Reagan on the Offensive

"It would be funny," said Johnny Carson, "if he turned out to be NBC's only hit." Carson was referring to Ronald Reagan, whose speech last week was a moderate success, as speeches go.

According to a Nielsen rating, Reagan drew 17% of the national audience that had its sets on that night, running well behind The Blue Knight on CBS (33%) and ABC's Starsky and Hutch (43%). Even so, 13 million people saw some or all of a blistering attack on a Republican Administration by a leading Republican. Responding to an appeal for funds, viewers began sending in pledges that Reagan's men predicted would total "substantially" more than the $110,000 cost of the entire venture.

Desperate to survive cruel April, when he stands to lose big to Gerald Ford in New York, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Reagan persuaded NBC to sell him a half-hour of prime time after the other two networks had turned him down. To make room, NBC pre-empted one of its turkeys, The Dumplings. Reagan spent twelve hours polishing several drafts and five hours taping the show at a Hollywood commercial studio.

Train Talk. Reagan raced through his old standard speech, which he had honed with some new sarcastic edges. He accused President Ford of being soft on inflation and Big Government spending, noting that "it took this nation 166 years, until the middle of World War II, to finally accumulate a debt of $95 billion. It took the Administration just the last twelve months to add $95 billion to the debt."

Reagan's real assault, however, was launched against the Administration's military and foreign policies. "The evidence mounts," he declared, "that we are No. 2 in a world where it is dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best... Peace does not come from weakness or retreat. It comes from restoration of American military superiority."

His most biting attacks were aimed at Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Reagan claimed that Kissinger has been quoted as saying that he "thinks of the U.S. as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta," and that " 'the day of the U.S. is past, and today is the day of the Soviet Union. My job is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available.' "

Reagan was paraphrasing quotes from a book, On Watch, by Retired Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., former Navy chief, which will be published in June. Zumwalt is running on the Democratic ticket for U.S. Senator in Virginia, and his platform consists largely of attacks on Kissinger. The admiral says that Kissinger made the statement to him on a train going to the 1970 Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia and again during a talk in 1972. Kissinger declared through an aide that the statement was "pure invention and totally irresponsible." The Secretary has often spoken pessimistically in private about the future of the West, but he has never gone this far, even in the Spenglerian depths of his despair. As for Zumwalt, he stood by his account of what Kissinger had told him.

Reagan also attacked Helmut Sonnenfeldt, 49, Kissinger's acerbic, brilliant, right-hand man ("Kissinger's Kissinger") on East-West relations and arms control. He claimed that Sonnenfeldt, who is a German-born, hard-line antiCommunist, "has expressed the belief that in effect the captive nations [in Eastern Europe] should give up any claim of national sovereignty and simply become a part of the Soviet Union."

Reagan was inspired by press accounts of an off-the-record lecture Sonnenfeldt gave last December in London to Europe-based U.S. ambassadors. At the same meeting, Kissinger said that the U.S. favored maintaining a position of "stability" with Russia, one that would exclude Communists from power in Western Europe but would also acknowledge Moscow's influence in Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia excepted) as a fact of life.

Then Sonnenfeldt elaborated. Not only did he warn that any Soviet satellite's attempt to break away probably would be crushed by Moscow's power but such an uprising could "sooner or later explode, causing World War III." He added that greater freedom in Eastern European countries could improve the image of Communism and make it easier for the party to elect candidates in Western Europe. Indeed, Sonnenfeldt and Kissinger do believe it is more important to exclude Communists from power in the West than it is to encourage liberals in the East. Two weeks ago, Kissinger told the House International Relations Committee that some of his aide's language had been "unfortunate."

'An Outrage.' TIME Washington Correspondent Strobe Talbott reports that "nothing in any version of Sonnenfeldt's remarks justified Reagan's charge that he had consigned the 'slaves' of Eastern Europe to 'become part of the Soviet Union.' U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe has not changed. While Sonnenfeldt is fearful of the effects of any abrupt move toward independence in the Soviet bloc nations, he insists that the heart of his own so-called doctrine is the notion of gradual liberalization in Eastern Europe. Says he: 'We want to get the Soviet Union to accept the process of greater autonomy for Eastern European countries without a repetition of [the Soviet clampdowns] in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.' "

Kissinger branded Reagan's remarks "an outrage." Ford said grimly that the speech was in many ways "misleading" and "inaccurate" and that the remarks attributed to Kissinger were "fabrication and invention." While not challenging Reagan's observation that the Soviets lead in conventional military forces, he noted that the U.S. has far more nuclear warheads and a 3-to-1 advantage in bombers.

Even so, the President's aides worry that the challenger's slashing attacks, while not depriving him of the nomination, could give the Democrats ammunition for later and thus harm Ford's election chances. They are apprehensive about a long period of divisiveness within the G.O.P.

Candidate Reagan pronounced himself pleased with Performer Reagan's showing on TV. Asked about President Ford's angry reaction to the program, the Republican challenger replied: "It seems we touched a nerve."

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