A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter

By Scott Kaufman

With 30 historiographical essays by established and rising scholars, this Companion is a comprehensive picture of the presidencies and legacies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

• Examines important national and international events during the 1970s, as well as presidential initiatives, crises, and legislation
• Discusses the biography of each man before entering the White House, his legacy and work after leaving office, and the lives of Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and their families
• Covers key themes and issues, including Watergate and the pardon of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, neoconservatism and the rise of the New Right, and the Iran hostage crisis
• Incorporates presidential, diplomatic, military, economic, social, and cultural history
• Uses the most recent research and newly released documents from the two Presidential Libraries and the State Department

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781118907580

Book preview

Introduction

Scott Kaufman

One served less than a full term in office, the other a single term. Scholarly and public rankings of the presidents taken over the past fifteen years have consistently placed them in the bottom third of those who have served in the Oval Office. Yet for all of the criticism they have entertained, both Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter have also received praise, not only for what they accomplished while in the White House but for what they did (or tried to do) after they returned to civilian life. It is this difficulty in coming to grips with Ford’s and Carter’s places in history, complicated by the fact that their presidential libraries and the State Department are still releasing materials related to their tenures in office, which makes A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter such an important resource. In this volume, readers will find essays from thirty scholars who examine not just the presidencies of these two individuals, but their lives before and after the White House as well as the roles played by their spouses during their terms in Washington.

Ford and Carter confronted a nation going through a period of transition. Politically, the country was in search of itself: the New Deal coalition and liberalism of the 1960s had come face-to-face with a New Right/neoconservative backlash, and the Vietnam War and Watergate had engendered a credibility gap. Popular culture appeared to depict an American people drifting away from politics or thinking about the welfare of the larger community, and focusing more on personal gratification, yet the attention devoted to subjects such as racial identity, sexual orientation, and women’s liberation challenged such an assessment. Diplomatically, the war in Vietnam had contributed to the disappearance of the Cold War consensus, and America’s standing as the world’s economic powerhouse faced a serious challenge from nations such as Japan and West Germany. Détente, credited to Richard Nixon, had begun to show signs of disintegrating in the face of domestic criticism and differences between the United States and Soviet Union over what détente meant. In this volume’s first two essays, Bradford Martin and Vanessa Walker, respectively, offer readers an overview of these domestic and international shifts, and, in so doing, offer a broad understanding of the challenges Ford and Carter faced.

Ford and Carter appeared unlikely candidates to sit in the Oval Office. The former’s political ambition was to become speaker of the House of Representatives. Scandal, however, played a key part in his becoming America’s first and only unelected president. Though Carter announced his bid for the White House in 1974, he seemed a dark horse with little chance of winning. Indeed, early in his candidacy, people asked, Jimmy who? Contributions by Scott Kaufman and E. Stanly Godbold present pre-presidential historiographical biographies of Ford and Carter, while Nicole L. Anslover and Jeffrey Bloodworth explain why scholars believe Carter went from an unknown to the nation’s chief executive.

During their terms in office, Ford and Carter encountered a wide variety of domestic and international challenges. Both had to figure out how to strengthen an economy weakened by growing foreign competition and high spending on the Vietnam War and social programs. They faced a Congress which sought to reassert its power after years of growing influence in the executive branch. Lawmakers, along with the American public, wanted to see the country devote more attention to human rights. Both men desired to revive détente, determined to improve ties with an increasingly powerful communist China, faced numerous challenges in the Third World, and had to address the needs and interests of a military that had had its reputation discredited by the Vietnam War. Yet there were dissimilarities between them. Carter, unlike Ford, came into the Oval Office via a presidential election. Ford had to contend with the ramifications of pardoning Richard Nixon. Additionally, they confronted different international crises: Ford had the closing months of the Vietnam War and the Mayaguez crisis; Carter confronted revolutions in Nicaragua and Iran, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Lastly, while the economy played a part in whom Americans elected as president in 1976 and 1980, there were disparate considerations for voters as well, including the Nixon pardon in 1976 and the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980.

As readers peruse the essays in The Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter that cover the Ford and Carter presidencies, they will find that most of the contributions are thematic in nature, and that the majority encompass the entirety of that president’s term in office. Yanek Mieczkowski addresses the domestic challenges Ford confronted, Kathryn S. Olmsted focuses on criticism and reform of the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s, Andrew Downer Crain tackles Ford’s controversial pardon of Richard Nixon, and John P. Burke covers the transition from the Ford to the Carter administrations. Kristin L. Ahlberg considers the impact of trilateralism on Carter’s thinking, while William Steding addresses human rights, which was a major component of Carter’s foreign policy. The relationship between the armed forces on the one hand and America’s thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth presidents on the other are addressed by Ingo Trauschweizer, and by Robert Davis III and Scott Kaufman, respectively. Similarly, Raymond Haberski, and Jeffrey Crouch and Elise Tollefson offer insight into the relationship between the media, and Ford and Carter. Jeffrey Bloodworth presents scholars’ explanations as to why Carter won the 1976 presidential election, while Andrew E. Busch does the same for Ronald Reagan and 1980. Jason Friedman and Joe Renouard each present assessments of Ford’s and Carter’s terms in office. Finally, John Dumbrell offers a comparative appraisal of these two presidents, concentrating in particular on their ability to communicate a vision to the American people.

Yet readers will see that in the case of Carter, some topics are divided into two essays. There are three reasons for this. One is that while there is a substantial literature on or related to Carter’s domestic policies, there is far more on his diplomatic initiatives. Second, the year 1978 was significant, for that year’s midterm election brought into Congress a substantial number of lawmakers who favored moving the nation in a more conservative direction. Finally, 1979 saw Carter face a number of foreign policy crises, some of which continued into or affected his diplomatic and domestic initiatives, as well as the 1980 presidential election. Hence, Timothy Stanley’s essay on Carter’s domestic policies focuses primarily on the years 1977 and 1978. Likewise, Carter’s foreign policy is split, with Andy DeRoche covering the first two years of Carter’s term and Blake W. Jones addressing the foreign policy crises Carter faced starting in 1979.

Moreover, portions of some of the essays in this volume cross over with one another. As examples, neoconservatives appear in the works by Walker, Anslover, and Binoy Kampmark. Martin and Anslover both address the feminist movement. Anslover and Bloodworth each provide details on the 1976 presidential campaign, Stanley and Leo P. Ribuffo address executive–legislative relations during Carter’s term in office, and Blake and Renouard offer scholars’ assessments of the thirty-ninth president’s response to the Iranian Revolution. Some readers might regard such repetitiousness as a weakness, for why have more than one essay cover the same or similar material? In fact, however, such crossover is a strength. For one, the essays in the Companion series include what the contributors see as the most important secondary (and, in some cases, primary) literature on the topics about which they write. Sometimes, those scholars may regard the same articles or books as important. Then again, they might disagree, thereby demonstrating that academics do not necessarily see eye-to-eye when it comes to the literature they review. Even their overall stance on a president or initiative can differ: Burke and Stanley, for instance, are more critical of Carter than is Ribuffo. Secondly, context is important. Some of the contributors may reference the same books or articles but place them in a diplomatic or political framework, while others do so with regard to social or economic matters, or even personality. Whereas Jaclyn Stanke raises the issue of human rights in connection with superpower relations during the Carter years, Steding widens the scope to include Carter’s promotion of human rights worldwide. Additionally, he draws attention to the role religion may have played in the thirty-ninth president’s commitment to making the rights of others a component of his diplomacy.

While neither Ford nor Carter remained in office beyond their single term, the former had, and the latter has had, long and active post-presidential careers. The two became friends during their flight to Egypt to attend the funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Ford joined the American Enterprise Institute, criticized conservatives for their opposition to equality for homosexuals, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, and challenged President George W. Bush’s contention that the United States had to invade Iraq because Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, he became a target of critics who charged him with using his title of ex-president as a way to make large sums of money. Carter is known for his work with Habitat for Humanity and his efforts, through the Carter Center, to fight disease and malnutrition throughout the world, as well as to monitor elections. He also has remained politically active, excoriating President Ronald Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies, meeting with the officials of other nations on peace missions, promoting Middle East peace, criticizing Israel, and opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he may go down in history as America’s most active and most controversial ex-president. Michael A. Davis examines Ford’s post-presidential life and activities, while Frances M. Jacobson does the same for Carter. In the concluding essay, John Dumbrell offers a retrospective of the tenure of both men, with an emphasis on their vision for the nation.

A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter would not be complete without looking at the closest companion of both men, their wives. Traditionally, the first lady has acted as both White House hostess and mother to her family. While she might engage in some initiatives of her own, they are generally maternal in nature: education, health care, caring for the environment, or promoting the arts. First ladies, though, have become increasingly activist, serving as advisors to and surrogates for the president. They have also become more and more outspoken. Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter both are excellent examples of such women, who played key roles in their husbands’ administrations and who, at times, caused a lot of controversy. It would not do due justice to cover the Ford and Carter years without addressing the variety of roles their wives played. Hence, T. Alissa Warters and Eryn Kane have presented readers with historiographical overviews of Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Carter, respectively.

It is the hope of the editor that those who read in its entirety this contribution to the Companion series will do more than learn about the policies of these two administrations. By the end of the volume, laypersons and even experts will have a better grasp of who these two men were, from where they developed their belief systems, how and why they became America’s chief executive, the challenges they faced in office, the roles their spouses played during their tenures, their post-presidential lives, and how in retrospect their terms in office have come to be viewed. More broadly, readers will find themselves having to contend with such questions as the extent to which cultural, political, economic, social, and diplomatic forces affect what a chief executive can or cannot accomplish; how important it is for the president to communicate clearly to voters his plans for the nation; what criteria one should use in determining whether a president did a good or great job, or was a failure; and what the proper role of both a first lady and an ex-president should be. In the process, it will become clear that scholars themselves do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on all of these matters. With the opening of additional archival material and the benefit of time, there is little doubt that the scholarly debates regarding the significance of the Ford and Carter presidencies will only intensify.

Chapter One

Détente’s Limits

Caught Between Cooperation and Confrontation

Vanessa Walker

The United States entered the 1970s with an international status significantly different than that which it had held a generation earlier. At the start of the post-war era, Washington possessed unsurpassed military and economic might alongside significant political clout. By the 1970s, that standing faced a multitude of challenges. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of US troops found themselves mired in a war lacking clear strategic objectives to defend the abstraction of US credibility as much as an unviable South Vietnamese government. Western Europe and Japan had recovered from the ravages of the world’s last global conflict, had grown more powerful militarily, and had started to contest America’s supremacy diplomatically and economically. The Soviet Union, while not posing an economic threat to Washington, had developed an atomic arsenal on par with that of America. Communist China too had begun to demonstrate its growing power on the world stage, threatening to fight the United States if American troops invaded North Vietnam and testing its first atomic bomb in 1964.

US officials, led by President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor—and later secretary of state—Henry Kissinger, sought to address these new realities by trying to implement a modus operandi in the US–Soviet relationship that would reduce tensions (and costs), while China, Japan, and Western Europe played an enlarged (though still subordinate) role. Although Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in developing a détente with the Soviet Union, that policy had its limits. Moreover, by the time the president left the Oval Office in disgrace as a result of the Watergate scandal, détente showed serious signs of weakness.

Détente

Although scholars have credited the Nixon administration with establishing détente with the Soviet Union, the idea of a more cordial relationship was not, as Wilfried Loth (2002) and Edward H. Judge and John W. Langdon point out, a new idea. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s had taken some steps to ameliorate superpower tensions, but with limited success. Nor had much progress taken place under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev. By the time Nixon came into office, then, write Judge and Langdon, little real headway had been made (Judge and Langdon, 1996: 212).

The conditions for achieving a true détente had changed by the late 1960s. Superpower tensions had eased for a time after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the United States, the so-called Cold War consensus had begun to break down, and Americans increasingly questioned whether it made sense for their country to make such an open-ended commitment to containing communism globally. Nixon agreed with this sentiment, declaring in what became known as the Nixon Doctrine of July 1969 that it was time America’s allies did more to defend themselves. Furthermore, there were now in the White House officials who appeared determined to play down ideology in favor of a balance-of-power concept aimed at maintaining world stability. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States, but it did not want to see the nuclear arms race get out of control. Additionally, the relationship between Moscow and its one-time ally, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had soured to the point that in 1969, the two nations engaged in military skirmishes along their border. Finally, the Soviet economy had begun to languish; Western trade and technology could assist the Kremlin in turning that situation around (Judge and Langdon, 1996).

To assume, however, that détente was solely a superpower construct would not be correct. Ralph Levering writes that the most important agreements between Moscow and Washington in the late 1960s and early 1970s involved lessening tensions in Europe, stabilizing the arms race, and increasing US–Soviet trade. In the first area, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt took the lead and the Nixon administration, despite some misgivings, followed (Levering, 1994: 125). Brandt, who assumed his country’s leadership position ten months after Nixon’s inauguration, rejected his predecessors’ call for unifying noncommunist West Germany with its communist neighbor, East Germany; Brandt realized that that goal was premature to pursue. Instead, he promoted Ostpolitik, which called for improving economic and cultural relations between East and West. Between 1969 and 1971, he signed nonaggression pacts with the Soviet Union and Poland, as well as the Berlin Accords, which guaranteed West Germans access to West Berlin. That at first the US government looked upon Brandt’s machinations with suspicion has been addressed by a number of authors. Dana Allin comments that Kissinger feared Ostpolitik could fail, allowing the Communist world [to] wind up in the stronger position (Allin, 1997: 39); this point is seconded by Holger Klitzing (2009). But, writes Jean-Francis Juneau (2011), the Nixon administration could not stop Brandt without deleteriously affecting US–West German relations. Instead, the White House did its best to use Ostpolitik to support its own vision of détente.

The Nixon–Kissinger vision of détente focused more heavily upon arms control (Dockrill and Hopkins, 2006). In June 1969, the president sent his secretary of state, William Rogers, to Moscow, stating that the United States was prepared to open Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks, which had first been proposed by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. It would take three of years of negotiations before the superpowers signed SALT I, which froze until 1977 the number of missile launchers both countries could possess. The superpowers also signed the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which restricted the United States and Soviet Union to two antiballistic missile systems each for an unlimited duration.

Additionally, the superpowers promised to hold a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Long a goal of the Kremlin, the CSCE would bring together the United States and numerous European powers and, Moscow hoped, would lead to agreements that would sanction the existing borders in Europe. In so doing, the Soviet Union would obtain recognition for the territory it had gained from World War II and, in turn, greater international legitimacy.

The Rapprochement with China

One of the key reasons for the breakthrough in 1972 on arms control talks with the Soviet Union was the changing nature of US relations with communist China. Sino-American relations had been strained since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 won a two-decade-long civil war against the noncommunist Kuomintang (KMT). Washington refused to recognize the new leadership in Beijing, fought against Chinese and North Korean military forces in the Korean War, and imposed an embargo on trade with the PRC. Simultaneously, the United States offered economic and military aid to the KMT leadership, which had fled to the island of Taiwan, and successfully protected Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations, arguing that the KMT and not the CCP was the rightful representative of China. The PRC charged Washington with supporting a government that did not represent the Chinese people and which had situated itself on an island that rightfully belonged to the mainland.

Even before becoming president, Nixon had expressed the need to reconsider the United States’ China policy, and he did just that after entering the White House. He relaxed the embargo, began referring to communist China by its official name, acquiesced to having the PRC rather than Taiwan represent China in the United Nations, and sent secret backchannel messages through third parties to the CCP’s leadership indicating his desire for better ties. The PRC responded in kind. This back-and-forth culminated in Nixon’s trip to Beijing in February 1972. There, he and Kissinger held talks with the PRC’s leadership, including Premier Mao Zedong and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai. Afterward, the two countries issued the Shanghai Communiqué, in which they pledged to improve economic and cultural contacts, and to seek a normalization of relations. Although the two countries established liaison offices prior to Nixon’s departure from office, formal normalization had to wait until 1979.

There are a large number of works on Sino-American relations that include the change in policy toward China that began in the late 1960s. Focusing solely on the connection between US public opinion and America’s China policy, Leonard Kusnitz (1984) finds that Nixon’s decision to seek better ties with Beijing diverged from public sentiment and lacked popular support. Kusnitz’s work, which does not use presidential archives or the National Archives, overlooks the complex interplay between policymakers and public opinion, with the former at times shaping the latter. Guangqiu Xu’s Congress and the US–China Relationship (2007) concludes that members of Congress had a significant impact on US China policy, even if at times he presents their diverse opinions and positions with an overly unified voice.

In his path-breaking book Friends and Enemies (1990), Gordon Chang demonstrates that rather than seeing the relationship between China and the Soviet Union as monolithic, US officials from 1949 on believed it was possible to find a way to drive wedges between the two communist superpowers. That effort culminated with Nixon’s junket to Beijing. Victor S. Kaufman (2001) agrees with Chang insofar as driving wedges, but adds that Nixon’s trip to China was facilitated by the stance toward Beijing adopted by President Johnson. Along similar lines, Evelyn Goh (2004) asserts that nearly a decade before Nixon became president, US officials had begun a reassessment of US policy toward the PRC; hence, Nixon’s rapprochement with China was not necessarily something new. Zhang Baijia and Jia Qingguo (2001) and Steven M. Goldstein (2001) take the story even earlier, finding that negotiations which began between US and Chinese officials in 1955 paved the way for the Nixon–Kissinger meetings nearly two decades later. This assessment is supported by Yafeng Xia’s (2006) excellent work on the same. In an exhaustive, blow-by-blow account, S. Mahmud Ali (2005) addresses the collaboration that took place between the United States and China starting in the early 1970s. Much more concise is Chris Tudda’s (2012) description of the events leading up to Nixon’s February trip. Though he relies heavily on English-language sources, his use of the recently declassified Nixon tapes adds value to his work. Michael Schaller’s (2002) short but excellent survey of Sino-American relations is also of value in interpreting and contextualizing these events.

A number of these aforementioned monographs are particularly useful because they include recently released Chinese documents. The same is true of the work of Chen Jian, whose Mao’s China and the Cold War provides new insights on rapprochement from the PRC’s perspective. Chen concludes that Mao’s desire to improve relations with the United States stemmed not just from the threat posed by the Soviet Union, but also the fading status of Mao’s continuous revolution (Chen, 2001: 239). Using the hazard posed by US imperialism (242), Mao had justified this continuous revolution, of which part was the Cultural Revolution, which the Chinese leader had initiated in the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution’s purpose had been to eliminate Mao’s opponents and mak[e] his power and authority absolute (244), but it had not gone as well as intended. By 1969, Mao had decided to bring an end to this continuous revolution and to seek a foreign policy success that would boost [his] reputation and authority (270). Here too, Mao saw rapprochement with the United States as important. How much of a role Mao himself played in the negotiations that led to improved Sino-American ties from the late 1960s into the 1970s remains a matter of debate, as evidenced in essays by Li Jie (2005) and Gong Li (2005).

On the president’s trip to Beijing, there is no work better than Margaret Macmillan’s Nixon and Mao (2007). The strength of her book is less her conclusions and more her ability to weave the primary and secondary literature into an enjoyable read. Both the Americans and Chinese had a desire to improve ties, she concludes. For Nixon and Kissinger, developing a relationship with China would permit the United States to balance Soviet power and convince Moscow to seek a détente with Washington, and further establish Nixon’s credentials as a statesman, which could help him win re-election. To Beijing, a presidential visit would enhance China’s prestige and solidify the PRC’s standing as an international power. Additionally, Mao and his subordinates believed it possible to get from their American counterparts concessions in return for a closer relationship, particularly insofar as Taiwan.

While Macmillan and others agree that the Nixon–Mao meetings had little significance beyond their symbolism, their impact upon later US foreign policy and Sino-American relations remains a matter of dispute. Macmillan points out that the possibility of the White House giving up on Taiwan aroused powerful opposition within Washington, which put any thought of normalization on hold. Indeed, Macmillan criticizes Nixon and Kissinger for making assurances to China about withdrawing American forces from Taiwan, which they were not, in the end, able to keep (Macmillan, 2007: 337); this finding is seconded by Nancy Bernkopf Tucker who, while acknowledging that Nixon and Kissinger had been right to press ahead to normalize relations with the People’s Republic, had willingly betrayed an ally, conceding Taiwan’s interests before negotiations began (Tucker, 2009: 52). Rosemary Foot (2005) seconds Tucker, asserting that Nixon and his national security advisor were so focused on improving ties with China that they failed to use Beijing’s desire for the same to exact from the PRC more concessions on Taiwan than they did. Yet she also argues (Foot, 1995) that the rapprochement with Beijing reduced the threat posed by China to American interests and influenced the PRC’s behavior internationally. Robert S. Ross concludes that while Nixon and Kissinger successfully achieved a rapprochement by punting the question of Taiwan to a later date, they severely restrained US flexibility in future negotiations. Chinese leaders, for their part, learned that when they encountered US resistance to compromise, particularly if it threatened Chinese objectives, it was best to avoid the matter until Beijing was in a better negotiating position to secure US compromises (Ross, 1995: 53, 54). Gong Li takes issue with Ross, contending that China engaged in miscalculations, including taking an overly hard line with the United States. Consequently, it harmed its bargaining position vis-à-vis Washington and facilitated US efforts to position itself in the US–China–Soviet triangle (Gong, 2001: 360).

Patrick Tyler, James Mann, and Harry Harding trace longer trajectories. In a largely narrative account of Sino-American relations from Nixon through President Bill Clinton, Tyler (1999) sees Nixon as having recognized what his successors were forced to accept: that despite other interests, including human rights and Taiwan, the United States had no option but to engage China. Mann finds that Nixon and Kissinger, [i]n both style and content…guided America’s relationship with China for at least a quarter-century (Mann, 1998: 50). This included conducting negotiations in secret and having American officials visit the PRC more than vice versa. The former was not always necessary and at times backfired, while the latter gave the Chinese a distinct negotiating advantage (52). For Harding, the period from 1969 to the early 1980s marked a second phase in Sino-American relations since 1949. During this period, the Sino-American relationship can be marked as a marriage of convenience rather than an enthusiastic romance (Harding, 1992: 297), with a common fear of the Soviet Union drawing them together. Throughout these years and beyond, though, there persisted wariness in Beijing and Washington toward the other.

Japan and Vietnam

The rapprochement with China was linked to Nixon’s policy toward Japan. Cheap Japanese exports and resistance in Japan to opening its market to American goods had precipitated a US trade deficit with Tokyo. Determining the Japanese government of Sato Eisaku unwilling to cooperate on finding a way to solve these trade issues, Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard, thereby reducing the cost of US exports while raising those of Japan’s. The opening to China also was part of Nixon’s response: he had acted unilaterally, rather than collaborating with the Japanese on China policy as promised to Sato in mid-1971. Walter LaFeber argues that the president’s moves demonstrated not only his determination that China, like Japan, was an Asian power to contend with, but, because Japan’s economic revival posed a threat to America’s well-being, to treat Tokyo as less an ally than a rival (LaFeber, 1997: 353). Michael Schaller agrees that the Nixon administration’s Japan policy did not help US–Japanese relations. However, [b]oth nations remained so mutually dependent that not even the…jolts of 1971–72 broke the bond (Schaller, 1997: 244).

Go Ito (2003) finds that just as Nixon and Kissinger used the opening to China as a means of playing off Beijing and Moscow, so they used it to play off the PRC and Japan. In the process, they received concessions from Tokyo on issues of trade and security in the name of containing China; likewise, the PRC, fearful of a revival of Japanese militarism, made concessions on the US–Japanese military partnership. But Tokyo, shocked and angered by Nixon’s failure to cooperate with it vis-à-vis the opening to China, also began to adopt a foreign policy more independent of the United States when it came to normalizing ties with the PRC and North Vietnam.

The rapprochement with China, as well as détente, was tied to the Nixon administration’s most pressing concern, that of extricating the United States from the highly unpopular war in Vietnam. What had begun as an effort to stem the spread of communism by aiding the French, who had controlled what was then Indochina, had turned into a full-scale US military commitment entailing the use of hundreds of thousands of American combat troops. By 1968, the war had become unpopular enough that Nixon was able to win the presidency in part with vague promises of peace with honor. His goal was to get the United States out of Vietnam, but in a way that did not make it look like Washington had lost. That process would take an additional four years and thousands more American lives. A historiographical debate has since ensued over whether Nixon could have won the war in Vietnam but was forced by domestic constraints to withdraw or, in the name of US credibility, unnecessarily prolonged an unwinnable conflict. Among those who assume the former perspective are Lewis Sorley (1999) and J. Edward Lee and H. C. Toby Haynsworth (2002). Most scholars, among them George Herring (2002), Arnold Isaacs (1983), Jeffrey Record (1998), Gary Hess (2009), John Prados (2009), and Jeffrey P. Kimball (1998), take the latter point of view. Though acknowledging Kissinger should have explored early on the possibility of a peace along the lines of that eventually signed between the United States and both North and South Vietnam in 1973, Stanley Karnow places some of the blame on the North Vietnamese for not pressing the national security advisor to do so. In reality, concludes Karnow, neither side was ready for an accommodation (Karnow, 1997: 644). Andrew L. Johns (2010) adds to the mix lawmakers, particularly conservatives, who shared with Nixon responsibility for prolonging the war. Possibly most damning is Larry Berman (2001), who maintains that Nixon and Kissinger did not expect the North to abide by the 1973 peace agreement. Instead, the president and his national security advisor hoped that by using American airpower, they could guarantee the South’s sovereignty through the end of Nixon’s tenure. Therefore, if the South succumbed to the inevitable assault from Hanoi, the Nixon administration could not be held to blame. Instead, the president found himself forced to resign as a result of Watergate, bequeathing to his successor, Gerald Ford, a war which was as yet unfinished.

Did, however, their effort to improve ties with the Soviet Union and China assist Nixon and Kissinger in ending the conflict in Vietnam? Both Moscow and Beijing provided economic and military aid to North Vietnam during the war. Nixon and Kissinger believed it possible to use Sino-Soviet animosities to demand that Moscow and Beijing pressure Hanoi to end the war as a price for better relations with Washington. Here, the Nixon administration failed. Competing among themselves for influence in Hanoi, neither communist power was prepared to push the North Vietnamese. The Chinese, comments Zhai Qiang (2001), cautiously encouraged Hanoi to negotiate with Washington, but refused to force the North’s hand, lest they force it into the Soviets’ arms. For their part, writes Ilya Gaiduk (1996), the Soviets rejected any idea of linking the Vietnam War to improved superpower relations, for they knew that Nixon wanted détente just as much as they did. Nor did the Kremlin have the influence in Hanoi that Washington believed it had. Keith Nelson (1995) also demonstrates that Nixon believed he could extricate the United States from Vietnam by going through Moscow. Despite this misfounded assumption, Nelson maintains that both Moscow and Washington pursued cooperation on Vietnam and a broader modus operandi for their own benefit: US technology for the former, increased access to Eastern Europe for the latter. And both sought greater cooperation to protect control over their respective spheres of influence. Nelson thus concludes that détente was a conservative reaction of two overextended empires to the challenges—exposed most dramatically by Vietnam—of maintaining the larger global Cold War order, and its costs for internal order.

Differentiating Détente’s Meaning

Gaiduk’s comment regarding linkage points to a larger issue, which was the belief held by Nixon and Kissinger that Moscow and Washington fully shared similarities when it came to establishing a cooperative relationship aimed at defending the global balance of power. This was not the case. In discussing linkage in his influential work Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Gaddis comments, The Russians did not take easily to this procedure. Their approach was compartmentalization: issues should be treated as discrete units, with cooperation on one taking place independently of such competition as might exist on others (Gaddis, 2005b: 291).

This difference over the meaning of détente became a key reason for its gradual disintegration as the 1970s progressed, a point made clear in Raymond Garthoff’s important tome, Détente and Confrontation (1994). A member of the US team that had negotiated SALT, Garthoff draws on his first-hand experiences, but goes well beyond them in an exhaustive treatment of both American and Soviet sources that exceeds 1,000 pages. Both powers sought stability in the international system, a reduction in the likelihood of nuclear war, and increased cooperation. Garthoff asserts, however, that US leaders tended to view détente as a way to control Soviet power by bringing the Kremlin into a system of shared institutions and interests, whereas Soviet leaders saw détente as an adjustment to the leveling of power between the two states. It is hardly surprising, then, that friction arose between the superpowers, leading to suspicions and misunderstandings that ultimately undermined détente, despite the desire of both countries’ leadership to continue cooperation. This misunderstanding carried over to the inability to account for the domestic political limits faced by their adversary. In this, Garthoff allots responsibility for détente’s downward spiral to Moscow and Washington.

Garthoff’s work, revised in 1994 to reflect the post-Cold War world and access to new materials, is a standard in the field and impressive in its scope and detail. It is particularly notable in its inclusion of Soviet and Third World perspectives and sources, long before it became de rigueur for diplomatic historians. Garthoff anticipates the main themes that would emerge after the Cold War ended and scholars had access to a greater range of archival materials from both sides: the structural weaknesses of détente; failures in conception and implementation between the power players; and domestic political factors that undercut détente’s vision before it could be realized.

Like Garthoff, many historians have pointed to détente’s internal inconsistencies, which began to weaken the policy even before Nixon left office. In his The Cold War, Gaddis is generally positive about détente’s effect in minimizing armed conflict in the international system. He notes, however, the paradox that although it was not designed to stabilize the Soviet system, détente’s emphasis on geopolitical stability did just that in the short term. The morality inherent in détente, he writes, lay in its avoidance of war and revolution, no small accomplishment in a nuclear age (Gaddis, 2005a: 181). Gaddis quotes a letter Kissinger wrote Nixon, in which the former explains, Brezhnev’s gamble is that as these policies gather momentum and longevity, their effects will not undermine the very system from which Brezhnev draws his power and legitimacy. Our goal on the other hand is to achieve precisely such effects over the long run (184). Gaddis emphasizes that this seeming amorality of stabilizing Soviet power in the short term quickly began to sour public and congressional opinion within the United States, while leading to increasing tensions between Washington and Moscow over the application of the policy.

In a concise yet insightful essay, Détente and its Discontents, Jeremi Suri similarly contends that the stability and American leadership détente fostered in the early 1970s proved superficial and self-defeating, avoiding resolution to real problems and ossifying a broken system (Suri, 2008: 229; see also Suri, 2007). As US and Soviet leaders studiously avoided intractable problems and points of friction while pushing ahead trade agreements and international summits, détente facilitated contacts between individuals across societies discontent with the Cold War status quo, sparking transnational protest movements. Suri argues that détente strengthened American international power but also created a renewed desire for moral clarity, rather than diplomatic subtlety (Suri, 2007: 244). Détente’s flaw was that it sought to reinforce the status quo, rather than transcend it, and thus created a hollow peace (237). Jussi Hanhimäki’s biography of Henry Kissinger also stresses détente’s detachment from new dynamics in the international system. Kissinger’s détente, argues Hanhimäki, failed to minimize the role of ideology within the context of US–Soviet relations, and the policy as a whole was backward looking (Hanhimäki, 2004: 381, 393).

Détente and the Third World

Events in the Third World exposed the limits of détente, as demonstrated at length in Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War. His work, a vanguard of multiarchival research, highlights the misunderstandings at the core of détente. Westad notes that the Soviet leadership never intended for détente to curtail its support for Third World movements, a view at odds with US hopes for international stability. Many in the United States interpreted the Soviets’ Third World actions as a deliberate break with détente or manipulation of the policy to provide a cover for Soviet expansion. Westad concludes that the surge of Soviet involvement in the Third World, particularly in Angola a year after Nixon left office, made even the most ardent US supporters of détente doubt where the future for US foreign policy lay in seeking cooperation with the Soviet Union (Westad, 2005b: 244). James Patterson seconds the lack of understanding among the superpowers of détente’s meaning and its implications for the Third World. Indeed, while Westad dates détente from 1969 to 1975—the latter year marked by the Soviet–Cuban intervention in Angola—Patterson goes so far as to assert that there was no real détente in much of the globe’s underdeveloped countries. The United States did not back away from its support for pro-Western authoritarian regimes, and Cold War rivalries continued to afflict the Third World (Patterson, 2005: 103–104).

If Vietnam and Angola are two examples of this lack of understanding, a third was the Middle East. Postwar US policy toward this part of the world was underpinned by a variety of considerations, including access to the region’s oil resources, coming to grips with the rise of nationalist sentiment, and, most important, trying to contain the spread of Soviet influence (Kaufman, 1996). Yet prior to 1973, neither Nixon nor Kissinger gave the Middle East high priority, leaving it up to the State Department to determine US policy. The 1973 Yom Kippur War shook the White House’s complacency when it came to Middle Eastern affairs. Israel quickly halted the joint Egyptian–Syrian attack on it in October of that year. Israeli ground forces counterattacked, pushing deep into Syria and threatening to destroy Egypt’s army. When Washington learned Moscow had begun to mobilize its armed forces in an apparent attempt to support its Arab allies, Nixon put the US military on alert, while Kissinger—whom Nixon in September 1973 had also appointed secretary of state—pressured Israel to halt its offensive. Shuttling between countries in the region, Kissinger succeeded in arranging several disengagement agreements. His hope was to use those pacts as part of a step-by-step process that would create a broader formula for peace in that volatile region of the world.

Scholars differ in their assessments of the Nixon–Kissinger approach to Middle East politics. Ishaq I. Ghanayem and Alden H. Voth, for instance, write, Henry Kissinger’s role in Middle East policy indeed created a foundation for the political stabilization of the Middle East—for Camp David and the peace treaty signed by Israel and Egypt in 1979 (Ghanayem and Voth, 1984: 181). William Quandt (2005), who served on the National Security Council during the Jimmy Carter administration, is less certain. Even without Watergate, he argues, Kissinger’s step-by-step approach would not have worked, as the national security advisor seemed never to have such a formula in mind. But Watergate, which jeopardized the president’s leadership, made any hope of developing a more ambitious Middle East policy impossible.

More significant, the Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, was a harbinger of the contradictions in détente. Patrick Tyler places the onus on Kissinger. Nixon and his national security advisor/secretary of state had rejected a proposal by Brezhnev for a joint US–Soviet effort to head off a Middle East conflict. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, the president realized his mistake and instructed Kissinger to discuss with Brezhnev superpower collaboration to end the conflict. But the national security advisor/secretary of state, fearful of pressuring Israel, ignored Nixon’s directive. Détente, comments Tyler, was giving way to Kissinger’s argument that Israel had to win so the Soviets would lose, which seemed a perversion of US national interest given the Soviet overtures to head off the crisis and to work cooperatively for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict (Tyler, 2009: 148).

Focusing less on Kissinger, Carol R. Saivetz echoes Garthoff by addressing the differing visions of détente held by US and Soviet leaders during the Middle East crisis. Long-standing tensions and the strategic emphasis on the Middle East, she argues, highlight the conflict between competition and cooperation innate to détente policies. The Kremlin, believing that strategic arms limits reduced the risks of escalation, saw détente as an opportunity to uncouple the central US–Soviet relationship from their activities in the Third World (Saivetz, 2005: 75). In 1973, the Soviet Union was willing to be more aggressive, while the United States, viewing détente as a way to entangle Moscow through agreements in the structure of the status quo, saw these actions as an eschewal of the cooperative elements of détente. Saivetz concludes, In the final analysis, it would seem that the [October] crisis had been precipitated because the competitive component of détente almost overwhelmed collaboration (79).

Craig Daigle shares Saivetz’s conclusion, as evidenced by the title of his book, The Limits of Détente. Significantly, though, he gives greater emphasis than previous scholars to the role played by Israel and its Arab neighbors in undermining détente. Détente had led the superpowers to accept in the Middle East a ‘no war, no peace’ situation that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syria’s leader, Hafez al-Assad, found unacceptable. When Sadat threatened to go to war with Israel if the superpowers did not involve themselves politically in finding a solution to Middle East peace—one that would include Israel returning territory it had captured in a war with its Arab neighbors in 1967—both Washington and, more important, his allies in Moscow ignored him. Sadat thus went to war, not to defeat Israel militarily, which he knew he could not do, but rather to reignite the stalled political process by creating a ‘crisis of détente’—drawing the superpowers into a regional conflict and forcing them to give up their no war, no peace stance. Sadat succeeded. Daigle concludes that as the peacemaking effort got under way, Nixon and Kissinger dispensed with any pretense of US–Soviet cooperation in a deliberate effort to seize the opportunity to establish preeminence in the Middle East (Daigle, 2012: 8, 346).

Events in South Asia were also tied to détente. The tense relationship between India and Pakistan, which dated to their independence from Great Britain in 1947, erupted into full-scale combat in December 1971 following East Pakistan’s declaration of independence from West Pakistan earlier that year. India, which in August 1971 had signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, came to the assistance of the East Pakistanis. Concluding that India planned to use its relationship with the Soviets to destroy West Pakistan, the White House ordered naval forces to the region, while Kissinger urged Moscow to restrain its Indian allies. Garthoff has found little evidence that the American show of strength had any impact upon the Kremlin—which had been encouraging New Delhi all along to restrain itself—or India, or upon the ultimate outcome of the war, which ended with the independence of East Pakistan (renamed Bangladesh) in December 1971. Thus, just as in the case of the Middle East, there were limits to détente in South Asia. Kissinger continued to apply a standard of guilt by association to a variety of Third World parties that he labeled proxies of the Soviet Union, comments Garthoff, with no better justification than that for India in 1971 (Garthoff, 1994: 321). Robert Dallek adds that although the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 did not wreck détente, the White House could take only so much credit for the achievement. Of greater importance was Moscow’s determination not to allow that conflict to derail an improvement in superpower relations (Dallek, 2007: 349).

Nor did Nixon and Kissinger necessarily find détente applicable to the Western Hemisphere. Greg Grandin (2006) and David F. Schmitz (2006) both observe that détente manifested itself in Latin America as an unapologetic embrace of new military dictatorships throughout the region. A corollary to détente’s emphasis on limited US resources and curtailed military interventions, the so-called Nixon Doctrine, championed strong pro-Western leaders who could impose order in their own countries and stave off leftist revolts from within. Détente strengthened, rather than diminished, US support for its Third World partners and their anti-communist crusade. Grandin notes Kissinger’s directive to Argentina’s military leadership to do what it needed to consolidate its power quickly, indicating a change in style rather than substance in US–Latin American relations under détente.

The Nixon administration’s efforts to destabilize Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, and subsequent support of the military government led by Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 coup d’état, perhaps most vividly underscores the role of right-wing dictatorships in US–Latin American relations during détente. The extent to which the president and Kissinger, working through the Central Intelligence Agency, were responsible for Allende’s ouster in 1973, remains a matter of contention. Kristian Gustafson (2007) argues that Allende was a dangerous Soviet and Cuban proxy who posed a threat to democracy in Chile—and, by extension, US hemispheric interests—but that Nixon and Kissinger ultimately had little influence over the coup that brought to power in Santiago a right-wing authoritarian government. Peter Kornbluh (2003), marshaling an enormous amount of declassified material, chronicles US policy and covert operations in Chile under Nixon. He argues that while internal Chilean factors were decisive in precipitating Allende’s ouster, the US government bore responsibility for fostering the instability and polarization that enabled the Chilean military’s overthrow of Allende. Jonathan Haslam (2005) and Edy Kaufman similarly acknowledge that internal factors played their part in the 1973 coup but give heavy emphasis to American machinations. Comments Kaufman, Constraints on the [Allende] regime did not come only from without. Much of the internal pressure on Allende originated in, or was at least encouraged by, linkages between domestic groups and US government and corporate bodies (Kaufman, 1988: 325). Tanya Harmer’s (2011) work on Chile, drawing on archives in both North and South America, reinforces assessments that détente’s main effect in Latin America was to empower right-wing military dictatorships and their war against internal subversion in the name of global anti-communism. Harmer concludes that the concept of détente did not really apply to the global South.

Beyond the United States: Détente from the Soviet World

The opening of Soviet archives with the end of the Cold War has offered new insight into détente’s demise. Scholars have increasingly explored behaviors and contradictions that seemed inexplicable or aggressive from a US perspective and found them resulting from internal Soviet concerns. Much like American domestic politics, dynamics within the Soviet leadership were formative in shaping the policy’s application, particularly in the Third World. Westad, for example, points to divides in the Soviet leadership that undermined collaboration with the United States. Westad explains that beginning in 1974, as a result of Brezhnev’s health problems and the unwieldy Kremlin bureaucracy, two parallel tracks of Soviet policy were being formed. One, led by the Foreign Ministry, stressed the centrality of détente with the United States and Western Europe, while the other emphasized a more activist approach to the Third World. Proponents of each, divided into different sections of the bureaucracy, failed to anticipate how one objective could undermine the other. Moreover, Westad stresses, for most leaders, including Leonid Brezhnev himself, the two were both correct responses to a changing world, based on the best of Soviet political theory (Westad, 2005b: 206). Later events, particularly North Vietnam’s victory over the South in 1975 and Soviet–Cuban involvement that same year in Angola, reinforced a highly ideologized version of Soviet policy, though Moscow in fact had little influence on their outcome. Thus, even as these events served to accelerate détente’s collapse, the Soviet leadership read them as harbingers of a successful translation of communist ideology into policy in the Third World.

This ideological commitment is one that Melvyn Leffler emphasizes as well. Leffler, also utilizing Soviet archives, emphasizes a sincere Soviet commitment to détente alongside a rigorous adherence to advancing socialist doctrine. Brezhnev and his comrades took seriously their ideology, Leffler explains. They believed that they had a historic responsibility to promote people’s well-being, nurture justice and equality, and ameliorate living standards (Leffler, 2007: 256). Yet Brezhnev in particular was genuinely dedicated to détente and did not want Third World conflicts to jeopardize cooperation with the United States. Brezhnev believed that normally, there was no need actively to intervene as the world was moving inexorably toward a socialist future (255). Leffler concludes that détente was not, then, deliberately abandoned by the Soviet leadership. Rather, international turbulence interceded, and historical forces and fears of Western imperialism and counterrevolution drew the Soviet Union into a more active role than intended (258).

Scholars looking at the Soviet approach to détente too have pointed to contradictions contained in the Kremlin’s policy. Svetlana Savranskaya and William Taubman argue that détente contained seeds of its own eventual destruction, and point as well to the conflicting understandings of détente held by US and Soviet leaders. Moreover, like Westad, they highlight the contradictions contained within the Kremlin’s foreign policy itself, namely that the Soviet Union needed better trade relations with the West to facilitate economic growth, while at the same time believing that geopolitical gains vis-à-vis the West were necessary for ideological vigor (Savranskaya and Taubman, 2010: 149). Détente thus exacerbated competition in the Third World rather than removed it. Savranskaya and Taubman conclude that true cooperation between the superpowers would remain elusive until they shared similar interests and values.

One of the preeminent scholars of the Cold War Soviet Union, Vladislov Zubok, offers a slightly different interpretation of the failures of détente in the same Cambridge History volume. Rather than concentrating on the structural flaws of détente, Zubok spotlights a weak and unfocused Soviet leadership in the wake of a stroke Brezhnev had suffered. He asserts that both neoconservatives in the United States and Soviet dissidents misconstrued Soviet actions as a deliberate attempt to use détente policy to shield the Kremlin’s ambitions for military and geopolitical expansion. It was a compartmentalized and fragmented approach that prevented the development of a central strategic vision or coherent leadership in the 1970s. Moscow’s activist Third World policy, he concludes, was more reactive than deliberate, a substitute for the real reform necessary to solidify Soviet power and address economic problems. Moreover, he emphasizes the lack of charismatic and capable leadership for failing to consolidate early gains from détente into long-term stability: One could imagine how, under a more dynamic and intellectually vigorous Soviet leadership, the earlier achievements of détente could have led to the reformation of the rationale underlying Soviet international behavior. Instead, the fractured leadership continued to rely on the imperial-revolutionary paradigm, rooted in Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Stalinist imperial mentality (with a great deal of Russian chauvinism). This ideology made superpower cooperation on interests within a realpolitik framework almost impossible (Zubok, 2010: 94).

Zubok expands on this argument in his book Failed Empire. Like more US-centered scholars, Zubok notes conflicting American and Soviet understandings of détente outside the European theater, but his main contribution is on internal tensions among the Soviet leadership. As in his essay, he points to internal Soviet contradictions to their own policy. The Kremlin, he finds, acted on ideological premises that decolonization would be a major blow to capitalism, yet for functional and personal reasons, Moscow’s leadership was incapable of bold schemes and initiatives (Zubok, 2007: 251). This resulted in a disjointed and ultimately counterproductive policy that contributed to détente’s downfall by the end of the decade. Angola, for example, was driven as much by domestic considerations as external imperatives. Zubok comments that in Angola, Brezhnev had been outsmarted by the Cubans into expanding Soviet assistance, despite his flat rejection of military assistance earlier. Although this venture turned out well for the Soviet leadership in the short run, it reveals the degree to which the Soviets faced contradictory demands in their own policies, often stemming from political considerations as much as calculated interests.

The works by Daigle, Westad, and Zubok reflect one of the most interesting threads to emerge from the Soviet and Third World perspectives on détente, namely how little control the Soviet Union had over its supposed proxies. This is particularly evident in Angola, which became a central point of tension for the Ford administration. In his much-lauded work on Cuba’s intervention in Angola, Conflicting Missions (2001), Piero Gleijeses convincingly establishes that the Cubans acted without Soviet support in Angola. Drawing on Cuban archives and interviews with individuals who volunteered in the military, Gleijeses shows that Cuba since the early 1960s had involved itself repeatedly in African affairs, even defying its Soviet ally, which did not want to endanger détente.

Other scholars have recently begun to investigate policymakers’ claims that the developing powers sought to exploit the perceived weakness of the United States signaled by détente. Like Westad, Zubok, and Gleijeses, Hal Brands warns against over-estimating both US and Soviet agency in determining the region’s Cold War conflicts. Brands asserts that Latin American leaders saw opportunity in a restrained US policy signaled by the end of the Vietnam War and the beginnings of détente. He writes, Leaders of widely varying ideological orientations embraced bold foreign policies and contested Washington’s hegemony in the region (Brands, 2010: 129). Brands states that this assertiveness by regional leaders was driven in large part by domestic politics, but the appearance of a subdued United States encouraged various governments to export their own domestic discontents through combative foreign policies. Moreover, many foreign leaders on both the political left and right eschewed the uneven special relationship with Washington and instead chose to align themselves with other Third World powers. More problematic is Brands’s claim of the symmetry of responsibility for political violence from both ideological poles. Stephen Rabe (2012), for example, has argued that in calling for balance and attention to left-wing sources of violence and radicalism traditionally overlooked by historians, Brands diminishes the enormity of violence perpetrated by right-wing military regimes that the United States allied itself with time and again. Harmer (2011) and Grandin (2006) also disagree with Brands’s conclusion that détente implied a subdued or restrained United States policy in the Western Hemisphere. Both concur, however, that Latin American leaders skillfully played on Washington’s concerns about its waning influence and leftist revolutionaries to strengthen their own position in regional and global affairs. Although the United States ended the decade with its regional hegemony largely intact, these difficulties in its proverbial backyard only reinforced domestic perceptions that détente was critically weakening Washington, and its repercussions could be felt well beyond superpower relations.

Domestic Politics, Human Rights, and the New Conservatives

In his weighty memoir of the Ford administration, Years of Renewal, Henry Kissinger observes, By the summer of 1974, when Gerald Ford took over, Nixon’s foreign policy had become nearly as controversial as his personality. Liberals chastised the President—and me—for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted the administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of détente, which in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology (Kissinger, 1999: 92–93). Kissinger identifies this domestic challenge as the primary obstacle to realizing the potential of détente, a conclusion shared by many of his detractors. Indeed, Kissinger’s observation is one borne out by both his contemporaries and historians, who place great weight on the primacy of US public opinion and domestic politics for détente’s decline.

The earliest works on détente, released just after Ford administration left office and arguably before détente was even over, were predominantly personal memoirs and first-hand accounts of administration officials (Caldwell, 1980). These primarily descriptive works detailed what actually happened rather than offering any comprehensive analysis. Of those attempting to offer early assessments of the détente policy and explain its demise, one finds a strong and vocal neoconservative contingent, which roundly criticized the policy. One such volume, Defending America, published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies (1976), includes neoconservative luminaries Paul Nitze, Theodore Draper, Eugene Rostow, and Walter Laqueur. Its authors critique détente on the grounds that it fundamentally weakened the United States both militarily and morally, an argument well established by the mid-1970s.

That domestic opposition was largely responsible for détente’s ultimate failure is supported by other early assessments, including those by Coral Bell (1977) and Stanley Hoffmann. Bell’s book, published just one year after Kissinger ended his tenure as secretary of state, is more of a contemporary analysis than a historical account. Still, it offers an early formulation of the prevailing conclusion that détente gradually disintegrated because it lacked domestic legitimacy. Bell argues that Nixon and Kissinger, in mustering support for their policy, fostered unrealistic expectations among the American public of what the policy could achieve; when those expectations were disappointed, public confidence in the policy and its purveyors waned. Hoffman, for his part, examines détente within the longer trajectory of US power in the Cold War. He takes a prescriptive approach and supports détente’s premise of seeking a functional, stable world order. Like Bell, Hoffmann finds the policy’s weakness not in its conception, but in US officials’ failure to build support for those policies domestically. American leaders, he writes, must show the people whom they represent, why traditional policies must change and obtain enough support to turn these changes into laws, institutions, and habits (Hoffman, 1978: 312). Bell and Hoffmann, writing before détente’s final death knell with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, agree with Kissinger on the importance of domestic opposition, coupling with it the failure of America’s leadership to garner popular support.

In what is one of the earliest assessments of détente, Josef Korbel (1972) suggests emphasizing domestic politics is overly simplistic. While not completely discounting the role of domestic considerations, Korbel points to the unlikelihood of capitalist and communist economies finding a way to develop equitable financial or commercial ties.