Ford on Portuguese revolution

You always know that a man is running for president when he contrives an invitation to speak before the annual convention of the American Legion and the sight of him doing it can be a very incongruous one, according to his physique and his military record – or his absence of a military record.

The picture in the papers next morning is always the same. On the wall, or curtain, behind him, is a huge, circular emblem with the words 'American Legion' running around the inside of it, enclosing a great star on a field of bay leaves, maybe laurel leaves, and the two letters U S solidly in the very centre. And, in front of it, there stands the speaker, the candidate, with his arms outstretched in an Eisenhower salute. He's always grinning and on his head is the legionnaires’ little overseas tricorne cap making him look like an overgrown French cadet. On Eisenhower, it looked all right. On Gerald Ford, a navy veteran, it looked acceptable, if a little odd. On Nixon, even though he was a navy man too, it gave him the appearance of a barker at an amusement fair. On Adlai Stevenson, the eloquent, literary, witty liberal, it looked ridiculous. 

However, there has never been, to my knowledge, a presidential candidate, however much of even a pacifist, who dare forego an invitation to address this thumping patriotic convention. The legion was thought up quite informally when 20 men, of mixed rank, met in Paris for a dinner in February 1919, only three months after the First World War ended. These men were all, so to speak, new/old soldiers and remembering that old soldiers never die, they were, in the flush of their battle companionship, determined not to fade away. They called a bigger meeting the next month and got together a thousand mostly soldiers and marines who were then kicking their heels up in Paris waiting to be demobbed. Two months later, an executive committee had been formed, held a meeting in St Louis and the legion was born. 

In its early manifestos, it declared a few, simple, downright aims. It was for God and country and, very early on, constituted a powerful lobby in Washington on behalf of wounded and disabled veterans and later on for the orphans of the men who'd died in the war. It then campaigned to increase the bonus of ex-servicemen and to amend the civil service law to see that preference was given to them in federal jobs. 

Since those early years, the legion has done many sensible and imaginative things, like a network of posts throughout the country devoted to building parks and playgrounds and hospitals. It has started junior baseball leagues. It organised emergency relief for victims of Mississippi floods in the Twenties and the Thirties. Possibly its most important public act was to throw its whole national weight behind the amendment to the constitution which, in the end, prohibited child labour. 

Well, many of these services are now forgotten and as the veterans of the First War died off and as the veterans of the Second grow old, it tends to be pictured, whether fairly or not, as a rock-ribbed, flag-waving, fanatically anti-Communist, patriotic society dedicated to the proposition that in any international conflict, military or diplomatic, the benefit of any doubt should be given to America first, last and all the time. 

President and presidential hopefuls tend to approach the legion's annual convention with a wincing conscience. It's not the place to preach appeasement or even the palest version of it. It is an atmosphere that encourages and applauds the jutting chin, the tone of defiance, the most extravagant promises about strengthening fortress America. But in the years since the Americans and the Russians – indeed all of us – have had to think the unthinkable, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, there has not been a president or a candidate who dared be callous enough to rattle a sabre or threaten anybody. 

The only man who could express, before a very silent convention, a firm detestation of war and even go on to warn everybody about the Frankenstein possibilities of what he called 'the industrial-military complex' was Eisenhower. When he appeared, he was, after all, the American hero of the Second War, the nearest thing in 200 years to George Washington on a white horse. 

Well, last week, President Ford went before the legion convention. And it must have been a ticklish occasion for him, since he's been busy on his first dry run of presidential campaigning crying up the blessings of détente and, as I mentioned last week, even praising the farmers of the Midwest for helping with their bumper crops to open a door to the mainland of China and to improve relations with Russia. 

So the problem is how to be strong without being a jingo, how to hope for a reduction in strategic arms and yet guarantee American security, how to woo the Soviet Union and warn her in the same breath. I can only say that this balancing act was made immeasurably easier for President Ford by the Russian's blunt and frightening call, issued before the president climbed on to the platform in Minneapolis, for mass solidarity with the Portuguese Communists. We'll come to that in a minute, since it mocks and threatens the whole declaration of Helsinki and, perhaps before any audience, President Ford would have chosen to change his tune. 

However, forgetting it for the moment, let's just summarise what the president had to say because his speech before the legion is, I think, much the most significant statement on foreign policy that he's made since he came into the White House. He told the legionnaires, as a general principle, that détente means a fervent desire for peace but not peace at any price. He paid a passing tribute to the legion's social programmes but quickly remarked that people, however sincere, who think that the billions for defence should be transferred to the poor and the disadvantaged, were short-sighted. 

'I'm convinced,' he said, 'that adequate spending for national defence is an insurance policy. It's most valuable if we never need to use it but, without it, we could be wiped out. For the next fiscal year, I honestly and sincerely hope to hold down our spending on nuclear forces. This tentative judgement is conditioned on real progress in the strategic arms limitation talks but Congress and the American people must realise that unless agreement is reached, I will have no choice but to recommend to the Congress an additional two to three billion dollars for strategic weapons.' 

And then he brought up the dirty word. He wished there was a simple word in English to substitute for détente. To him, détente meant easing, or relaxing, 'but definitely not, I emphasise "not",' he said, 'the relaxing of diligence or the easing of effort. It means maintaining the strength to command respect from our adversaries and to provide leadership to our friends, not letting down our guard or dismantling our defences.' Helsinki had established, he thought, a basis for détente, not the thing itself. 'But we cannot raise the hopes of our people and shatter them by un-kept promises.' 

And now he came to the line that spoke for the volumes of misgivings his administration has felt since the first Russian comments on Portugal. 'We are now carefully watching some serious situations for indications of the Soviet attitude towards détente and cooperation in European security. The situation in Portugal is one of them. The United States expects Portugal to restore a democratic form of government but the Portuguese must find the solution in an atmosphere that is free from the pressures of outside forces.' 

To people in Washington who fear the worst, that's rather as if 40 years ago we had asked the Nazis and the Soviets to stop sending arms to Spain. I think it would be presumptuous to say that President Ford and Dr Kissinger see the declaration of Helsinki, only three weeks after its signing, as a hollow document but nothing the Russians have done, as distinct from what they've said, has so depressed the president in the year that he's had to deal with them. 

Let's recall that at the very end of the Helsinki conference, the assembled governments, including the United States and the Soviet Union, signed a document promising to support liberty of thought, conscience and faith, the exercise of political and civil rights, a freer flow of information, ideas and people and in the relations between states, non intervention, sovereign equality, self determination, territorial integrity and change by peaceful means. 

Well, within ten days of the signing, I don't think there can be the slightest doubt, Moscow has fed money –and now, at the least, official encouragement – to flout and deny in Portugal precisely liberty of thought and conscience, the exercise of political and civil rights, non intervention, sovereign equality, self determination and change by peaceful means. Cunhal, the Communist leader, simply brushes aside the elections that battered his party with a thumping 60 per cent majority. As for freedom of ideas and faith, the military have suppressed the last free newspaper and attacked a Catholic church. The legions of Portuguese who are enraged at their own suppression by a party that got only 12 per cent of the vote are regularly defined in the Soviet newspapers as hoodlums and neo-fascists. 

And beyond these desolating facts is the profound and effective cynicism of intervening in the most brutal way in Portugal and then saying that when the United States and the Common Market countries are shocked by the defiance of free elections, those countries are miffed that Portugal is not developing, quote, 'in a direction that suits the capitalist West and are, in effect, interfering directly in the internal affairs of Portugal'. This is surely, in the way of propaganda, the old Hitler technique of massing armies on the frontier of a cringing nation and then screaming that that nation is attacking the Third Reich. 

I'm afraid that the American columnist, James Reston, spoke nothing but the plainest truth when he wrote, 'The troubling thing is that the Soviet Union, after getting almost everything it wanted at Helsinki, mainly recognition of the national boundaries seized by force, should now invoke the Helsinki principles of liberty in order to help destroy liberty in Portugal.' 

This is what rankled in the mind of President Ford at Minneapolis. He was not tempering his hopes for détente to the windy patriotism of the legionnaires. He was taking a quite new stand and saying that, after Helsinki, there are limits to America's acquiescence in such another brutal seizure as that of Hungary.

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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