Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (19 page)

Congress and state legislators, however, consistently refused to consider what European nations long had done to cut gasoline consumption: place high taxes on sales. These taxes, which helped to make gasoline in Europe some four times as expensive as it was in the United States, encouraged overseas car manufacturers to produce fuel-efficient motor vehicles and drivers to watch what they spent on gasoline. High taxes on gasoline seemed politically impossible in America, where oil and gas interests were strong, mass transit was ill supported, and people drove vast distances, especially in the West. For these and other reasons, the United States continued to consume large amounts of the world’s sources of energy.

Carter’s comprehensive energy program, moreover, did not succeed. He started off poorly by encouraging his secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, to develop the plan in secret. When the National Energy Plan (NEP) was unveiled in April 1977, its daunting complexity antagonized Congress. Once interest groups managed to comprehend it, they attacked it from all directions. Oil and gas interests demanded to be unshackled from government controls, without which, they said, they would be encouraged to explore and develop new resources. Environmentalists, fearing the exploitation of new fields, opposed these interests. Consumers balked (as they had in the Ford years) at paying more for gasoline or heating oil. As Speaker O’Neill observed sadly, energy policy was “perhaps . . . the most parochial issue that could ever have hit the floor.”
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In October 1978, a year and a half after NEP was introduced, Congress finally approved a bill that decontrolled natural gas prices and established tax credits for energy conservation measures. In general, however, the act fell far short of Carter’s grandiose plans of 1977.

These struggles exposed an especially large obstacle to energy conservation in the United States: Americans, the most affluent people in the world, had historically used their ample resources as if there were no tomorrow, and they did not focus very much on long-term problems. Notwithstanding the oil crisis of 1973–74, they continued to resist serious restraints on their ability to consume. When Carter called on Americans to sacrifice—rarely a wise or successful political move—people resisted. When good times later returned, they became even less enthusiastic about conservation: Per capita energy use began to rise again in 1983. The reluctance of Americans to sacrifice exposed an equally durable aspect of popular attitudes in the 1970s and thereafter: While Americans regularly denounced their government, they expected it to assure and to expand their rights and comforts. Nothing must be allowed to dampen their expectations about living standards that had ascended during the heady, upbeat years in the 1950s and 1960s.

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HOUGH WHIPSAWED BY THESE PRESSURES
, Carter soldiered on, but his last two years in office were in many ways grimmer than any in the recent history of the country. At the root of this grimness were two interrelated developments, one involving foreign policies, the other the economy. Together they unleashed an avalanche of conservative opposition that was to bury him and his party in the election of 1980.

Carter was a Wilsonian internationalist and idealist in his approach to foreign affairs. He took office believing strongly that the United States should speak out against nations that violated basic rights. In February he indicated that he would cut foreign aid to nations with poor human rights records. He and Cyrus Vance, his judicious secretary of state, seriously yearned to promote better relations with the Soviet Union and lessen the threat of nuclear war. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed, “We will move this year a step toward our ultimate goal—the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth.”
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Hoping to heal old wounds, the president quickly pardoned some 10,000 Vietnam War draft evaders. In 1977, he halted production of the B-1 bomber, which had been developed to replace the B-52 in America’s defense arsenal. In 1978, he canceled development of the neutron bomb, which had been intended as a battlefield weapon in Europe. On January 1, 1979, the United States established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, thereby infuriating conservatives who supported Taiwan.

In 1978, Carter scored two heartening diplomatic victories, winning Senate ratification of two treaties that promised to cede the Panama Canal to Panama at the end of 1999 and brokering a widely hailed treaty—the so-called Camp David Accord—in which Egypt recognized the state of Israel and Israel agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
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Carter displayed considerable skill in waging the Panama fight, which aroused sharp conservative opposition. In the end, the two treaties barely received the votes of the necessary two-thirds of senators, many of whom worried about popular backlash at the polls.
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(As it happened, twenty senators who voted for the treaties were defeated for reelection in 1978 or 1980.) The president was equally resolute in getting Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt to come to terms in September 1978. Before the agreement was reached, he held them together for thirteen days at Camp David. In the glow thereafter his popular approval ratings, which had tumbled to 38 percent in midsummer, rose to 50 percent.
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In dealing with the Soviet Union, however, Carter encountered difficulties from the start. By 1977, Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev was seventy-one years old and ailing. Requiring a hearing aid and a pacemaker, he seemed at times almost robotic in his movements and wore a glazed look that may have been caused by medication. Brezhnev had never been a serious supporter of détente, and he deeply resented Carter’s complaints about Soviet abuses of human rights. The United States, he complained, did not seem nearly so critical of China, Iran, Nicaragua, the Philippines, or other nations that were widely believed to be guilty of such violations. In 1977, Brezhnev began deploying a new generation of SS-20 missiles that could hit targets anywhere in Western Europe. Cuban troops, serving as proxies for the USSR, remained active in Ethiopia and Angola.
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In June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev held a summit meeting in Vienna and announced agreement on SALT II, which called for limits on the numbers of missiles and bombers that each side might have. But anti-détente hawks in the Senate, led by Henry Jackson of Washington, retorted that the treaty undermined American security. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said he favored the agreement, but he, too, was known to be deeply distrustful of the Soviets and anxious to bolster American defense spending. Brzezinski, who had waged bureaucratic warfare with Vance since 1977, had an office near Carter’s in the White House and often had the president’s ear. Prominent Cold Warriors active in an increasingly vocal pressure group founded in 1976, the Committee on the Present Danger, also intensified their criticisms of America’s “cult of appeasement.”
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Amid rising anti-Soviet feelings, SALT II encountered tough sledding in the Senate, which failed to act on it in 1979.

As Carter confronted these pressures, he felt obliged to stiffen America’s Cold War posture, first by agreeing in June to back full development of intercontinental MX missiles, which were to be shuffled about the country on underground rails so as to be mobile in case of attack. In mid-December 1979, he joined NATO ministers in stating that unless the Soviets removed most of their nuclear arsenal in the European theater, NATO would retaliate by deploying a limited number of cruise and Pershing II missiles there, beginning in 1983. The cruise missiles were small, intermediate-range, land-based, radar-guided weapons useful in theater actions. The powerful Pershing II missiles had a range of 800 miles, twice that of the Pershing I missiles already there, and could hit targets in the USSR.

This was the deteriorating state of Soviet-American relations on December 27, 1979, when the USSR launched an invasion of Afghanistan. Why it did so was unclear. Some experts said that the Kremlin sought mainly to preserve a pro-Soviet government threatened by rebels. Others speculated darkly that the USSR had designs on the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. Whatever the motivation, the invasion dashed any hopes that Carter, Vance, and others of their persuasion still held for moderating the Cold War. Carter quickly became a hawk, denouncing the invasion as “the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War.” He also proclaimed what some observers called the Carter Doctrine, which warned that the United States would use armed force if necessary in order to prevent outside powers from gaining control of the Persian Gulf region. To show his seriousness he imposed an embargo of American grain exports to the Soviet Union, withdrew SALT II from Senate consideration, and called for a resumption of Selective Service registration for men who reached the age of eighteen. He announced that the United States would boycott the summer Olympic Games, which were scheduled to take place in Moscow in 1980. A total of sixty-four nations ultimately joined the boycott.
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Carter also called in 1980 for 5 percent increases over each of the next five years in America’s defense budgets. These increases were 2 percent higher than he had earlier requested. Congress readily complied with regard to fiscal 1981. When Ronald Reagan took the reins of power from Carter in 1981, he needed only to carry on—and to escalate—a defense buildup that his predecessor had started. The Cold War had hardened into a deeper freeze.
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While countering the Soviets, Carter had to deal with especially volatile developments in Iran. These had a considerable history, dating at least to 1953, when the CIA had helped to mastermind a coup that placed the pro-Western Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in power in Tehran. In return for generous American aid, the shah guaranteed United States and Great Britain valuable oil rights in Iran. He also sided with the West in the Cold War, becoming the primary bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf region. Though the shah ventured a few reforms—trying to advance secularization in education—these infuriated many leaders of the Shiite clergy. Over time he ran an increasingly brutal police state, but all American administrations after 1953 gave him strong support and sold him huge quantities of arms. In 1973–74, Secretary of State Kissinger had refused to cut off these sales, even though the shah had played a key role in the quadrupling of OPEC prices for oil.
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Carter continued this backing. In December 1977, the president visited Tehran, where at a state dinner he lauded the Shah as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.”
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What American leaders did not sufficiently appreciate was the hostility that their support of tyrants such as the shah had helped to foment in the Middle East. By the 1970s, many Iranians, including democrats and leftists in the middle classes, had become furious at America’s hypocritical posture—proclaiming the virtues of democracy while backing an oppressor. American officials, including analysts at the CIA, were also unaware of the surging power of radical religious feelings in the Muslim world. In January 1979, followers of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the dark-eyed, snowy-bearded, white-robed leader of these radicals, overthrew the shah. The shah moved about before settling in Mexico but was eager to come to New York City in order to undergo surgery for cancer. By October, with the shah’s cancer at a life-threatening stage, Carter acceded to pressure and let him come.

Less than two weeks later, on November 4, 1979, a mob of youths overran the United States Embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage.
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Khomeini refused to intervene or even to talk to American emissaries. Though the precise nature of the revolutionaries’ demands was vague, three stood out: America, the “Great Satan,” must return the shah to Iran, give back the huge wealth that he had supposedly stashed away in the United States, and apologize. In making such demands, the radicals were dramatically altering the way that international relations were to be conducted in the future.

Carter was trapped. To return the shah or to apologize was politically suicidal. No one seemed to have a good idea of the size of the shah’s assets or how these might be legally turned over. After prohibiting the import of Iranian oil, freezing Iranian assets in the United States, and expelling illegal Iranian students, the president encouraged Vance to explore a range of options that might lead to negotiation. Meanwhile, Brzezinski and others quietly worked on plans for an American military rescue—an operation that at first had seemed impossible inasmuch as Tehran was hundreds of miles from the nearest likely staging area for an American attack.

Weeks, then months, elapsed, during which the “Hostage Crisis,” having at first helped to rally Americans around the president, gradually undermined his stature as a leader. The president claimed that he was too absorbed in the effort to free the hostages to engage actively in political matters and stayed close to the White House. His near-isolation became known as the “Rose Garden Strategy.” The media seemed to report on nothing else. ABC ran nightly broadcasts called “America Held Hostage.” On CBS, anchor Walter Cronkite adopted a nightly sign-off, as for example, “And this is the way it is, Thursday, [whatever date], 1979, the [numbered] day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran.”
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