration?

In his disarmingly frank way, Carter himself admitted a failure of personal leadership. In midsummer of 1979, he removed his government to Camp David and summoned over a hundred Americans—political,
business, labor, academic, and religious leaders—for long consultations, and then emerged to declare in an eagerly anticipated television speech that the nation was caught in a crisis of confidence, a condition of paralysis and stagnation, to which his detached, managerial style of leadership had contributed and at the center of which was the energy crisis, whose solution could “rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future.” At a specially convened cabinet meeting two days after the speech, he stated, according to a participant, “My government is not leading the country. The people have lost confidence in me, in the Congress, in themselves, and in this nation.” A week before his 1980 election defeat he graded himself on CBS’s
60 Minutes,
giving his presidency a B or a C plus on foreign policy, C on overall domestic policy, A on energy, C on the economy, and “maybe a B” on leadership. For a President, B and C are failing grades.

Carter’s shifts toward the middle ground in domestic policy and confrontation in Soviet relations, along with his loss of popularity at home, had opened up a leadership vacuum that was bound to attract a liberal-left Democrat of the stripe of Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, or indeed the 1976-style Jimmy Carter. Would Edward Kennedy run? Since his brother Robert’s assassination, Democratic party leaders and rank-and-file enthusiasts had been trying to recruit him, but the young senator had proved to be a master at saying no. Now, thoroughly disappointed by Carter, he decided to take on the toughest of political assignments, unseating a President of one’s own party. At first Kennedy appeared unable to define his alternative program coherently, and when he took a fling at the dethroned Shah of Iran and the “umpteen billions of dollars that he’s stolen from Iran,” the media treated this as a campaign gaffe to be derided rather than a policy issue to be debated.

Carter’s early handling of the seizure in November 1979 of the American embassy in Teheran and sixty-three American hostages produced the usual rally-’round-the-President surge in public opinion. Kennedy failed to gain momentum after running far behind the President in the Iowa caucuses. Later the senator picked up strong support in urban areas when he spoke firmly for détente abroad and anti-inflation controls at home, but he never headed his adversary. Some of the President’s men argued that Kennedy’s run hurt Carter in the fall contest with Ronald Reagan, but Democrats showed their usual capacity for reuniting before the final battle. In retrospect it appeared that Carter had defeated himself, largely by appearing to have faltered as a strong leader, a sitting duck for Reagan’s charges of inadequacy and indecision.

Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s aide and confidant, wrote after the 1980
defeat that he had “found many forces at play today that make the art of governing very difficult”—an “active and aggressive press,” the fragmentation of political power, congressional resistance, special-interest groups, and the like. Conditions, in effect, made governing impossible. Leading students of the Carter presidency instead fixed the blame on the President himself. “Carter lacked any sense of political strategy,” wrote political scientist Erwin C. Hargrove, “and thereby the majority of citizens came to believe that he was not in control of the events which most concerned them.” If Carter was bedeviled by weak party support, congressional factionalism, bureaucratic power groups—and by the “iron triangles” interlocking these resistance forces—the question arises: to what degree did he seek to curb or even master these by leading and refashioning his divided party, for example, or by improving his poor congressional liaison office? He devoted little time to rebuilding either the party or the liaison office.

The “bad luck” theory of Carter’s decline holds that he was simply engulfed by forces over which he had no control—the energy crisis, soaring gasoline prices, steep inflation, high interest rates, Kennedy’s challenge, and above all the continuing hostage crisis and the brutal Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. As great leaders have demonstrated, however, setbacks can be—or can be made to be—spurs to action.

Perhaps Carter’s greatest failure stemmed from his moralism in foreign policy combined with his flair for media showmanship. His reaction to the hostage seizure in Iran and to the Afghanistan intervention was not to put the crises in perspective and restrain public opinion but to dramatize the issues and further inflame the public. This politically expedient course, reflecting also Carter’s moral judgment, brought the heady feeling in the short run of being the true spokesman and leader of the people, but it had severe longer-run effects. In helping to arouse the public, and then responding to that aroused public, Carter raised hopes and expectations inordinately. But Iran held on to the hostages and the Russians remained in Afghanistan. Nothing is more dangerous for a leader than a widening gap between expectations and realization.

This gap paralleled and exacerbated another one—between Carter’s idealistic, uplifting foreign policy pronouncements and day-to-day specific-policies. Preachments were not converted into explicit guidelines.
A strategic
approach was lacking. When initiatives had to be taken and tough choices made, the Administration lacked a hierarchy of priorities that could fill the gap between its global activism and the routine application of foreign policies. Carter alternated between born-again moralizing and engineering specifics. In this respect he shared one of the oldest intellectual weaknesses of American liberal activism.

At the 1978 Harvard commencement a gaunt and towering figure out of the Russian past denounced not the evils of Soviet communism, as many in the audience had expected, but the American culture in which he had taken refuge. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a powerful attack on the ideas and symbols most Americans held sacred—liberty, liberal democracy, even the pursuit of happiness. “Destructive and irresponsible freedom,” he said, had produced an “abyss of human decadence”—violence, crime, pornography, “TV stupor,” and “intolerable music.” Solzhenitsyn had long been sounding the tocsin against freedom Western style. Civil liberty, he had said almost a decade before, had left the West “crawling on hands and knees,” its will paralyzed, after it had supped “more than its fill of every kind of freedom.” Indeed, to regard freedom “as the object of our existence” was nonsense.

If the Harvard audience responded to most of Solzhenitsyn’s stinging attack with a measure of composure, it was perhaps in part because the university was by tradition a forum of protest. Graduate student Meldon E. Levine, delivering the English Oration in 1969, at the height of the student protest, in that same Harvard Yard, had challenged his audience of alumni, faculty, and parents to live up to their own standards of equality and justice, courage and trust. The students were “affirming the values which you have instilled in us,” he said,
“AND WE HAVE TAKEN YOU SERIOUSLY.”
And almost two centuries before, President Samuel Langdon of Harvard had lamented, “Have we not, especially in our Seaports, gone much too far into the pride and luxuries of life?” Was it not a fact that “profaneness, intemperance, unchastity, the love of pleasure, fraud, avarice, and other vices, are increasing among us from year to year?”

For more than three centuries, indeed, Americans had worried about other Americans’ loss of virtue. Over the years, the definition of virtue— and of vice—had taken many forms. During the twenty years or so following President Langdon’s protest of 1775 the most widely accepted idea of virtue was the subordination of private interests to the public good, demonstrated by direct, day-to-day participation in civic affairs. What were these private interests to be suppressed? Certainly the blasphemy and drinking and carnality and pleasure seeking that Langdon complained of, but even more the commercial avarice and frenzied moneymaking that promoted those vices and ultimately corrupted the republic. Vice and virtue were locked in a never-ending struggle for the soul of America.

The framers of the Constitution had enjoyed few illusions as to how that
struggle might turn out, for their political and military battles in the 1770s and 1780s and their study of political philosophy had left them pessimistic about the nature of man, in contrast to its potential under the right circumstances. They had limited faith in the capacity of their fellow Americans to exhibit the classical virtues of self-discipline, courage, fortitude, and disinterested public service, even less faith in the power of Calvinism’s austere morality to control appetites and passions, and only a faint hope that a benevolent tendency within human nature to sociability and community, as articulated by the Scottish philosophers, would prevail under the raw conditions of American life. Unwilling to pin their hopes on human virtue, they had fashioned rules and institutions—most notably the Constitution—that at the very least would channel and tame the forces of passion and cushion the play of individual and group interest.

Two centuries later, Americans were more divided than ever as to the cause and cure of vice and the nature and nurture of virtue. Ostensibly these matters were left to the deliberations and preachments of churchmen, but they too were divided in numberless ways, even within their own denominations. Families, schools, the military, the workplace, the tavern added to the variety of ethical codes. And beyond all this, American men and women professed moralities that they did not follow in practice. In the mid-1950s Max Lerner found that the moral code prescribed that “a man must be temperate in drink, prudent in avoiding games of chance, continent in sex, and governed by the values of religion and honor.” A woman must be chaste and modest. But this formal code had been replaced by “an operative code which says that men and women may drink heavily provided they can ‘carry’ their liquor and not become alcoholics; that they may gamble provided they pay their gambling debts, don’t cheat, or let their families starve; that a girl may have premarital sexual relations provided she is discreet enough not to get talked about or smart enough to marry her man in the end; that husband or wife may carry flirtations even into extramarital adventures, provided it is done furtively and does not jeopardize the family; or (if they are serious love affairs) provided that they end in a divorce and a remarriage.”

Even as the moral code was cloaking “real sex” during the 1950s, unsentimental biologists were ripping aside the shields between sexual pretension and practice. In 1953, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues published
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
a few years after their similar study of the human male. In a huge sample of respondents, over 90 percent of the males and over 60 percent of the females had, by their own account, practiced masturbation; about half the men and over a quarter of the women reported having had some homosexual experience; 8 percent of
the males and about half that percentage of females admitted some experience with bestiality. Tens of millions of Americans, in short, were sexually “perverse,” according to the moral code. The Kinsey studies recorded the assertion of 71 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women that they had practiced premarital intercourse in their teens; indicated that adultery and illegitimacy were far more common and widespread than commonly supposed; reported that many boys of low-income families claimed to have had intercourse with scores and even hundreds of different girls. So tens of millions of Americans were “immoral” by the standards of the received morality.