Michiko Kakutani: The Ford Administration as a Dress Rehearsal for Today
The title of Barry Werth's compelling but somewhat cursory new book, "31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today," refers to the tumultuous period following President Richard M. Nixon's resignation — a period in which President Gerald R. Ford tried to stabilize a country reeling from Watergate, reach a decision about pardoning his disgraced predecessor and establish an administration of his own. Those 31 days and the ensuing months were a period in which some of the key players in the current Bush administration — most notably Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — rose to power and established their mastery of intra-administration battles, a period that in some respects serves as a bookend to our own.
Both then and now, Mr. Rumsfeld (who succeeded Alexander Haig as Mr. Ford's chief of staff and later become his secretary of defense) and Mr. Cheney (who was Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy and went on to succeed him as chief of staff), served a president who had come into office with little foreign policy or national security experience. Both then and now, the two men helped implement conservative policies that represented a turnaround from an earlier realpolitik approach, and both then and now, they took on a standing secretary of state (in the case of the Ford administration, Henry A. Kissinger, the architect of Mr. Nixon's détente strategy; in the case of the current administration, Colin L. Powell, who tried to slow the rush to war against Iraq)....
Mr. Ford was attacked by Ronald Reagan and Senator Henry M. Jackson for being weak on communism. Meanwhile, as Mr. Mann wrote in "Rise of the Vulcans," Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney "began to undercut the power of Kissinger and of Kissinger's ally and friend Vice President Nelson Rockefeller," with Mr. Rumsfeld's eventually posing "a frontal challenge to Kissinger's policies of détente and arms control with the Soviet Union."
Another Ford administration effort to appease hardliners involved the appointment of a "Team B" (a group that included Paul Wolfowitz, who would go on to become deputy secretary of defense in the administration of George W. Bush) to second-guess C.I.A. analyses of intelligence on the Soviet Union. Though many of Team B's conclusions, which depicted the U.S.S.R. as an expansionist monster, were later discredited as hyperbole, Mr. Werth writes that its report "became the rallying point for opposition to détente and arms control": "Rumsfeld and Cheney drove the SALT II negotiations into the sand at the Pentagon and the White House," and "the vaunted Nixon-Kissinger realism in foreign affairs was at last stalled, if not defeated."
Two and a half decades later, another Team B-like group was set up at Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon to sift through raw intelligence. It focused on evidence that might link Iraq to Al Qaeda and make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And its findings would be used to challenge conventional intelligence estimates and help make the case for war against Iraq.
Again, Mr. Werth suggests parallels between now and then, between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld's influence on foreign and defense policy in the current administration and Mr. Nixon's determination to centralize decision-making in the White House; between the marginalization of the State Department now (in the walk-up to the war in Iraq) and then (over Vietnam and the Paris peace talks).
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Both then and now, Mr. Rumsfeld (who succeeded Alexander Haig as Mr. Ford's chief of staff and later become his secretary of defense) and Mr. Cheney (who was Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy and went on to succeed him as chief of staff), served a president who had come into office with little foreign policy or national security experience. Both then and now, the two men helped implement conservative policies that represented a turnaround from an earlier realpolitik approach, and both then and now, they took on a standing secretary of state (in the case of the Ford administration, Henry A. Kissinger, the architect of Mr. Nixon's détente strategy; in the case of the current administration, Colin L. Powell, who tried to slow the rush to war against Iraq)....
Mr. Ford was attacked by Ronald Reagan and Senator Henry M. Jackson for being weak on communism. Meanwhile, as Mr. Mann wrote in "Rise of the Vulcans," Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney "began to undercut the power of Kissinger and of Kissinger's ally and friend Vice President Nelson Rockefeller," with Mr. Rumsfeld's eventually posing "a frontal challenge to Kissinger's policies of détente and arms control with the Soviet Union."
Another Ford administration effort to appease hardliners involved the appointment of a "Team B" (a group that included Paul Wolfowitz, who would go on to become deputy secretary of defense in the administration of George W. Bush) to second-guess C.I.A. analyses of intelligence on the Soviet Union. Though many of Team B's conclusions, which depicted the U.S.S.R. as an expansionist monster, were later discredited as hyperbole, Mr. Werth writes that its report "became the rallying point for opposition to détente and arms control": "Rumsfeld and Cheney drove the SALT II negotiations into the sand at the Pentagon and the White House," and "the vaunted Nixon-Kissinger realism in foreign affairs was at last stalled, if not defeated."
Two and a half decades later, another Team B-like group was set up at Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon to sift through raw intelligence. It focused on evidence that might link Iraq to Al Qaeda and make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And its findings would be used to challenge conventional intelligence estimates and help make the case for war against Iraq.
Again, Mr. Werth suggests parallels between now and then, between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld's influence on foreign and defense policy in the current administration and Mr. Nixon's determination to centralize decision-making in the White House; between the marginalization of the State Department now (in the walk-up to the war in Iraq) and then (over Vietnam and the Paris peace talks).