An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy

20. EXACTING A PRICE

206 20 EXACTING A PRICE Jimmy Carter noted with pride that he sometimes excelled where others did not. At one of his foreign policy breakfast meetings with advisors, he said,“There is a tendency on the frazzled edges of government to drift away from the tough decisions we made. I am not going to abide that.We cannot wince now or seem unsure of ourselves.”1 Later, he would even suggest in his diary that he was cooler about these matters than others were:“I have a lot of problems on my shoulders, but, strangely enough, I feel better as they pile up. My main concern is propping up the people around me who tend to panic (and who might possibly have a better picture of the situation than I do!).”2 Certainly Carter saw the Afghan crisis as a test of his mettle. Some of the moves his administration embraced, he wrote later, “would require substantial sacrifice and would be very difficult to implement, but we would not flinch from any one of them.” Regarding draft registration, he“listened to all the arguments some advisors marshaled against the idea, but decided to proceed.”3 As to the grain embargo, Carter was aware of some of the political risks he was running. He told White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, God knows...I have walked the fields of Iowa and know those farmers and realize that I promised them in the seventy-six campaign that I would never embargo grains except in the case of a national emergency! But this is an emergency and I’m going to have to impose the embargo and we’ll just have to make the best of it.4 Still, standing up to the USSR was not difficult at first. The Soviets’ intervention in Afghanistan was their first obvious crossing of international boundaries since the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and a public that had been hearing about Soviet aggression looked for an assertive response by the United States. Going to the United Nations and building up a military presence in the Middle East was widely supported. The renunciation of diplomatic, political, and cultural ties with the Soviet Union was also met with wide approbation. Even Carter’s most controversial sanction, the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, produced an immediate “rally around the flag” response from the American public.5 The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate both passed resolutions backing Carter’s Olympic stance, and the Executive Board of the U.S. Olympic Committee voted unanimously to ask the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to move, postpone, or cancel the 1980 Summer Games.6 A few days earlier, on January 16, Ed Sanders, a special aide to Hamilton Jordan, wrote Jordan and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, asking to whom in the EXACTING A PRICE 207 administration should a petition signed by over 50,000 people be sent. The petition requested that an alternative site for the games be found.7 Carter’s response led a leading foreign policy hawk and founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger to welcome Carter into their fold. Eugene Rostow of the Yale Law School wrote Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was an ominous event, signaling the first open exchange in a“hot war.” It was the last clear chance for the United States to stop Soviet expansionism short of a broad war. Comparing the event to the Rhineland and Czech crises of the 1930s, he urged to the president to adopt every rational means to prolong and intensify the conflict in Afghanistan. Should the president so desire, the Committee on the Present Danger could help him.8 That Committee’s publications elaborated on the opinion enunciated in Rostow’s letter that the contemporary scene was similar to that facing the West prior to World War II. Any failure to take tough stances against the Soviets was comparable to the kinds of appeasement that had whetted Adolf Hitler’s appetite for aggression. Except for the recommendation that the United States employ enhanced radiation weapons in Afghanistan,Carter had embraced or would embrace almost every recommendation made by the Committee.9 The Domestic Battles There was some fallout on the partisan political front. The invasion occurred at the beginning of the 1980 presidential campaign. Not unexpectedly, presidential aspirants from both parties lined up on the campaign trail to take potshots at some of Carter’s policies. Senator Ted...