The Helsinki Accords

The name Helsinki could come, in time, to be as significant historically, one way or another, as Waterloo, Munich, Yalta, Bretton Woods, Stalingrad but I don't think anybody, only days away from the event, can say exactly what, historically, was done there.

It could be a new start towards a world in which a threat to one nation of Europe is seen to be a threat to the whole continent. It could be not a peace treaty, but an instrument of surrender, an admission after 30 years that the borders which the Russians froze at the end of the Second War are now locked up for good so that the Iron Curtain becomes a permanent frontier between two Europes. 

Somebody has called Helsinki 'a corrective operation long overdue' but I think we're too close to the surgeons, they're only just washing up and the time to talk about it will be weeks, maybe months, from now when we can see more clearly the post-operative symptoms and say whether the patient is truly a new man or a man with a permanent limp from an operation that failed. 

In the meantime, I'd just like to notice that, however grand or legally precise the Helsinki document may be that attempts to ensure the security of the 33 European states, every nation still thinks first of its own security as an independent necessity and last week three of those states – a big one and two little ones – reacted very differently to the idea that they still need the protection either of American or Soviet forces. The big state is, of course, Turkey and the one of the little states is so minute – only 24 square miles – that it appeared at Helsinki with understandable chips on its shoulder after the chuckling from the other nations that it should there at all. 

It is San Marino, the tiny, landlocked compound on top of a mountain in the Italian Apennines. 

The San Marino delegate – the only woman leader, incidentally, of a national delegation – has sat through the whole 30 months of talks that eventually beat out the complicated and god-awful prose of the final agreement. To the question which was put to her, 'Why did you come at all? What power can a 24-square mile country possibly wield against the immense shadows of the surrounding giants?' She replied that even the tiniest nation cannot count on another nation to protect its vital interests and she brought up a startling bit of historical proof which the big boys might well ponder. 

A century and a half ago, Napoleon offered to extend the boundaries of San Marino to give it access to the sea, something that every nation, then and now, has always craved. San Marino turned him down on the very realistic principle that, as the delegate said last week, sooner or later we should have had to fight and give up the land. They preferred to stay small and landlocked and not excite the ambitions of their neighbours. And this offers, it seems to me, an extraordinarily sensible attitude which directly challenges the general and perpetual childishness of national pride. 

Well, now, another small state, Malta, held up the final document for days by insisting that it should urge the withdrawal from Western Europe of all American and Soviet forces. The snag here, of course, was that the Soviet Union is a European power and its conventional military power, its infantry, not to mention its new, great navy, puts it on the doorstep, or the shore, of all Western Europe. So the withdrawal of Soviet and American forces would be no quid pro quo to the NATO countries. American force represents 'their' European force. Naturally, neither the Soviet Union and the communist Eastern European nations, nor the United States and the NATO countries were willing to do this. 

Turkey – that is our big, current problem, a challenge to the Helsinki Pact in the moment that everybody was signing it. During the past few months, while President Ford has been being briefed about European attitudes towards the Helsinki summit, it became clear to him that Turkey was a difficult, special case. It was bristling with anger over the arms embargo imposed by the United States after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The Americans felt they couldn't possibly deal in good faith with Turkey and Cyprus if American arms had been responsible, as they were, for the invasion. 

However, the United States has 20 military bases of various kinds there, the most important of which are centres for the electronic monitoring of Soviet military movements and intelligence. That's only one point. Another is that Turkey, with an army of 350,000 men is the biggest of the NATO forces and it was easily the most effective, or potentially the most effective, so long as the supply of American arms flowed smoothly. 

But now the Turks have been putting out feelers to Western Europe for arms and that would be all right provided they were financed in Western Europe but, as you may have heard, Western Europe is feeling the pinch in the pockets of its economies and the financing for the arms would have to come, in all probability, from the Arabs. Now Turkey has been, for a long time, friendly, sympathetic to Israel. Obviously, the necessary Arab money might not be forthcoming unless Turkey changed its sympathies in the Middle East. 

This was the awkward situation that Mr Ford and Dr Kissinger had in mind when the president, before Helsinki, appealed to Congress to lift the Turkish arms embargo. Congress? A surprisingly large number of sophisticated Europeans, in attendance at Helsinki, said, 'What has Congress to do with it?' The sophisticates obviously came from countries where foreign policy is in the hands, exclusively, of the government in power. But the President of the United States cannot, well, he cannot sign any treaties with a foreign power without the consent of the Senate and the constitution also says that Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. So that's where the House of Representatives comes in too. 

I have given you the background of the complications that riddle Turkish-American relations and of which President Ford is very well aware but which many members of the House of Representatives didn't know about or, for various reasons having to do with the national origin of their constituents, didn't want to know about. Anyway, the House voted last week to reject the president's plea to lift the embargo on arms to Turkey and, while the president was off in Europe his party leaders did something to point out to Congress the mischief it might do by defying the Turks. So, on Thursday, the bill was reintroduced and it was passed by the Senate but only by a single vote. 

The House, however, refused to be pressed or persuaded. The chairman of the House Rules Committee said that he'd look at the bill again in September and then the Congress took off into the steaming heat for a month's recess. Whether or not the House eventually relents and lifts the embargo, the consequences of its first defiance of Turkey remain the same. The Turks, as you know, retaliated instantly by halting the work of the American military bases and taking some of them over. The news flashes made much of the fact that to have these bases out of American hands would reduce the European monitoring of Soviet intelligence by about 25 per cent. But it seems to me a more important fact is that at all times, even in war time, the hands of the President of the United States can be tied by the Congress or he can be compelled to shell out money to nations he'd rather not subsidise. An interesting and puzzling detail, not much dwelt on, has to do with what we call 'executive funds'. 

These are monies, in very considerable amounts, that are voted the president with no strings attached. He may dip into them as he chooses. So even after the vote in the House, he had, I understand, about $100 million he could have given to the Turks in executive funds. He didn't do it and we can only guess that he didn't do it for an old, old reason, namely that when a president uses executive funds to bypass the will of Congress on a matter about which it feels strongly, he's laying up all sorts of trouble by way of retaliation later on. 

Also, on this matter, we should remember that the United States has very few citizens of Turkish origin. It has an awful lot of people of Greek origin. For several generations, in fact, all the lowly work out West in the copper mines of Utah, the silver mines of Nevada, was done by Greeks. The so-called Greek lobby in Congress is powerful and very vocal and the president was told before the vote that the Greek lobby was going to prevail, which it did. 

Well, this is, I imagine, only one knotty issue among scores that Mr Ford, Dr Kissinger and their aides have been thrashing over before they went to Helsinki. It reminds us – especially the idealists among us journalists – that the real world is not at all like Gary Cooper Westerns or those rousing little comedy dramas that Frank Capra used to direct, in which James Stewart, a country boy with a pure heart, goes to Washington and defies and conquers the bad guys in Congress. 

I once had the touching idea of a television feature which would show what happened to a young man who ran for Congress and got there. I wanted it not to be a composed script, but a documentary starting with a real candidate in his home town, watching him campaign, interviewing him to hear what he thought Congress was like and what he hoped to do there. Not knowing who'd be elected, we obviously had to shadow two candidates. And then we'd follow the winner to Washington and interview him again six months, say, after he'd settled in. 

Well, to do this I had to have the permission of the Speaker of the House who, in those days, was the formidable and, I may add, quite incorruptible representative from Bonham, Texas, Sam Rayburn, universally known as 'Mr Sam' – a man with a head like a bullet and bald as an egg. Well, he said it wouldn't do to show just one winner. You'd have to have one Republican winner and one Democrat (he was a Democrat). It also wouldn't do to have only a congressman, you'd have to have two senators. The whole thing got too unwieldy and at last we wrote, shall I say, an imaginative script to be acted out – a work of fiction – for which we would hire one particularly fine, upstanding actor. It would be cleaner, simpler, more inspiring and it was to be called 'A clean, fresh breeze'. 

I went back to Mr Sam to ask him if it was all right to film our actor in the chamber and offices of the House of Representatives. The veins started to bulge in his neck. He remembered, with considerable ire, Capra's 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' and he put paid to the whole project by saying suddenly, 'An actor, have you ever met an actor, Son? They're terrible people. They wear wigs and they get their teeth fixed baby white!'.

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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