Why Vance quit

A week ago, for reasons we don't have to go into, I had to record my talk a day ahead of the usual time. It was, on the whole, about the political prospects of Senator Kennedy after the Pennsylvania primary but next morning I woke up and heard the sad, grey monotone of President Carter telling of the disaster in the Iranian desert. I threw my talk in the waste basket and I presume the BBC 'wiped', as they say, the original tape and it was necessary to sit down again and do a wholly different talk since the last thing any foreign audience would want to hear about at the weekend was the remote academic topic of Senator Kennedy's presidential ambitions.

Two days ago I was flying into Kennedy Airport and an agreeable American who I'd been chatting with asked me how these talks worked – since Americans don't hear them – how I managed to keep on the heels of the breaking news. I explained to him that they weren't necessarily news commentaries. 'They can be just as well', I heard myself saying in a phrase that I must have said a hundred times, 'they can be just as well about American children or the chemistry of the New England fall or the history of ice cream'. It was a nostalgic sentence, for I wonder when we'll ever get back to talking about places and people and habits that can make us right to forget the nagging toothache of the news. You'll gather that this is not one of those happy times.

I mentioned last week that after the fiasco of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy had actually seen his popularity rising in the polls. Well, there was a moment, a stunned moment last week, when the only safe instinct of the people, and of Mr Carter's presidential rivals, was to blink and pray and rally as you might at a memorial service behind the principal mourner, the president but any hope he might have held of seeing sympathy turn into approval vanished over the weekend, and the resignation of Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, marked the end of the memorial service and let the people out into the streets to protest and argue and fume and share the bitter feelings of the Western allies who thought they'd cured the president's itch for military action with the salve of a general application of economic sanctions against Iran.

Well, the White House was counting up Mr Carter's growing lead in pledged delegates to the Democratic convention while the polls have been showing him tumbling to the lowest point of public trust in his ability to run the country, both in domestic and foreign affairs and so, I think it's fair to say so, on Wednesday Mr Carter made an astounding public statement. Having said months ago that he would not leave the White House to go electioneering until the hostages were safe at home, he said on Wednesday that he has reversed himself and will now go off on a campaign tour, though, he said, in a limited way.

What is there in this that I can call 'astounding'?' Well, the obvious, simple fact is that the hostages are not only far from home, but now since they've been dispersed by the Iranians, practically immune from any further rescue attempts, so what could be Mr Carter's excuse for changing his mind about staying close to the White House and not getting out on the campaign trail?

Hark. He said – what will be news to practically everybody of all parties – that there has been progress on several issues and mentioned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the energy problem and the movement of inflation. But how about the hostages, whose plight made him take the solemn pledge six months ago to forego all self-serving electioneering?

Well, he said, the problem of the hostages, I quote, 'has been alleviated to some degree'. It will be news to the allies, to the hostages' relatives and undoubtedly to the hostages themselves that their problems have been 'alleviated' and not disastrously aggravated by the failure of the rescue attempt.

I want to come back to the resignation of Secretary of State Vance because it's linked in a direct way we didn't know about a few days ago not just with the fiasco in the desert, but with the belief of the Western allies that a united front in favour of economic sanctions against Iran was the fair price to pay for dissuading the president and his national security advisor Mr Brzezinski from any military action at all.

First let's clear away the early, simple explanations of Mr Vance's resignation, the sort of explanation that is crystallised in a headline. Some of those headlines went like this: 'Vance Ends Feud with Brzezenski by Quitting', 'Vance Resigns Saying he Opposed Rescue Bid'. Beneath the big type, we learned what Mr Vance, a careful mind but not the most vividly articulate speaker, didn't make too clear in public, namely that he had tendered his resignation in the middle of April when, in fact, the president and a handful of advisers, had agreed to go ahead with the rescue.

In other words, Mr Vance's resignation was on the president's desk once the rescue decision was made and would have stayed there whether the attempt succeeded or failed. He was against this military move not because he thought it doomed to failure, not because he feared that if it succeeded, as some people have suggested, the Iranians would have a pressing motive for inviting the help of the Soviet Union. He was against this military move or, as it comes out, any other on principle. And what principle may that be?

Well, he was against it for a simple, stark reason of honour. He it was who had been entrusted by the president with the job of assuring Britain, West Germany, France and Japan that what the president needed from them, to abandon any thought of military action, was their united backing on economic sanctions. Mr Vance, as you know, travelled to Europe, he saw foreign secretaries, he saw prime ministers. Back home he saw ambassadors and allied ministers. For about a month he gave everything he had to convincing the allies that their solidity, their common backing of the president on sanctions was the required quid pro quo for withholding a military move.

Yet, at the very beginning of that month, the last week in March, Mr Vance had gone to the White House for a secret talk with the president and learned, to his great dismay, that the desert rescue attempt was being planned. He was dead against it and said so. Yet his loyalty to the president required him to go about his business with the allies assuring them of the president's peaceable intentions, even for ten days after the decision had been reached in the White House to stage the rescue attempt.

In other – and nastier – words, Mr Vance was required by the president to lie to the allies for the sake of what some cool diplomat once called 'the higher truth of deceiving the enemy'. That's to say – and to any government planning a secret military move it must be obvious – there must be not the slightest risk in Mr Vance's to-ing and fro-ing between the embassies and the allies, not the slightest risk of a leak to the Iranians or their agents abroad. That part of it worked. It was a shock to everybody outside the handful of men in the White House who voted for the raid and agreed on the date.

So we can now see how the last ten days of Mr Vance's service as Secretary of State must have been a plague on his conscience, for the raid was on, the secret briefings were going ahead, the signals had been given. He knew it, yet he had to go on directing the negotiations with the allies, pressing the reassurance that the prospect of an allied agreement on economic sanctions had stopped the president thinking of military action, and the allies agreed.

While Mr Vance was busy pressing the last of these assurances with old friends, he knew that the raid was about to be staged. Loyalty, even to a president, can be strained just so far for some men. Cyrus Vance is one of those men who cannot look a friend in the eye in the interests of 'the higher truth'. So, it can be seen plainly now the raid, its success or failure, had nothing to do with the case. The decision to stage it was all. So long as the decision was in doubt or liable to be dropped, he could talk with the allies in good faith. Once it was made, he wrote out his resignation, held on gamely and miserably until it happened and promptly told the president to accept it.

It's been remarked that there has been no other similar act of a secretary's resigning on principle since William Jennings Bryan, way back there in 1916, quit on the fairly straightforward ground that President Wilson was working the country up into a mood to go to war with Germany, which he was, thanks be to God.

Now, of course, there's nothing at all unique in Mr Vance's plight. Loyalty to the chief and loyalty to the naked truth is the chronic conflict of all government men in high office and, during a war, the conflict is softened or even extinguished by the primary responsibility to win. In wartime, as Winston Churchill put it, 'the truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies'.

There will be those who say that Mr Vance was Secretary of State in a war situation where any move by him to publicise his disagreement with the president and his military advisers would have endangered the raid before it happened and would have endangered the lives of the hostages. I think this is more than a talking point. Another Secretary of State would have had no misgivings but Mr Vance had them – a decent man who perhaps did not have the little extra steeliness that is required of a statesman.

However, this melancholy incident will put an extra strain, a more blinding spotlight, on Mr Vance's successor, Senator Edmund Muskie, who is being asked to be loyal to Mr Carter at a time when the president's political fortunes are very low, when he's off to the hustings not only to defend the indefensible but also, somehow, to convince the voters that inflation is deflation, recession is prosperity and that, in his recent relations with the allies, faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

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.

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