sack to the Cold War
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington It Carter has left his Capitol City as the Aings of old fled the outbreak of the plague. h.t the beginning of the month, he took ,!Inself off to Camp David, the Presidential :13Ifdeout of sylvan luxury in the mountains Maryland. There he remained invisible 411.d. inaudible for days, except for a tourist 11;lit en famille to the nearby Civil War toattlefield at Gettysburg. Then it was off T. IlroPe, to take little Amy to the Berlin fletgarten and collect autographs of the „alliolls European statesmen who have indi ed a willingness to receive this President, biel()se main accomplishment in office has n to make Gerald Ford seem masterful. le while Mr Carter wafts to and fro, a vir,:ent fever has been attacking the lining of brains of the rest of official Washingtilo. The plague has taken the form of a sea, freakout o r the discovery that the re 't Union is an Asiatic despotism. The tiaction to the Shcharansky-Ginsburg trials ,S been one of fulminating hysteria. Led nenry Jackson, the Senate has been naath. log in a fury of accusation and indigoition just as if these two newest members the Moscow martyr-of-the-month club sere .the first victims to be packed off to ueria by Tsar and Commisar.
unless it is to make what was already 17°bable a certainty, namely that there be SALT agreement, the outbreak of this tYbantic scurrying can be only explained 7:r a viral infection. It so weakened the cen641 nervous system of Senator Patrick 01°Ynihan that he accused President Carter s,‘ some sort of 'poetic complicity' in the c,"tvlet condemnation of the two dissenters. ir criticism came ill from a man who, as a h811 official of the Nixon administration, ttal (I been silent, not only when Nixon signed d: SALT agreement but when he dined, b4Iced and vacationed with Leonid autezhnev in a manner which did indeed ar to show approval of the Russian ritical system. But Mr Moynihan was only wrie of a mob of Senators demanding that Ii Pullout all the piccolo players and celfrom the cultural exchange programmes, or we withdraw from the 1980 Moscow sCY111Pies, that we refuse to sell the Rus044ns more computers and that we institute vine. of those full-scale economic boycotts oshicn have worked so well against Cuba, sulna, Argentina and whatever other coun"I has felt the lash of this wet economic The media amplified this frenzy to such Ivs'n extent that there have been hours here hen our television sounded like a right2nd mirror version of Radio Moscow. If it ain't young Mrs Shcharanksy being
asked to advise the United States on foreign policy, it was a Yale Law Professor dilating in pedantic monotones on exactly how the Soviet legal system sucks, or it was a sowbellied Congressman declaring that the Russians had as good as called our Pres ident a liar for trying Shcharansky as a spy after Mr Carter said the man had never worked for the CIA. That brought back memories of Ike's famous experiment in Cold War candour, when he admitted Francis Gary Powers was up there alone in his little U-2 spy plane over Mother Russia, taking snapshots of no-nos.
Then at the height of the clatter, Andrew Young, the American Ambassador to the UN, decided it was time to wave his couth around again. When word reached here that the world's most forthcoming diplomat had told a Paris newspaper that 'there are hundreds perhaps thousands of political prisoners in the United States' it looked as though Congress was going to repeal the anti-lynching laws. In a less perfervid moment what Young, who has indeed had the experience of being a political prisoner in the United States, said wouldn't have caused such a fuss. But what might have made the episode funnier, if anyone in Washington still had the capacity to titter, was that almost as Barry Goldwater and a host of other worthies were demanding Young's scalp, the American Indian was setting up a tepee in the park across from the White House. The gist of the grievance by this war party of some 800 peaux rouges, who had literally walked across the country, appears to be that life in America for them is scarcely better than for Shcharansky in Russia.
Somewhat less discontented but no less visible are the women who arrived in Washington to demonstrate in favour of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. A hundred thousand strong, they marched to the Capitol to ask Congress to extend the seven year deadline given States to agree to the Amendment. Time will run out next March, with the legislation needing three more states to reach the necessary thirty-eight. The march was at least as noticeable for the absence of Rosalynn Carter as for the presence of so many others. Afterwards, when some of the leaders of Women's Movement began to bitch about the general lack of Carter family support, the White House explained that Mrs Carter didn't walk with her sisters because she wasn't invited.
Typical. The President doesn't lead unless he's invited either. Assuredly, he doesn't command and men like Henry Kissinger are saying that the reason for his powerlessness in the face of this antiBolshevik solar flare-up is that he went public with his human righteousness policy, thereby hardening Russian attitudes and encouraging things to get out of control at home.
But Kissinger, sly fellow he likes to make himself out to be, had no better luck when he tried to go the other way. Under his tutelage, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was not invited to the White House, an act of omission for which both he and President Ford paid dear. Nor was Henry able to persuade the Senate to agree to the Soviet Trade Treaty, unless the Russians increased the outflow of Jewish emigres to their homeland, Israel.
The intensity of this anti-Russian feeling may glow and dim, but its continuing nature was accurately described by George Kennan, the former American Ambassador to Moscow, the official who, under the byline of Mr X, wrote the magazine article popularly supposed to have convinced Washing ton to begin the Cold War: 'There has never been a time when American statesmen concerned to find and develop a constructive middle-ground in relations with Russia have not felt their efforts harassed . .and the harassments have not been minor in intensity or in power. Every Administration has been to some extent afraid of this hardline opposition. It had behind it the power of chauvinist rhetoric as well as strict milit ary logic. In the heyday of the NixonKissinger detente, this opposition was almost silenced — partly by Richard Nixon's formidable credentials as a hard-liner, which bewildered many critics, and partly by Henry Kissinger's diplomatic fireworks which dazzled them. But the resulting silence was one of frustration, not of accep tance. When Watergate drained the authority of this political combination, the opposition broke forth once again with redoubled strength and violence. It has raged over the entire period from 1975 to the present'.
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