Carter's ultimatum under fire

Up in the beautifully combed snow wastes of upstate New York, the Olympic Games opened on Wednesday with the usual bravura – 25,000 balloons, skydivers, trumpets, the throb of drums, choral singers and 2,000 doves scattering or scuttering among the sky-writers. Whether the word is bravura or bravado, it was certainly a brave effort to pretend that what we were seeing was the chivalry of 38 nations upholding the ancient tradition of international friendship, a tradition which, unfortunately, many people have been reminding us was plagued by wars and hatred from the beginning of the Games and led to their suspension for hundreds of years.

As we all know by now, the International Olympic Committee delivered a slap to President Carter by unanimously upholding Moscow as the site of the summer games but left the question of participating or not till 24 May, the last day for entering or refusing. In this way the committee gave the Russians elbow room in which to get out of Afghanistan in their own way, in their own time – a careful move that President Carter might better have thought of before he decided to lay down an ultimatum of next week to which the Russians could only say, 'Yes, sir' or 'No, sir'.

A New York Times columnist, a gangling, droll fellow called Russell Baker, came back to Washington from a five weeks' holiday and was shocked to find everybody wearing hawk feathers. 'The new style,' he wrote, 'was set by President Carter with his extraordinary faculty for being born again and again and again. In his latest re-emergence he's been born as a hawk and is perched in the White House rose garden on a very strong public opinion poll. That was alright with me, I had my hawk feathers stored in a closet, put them there in 1967.'

1967, Mr Baker implies, was about the time when the people were beginning to fear that the wiseacres, from Walter Lippmann to General MacArthur, who'd been saying we never should have committed American ground forces to Vietnam, were turning out to be right. By 1968 the country was rocking with protest and violence against the hawks but it took five more years for the hawk to extricate America and pretend that they were really doves of peace.

Well now, as Mr Baker facetiously but correctly notes, hawkishness is the vogue and it's a vogue created suddenly and dramatically by a Jimmy Carter who is in this and other respects almost unrecognisable as the Jimmy Carter of 1976.

Only a little more than a month ago, 'he went up', as the saying goes, 'to the mountain' – it was the mountain of Afghanistan – and came down, again shocked to have discovered for the first time the true Soviet character. He told the Russians to get out of Afghanistan by 20 February or face a boycott of the Olympic Games. He told them to stop short of Pakistan or Iran and the Persian Gulf or face the likelihood of military force. He called for not the revival of the draft, but a national registration for the draft by both men and women. He increased the military budget beyond anything he'd once conceived or favoured and he sought, and got, the use of military bases in Oman, Kenya and Somalia. He has ordered an amphibious assault force into the Arabian Sea to prove that the Persian Gulf can be quickly manned by American ground forces.

Almost at once the campuses came alive again with students who were toddlers in 1967 bawling slogans and carrying placards saying things like, 'Hell no, we won't go!' And 'We won't fight for the oil companies!'.

Well, after the first exhilaration of the new hawks and the first equally automatic response of the new generation of student pacifists, there was a pause for second thoughts and it should be said that the weightiest protest against the President's sprouting hawk feathers has come not from the campuses, but from an old Russia hand, a man who 30 years ago had most to do with articulating, if not creating, America's post-war policy of 'containing' Russian imperialism. In fact, he coined the word 'containment.'

His name is George Kennan. He was in the American foreign service for over a quarter of a century, starting in 1926 seeing and serving everywhere from Berlin to Vienna, Moscow, Prague, Lisbon, Riga; became, after the war, the number one Russian expert of the State Department, was ambassador to the Soviet Union, later to Yugoslavia, has taught Russian history and the history of diplomacy in many universities from Oxford to Wisconsin and is now a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where, in its early days, Einstein and Oppenheimer brooded and taught.

Last Sunday, George Kennan was invited into the Columbia Broadcasting System's studios and on to the famous and often brilliant, muck-raking – in the best sense – programme Sixty Minutes. He feels strongly that President Carter over-reacted dangerously to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and he was invited to say why.

George Kennan, born in the Midwest, is 77 now, a gleaming, handsome man who looks not unlike a rather splendid bald hawk. He's also as alert as he was in his famous containment days and if he's surprisingly young in spirit he's no less a firm practitioner of the old diplomacy in the sense that he distrusts dramatic twists of policy.

First he found the new atmosphere in Washington a rather dangerous one, in which there's not only a high degree of militarisation, of thinking about our problems with the Soviet Union but one in which a great many people seem to have felt that we had to do something to show our muscle, our force, almost regardless of what it is we do with that force. He's not against the building up of the American military capability in that part of the world, he's for it but it must be balanced, he says, with an effort to restore some sort of political communication with the Soviet government to reassure them that if they want to liquidate their unhappy situation in Afghanistan, we're not going to take advantage of it or seek to humiliate them or make a prestige victory of it.

Well, this led inevitably to the question, 'Why, if the Soviet invasion has turned out to be unhappy for the Russians, why did they invade?'

Well, Mr Kennan scorns, in his mild way, the notion that the Russians were on their way to their age-long goal of a warm water port. It would have been much easier for them, he thinks, to have gone straight through Iran, which they could have done at any time without resistance. He believes, in other words, that the invasion was a defensive move to protect their southern border. He's pretty well convinced that they do not intend to move into Iran and/or Pakistan not just because Pravda says so, but, as he insistently pointed out, because Brezhnev did the very rare thing of signing a statement and putting it on the front page of Pravda, thereby, Kennan says, committing himself before 16 million members of his own party plus the entire Soviet population, plus the satellite countries of Eastern Europe.

He reminded us that after 50 years of being involved with Soviet-American relations and living through the whole Stalin time, he doesn't make light of what he calls the 'negative aspects' of the Soviet political personality but he says he has protested bitterly in the past and does so now against a frame of mind which yields to the idea of the inevitability of war, 'I don't think our differences have to be resolved by war, could be resolved by war, I think the Soviet leaders understand that, if anything, better than we do.'

As for the president's boycott of the Olympics, he thinks it does little good to send the Russians 'ultimata and say you must do this and that by a given date or else because this is not the way you induce great governments to do sensible things'.

And this brought him to something about which there's much underground grumbling in the State Department but which has not before been aired in public as a bad method of conducting foreign policy. It's the practice, which John Kennedy started, of having a Secretary of State and also a National Security Advisor in the White House. Today, we have Secretary Vance and, half a mile away at the president's elbow, we have Mr Brzezinski. Inevitably two characters are bound to conflict and it's no secret that Vance and Brzezinski are often at odds on fundamentals.

Mr Kennan thinks that having two State Departments, so to speak, is a dangerous system and he thinks that when the president sends the National Security Advisor to Pakistan, has him discuss military matters, go out to the Afghan border, the wrong signals may be given to the Russians. We may seem to be frightening them with the spectre of a Chinese-Pakistan-American alliance on their southern border. He grants that this is the first time the Russians have moved 'beyond the high water mark to which they advanced in 1945' and he thinks that hard-liners may be taking over in the Kremlin.

Against the use of Russian surrogates in Cuba, North Vietnam, he cites the spectacular failures of the Soviet Union to bully many African nations into their camp, for instance, Ghana, Egypt, [Yeni??] but he says if they remain in Afghanistan, then the United States should think seriously about blockading Cuba, about whether it can stand having an active Russian ally so nearby.

So, in the main, he thinks the Russians should not be given the idea that America believes weapons will solve anything, that they made a mistake in Afghanistan and know it and will get out in their own time.

In a nutshell, he believes in doing what Bobby Kennedy did in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 – offering the Russians a dignified out. There are those who point out that for four or five years in the Thirties the European powers kept giving Hitler dignified outs until he was powerful enough to capture Europe.

Anyway, Mr Kennan's is the most serious opposition belief to President Carter's policy and whether he's right or wrong, there's no question that millions of Americans yearn to believe he's right.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.