Carter: Black and Blue

Critics berate him for weakness, but he keeps to a course of restraint

Skimming down a steep, snow-covered road at Camp David in Maryland's lovely Catoctin Mountains, Jimmy Carter was enjoying the brisk air of an afternoon in the woods when the tip of one of his thin skis caught beneath a crust of rough ice. The President of the United States went down hard. The consequences of this tumble were clearly visible when he returned to snow-paralyzed Washington the next day: an ugly purple bruise the size of a silver dollar over his right eye, several bright red scratches on his cheek, a puffy lip and a slight limp. It took the deftest ministrations of his makeup woman to hide the wounds before public appearances.

The bruising of the President did not stop all week. Despite Carter's efforts to appear decisive and determined in his handling of the nation's affairs, he kept encountering hidden obstacles. And as his standing in U.S. public opinion polls once again sank, world events seemed conspiring to prove his frequently repeated assertion that "the United States cannot control events within other nations."

The Chinese invasion of Viet Nam and the Soviet warnings of armed retaliation against China produced a new convulsion in a world already alarmed by the turmoil in the Middle East and Africa (see WORLD). While the fighting did not immediately involve U.S. interests--indeed the U.S. could take some ironic satisfaction from this conflict among the Communist powers, and in Viet Nam of all places--the prospect of a wider war was deeply disturbing. If the Soviets became involved, would the fighting spread beyond Viet Nam? And was there any way for the U.S. to contain it? "We will not get involved in a conflict between Asian Communist states," Carter promised last week. But the only remedies he offered were those of the mediator--"to express our deep concern ... to encourage restraint."

In Iran, similarly, the Khomeini revolution continued to lurch along unpredictable paths, with the U.S. acting largely as a bystander. Leftist gunmen kidnaped and then freed a wounded U.S. Marine embassy guard. American civilians continued their airborne exodus. Sure of its case, the U.S. did respond more firmly than it had earlier to the killing of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs. It slashed aid to Afghanistan from $15 million to $3 million, sparing only humanitarian projects, and it angrily rejected Moscow's claim that Soviet advisers were not involved in the killing. But here, too, Carter conveyed an impression --however unfair that impression might be--of helplessness.

No one event, no single mistake, produced this new season of political depression for Carter. The President's loss of stature is both a cause and effect of his handling of foreign policy. There is a pervasive sense at home and also abroad that Carter is not in command.

Europeans especially are concerned.

Editorialized Paris' right-of-center Le Figaro: "U.S. influence has shrunk in all directions. It has lost Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Yemen, Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia and most recently a kingpin in Iran, guardian of the Gulfs oil... the Yankee umbrella has more and more holes in it. The free world now asks itself the question: Must it still count on Americans?" London's Daily Telegraph was no kinder: "There is a nervelessness at the center in Washington coupled with clumsiness at the extremities. Hence the alarming loss of respect."

Following from this kind of perception comes a real diminution of Carter's ability to act decisively and effectively, either abroad or at home. Yet when Carter's aides challenge his critics to explain what he should be doing differently, the rhetoric is strong, but the answers are far from persuasive. If Americans feel resentful at the sense of being pushed around, and many do, they also remain deeply wary of any new military involvement in the far corners of the world.

The perception of Carter as irresolute is hardly news to the White House. A group of outside political consultants who assembled there not long ago delivered a litany of political problems affecting a wide variety of unhappy groups, among them Jews, blacks and labor unions. Here too, as in foreign affairs, Carter seemed to keep saying that there were limits to what he could do. Finally one former presidential adviser summed up the feelings of the group. Said he: "The President has a terminal case of meekness." The Harris poll reflected this view in its latest measurement of Carter's popular standing. Only 36% of those surveyed gave the President an overall favorable rating. When he goes to California this week in an effort to drum up support, Carter will find some Democrats openly hostile. Not only are the $1,000-a-plate tickets for the Democratic National Committee dinner moving slowly, but some onetime Carter supporters have formed a group called Democrats for Change, 1980, and are staging a rival dinner. Says one of them, TV Producer Norman Lear: "What we need more than anything else is someone to give us a sense of purpose."

With barely a year before the first primaries, the already crowded Republican presidential school is drawn toward Carter like sharks to blood. One after another, the G.O.P. hopefuls last week attacked what now seemed their best immediate target, Carter's foreign policy. Ronald Reagan led the way: "I'm beginning to wonder if the symbol of the United States pretty soon isn't going to be an ambassador with a flag under his arm climbing into the escape helicopter." Former Texas Governor John Connally charged that the coming SALT II treaty will do nothing "but legitimize and condone the Soviets' overtaking the United States in strategic arms between now and 1985." Onetime CIA Director George Bush complained that even the Chinese Communists are concerned about "the lack of U.S. resolution on Iran." Asserted Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker: "There is a growing view that America is a patsy and we never retaliate. We do more with someone who shoots a cop than someone who assassinates an ambassador." None of these challengers, of course, bears any responsibility for the commitment of American lives to distant causes.

Carter undertook to answer the critics and skeptics in a major speech at Georgia Tech, where he had once been a student. Originally he had planned a lengthy defense of the pending SALT agreement, but he and his advisers realized that he now had to take a broader approach.

Carter declared anew his thesis that the U.S. power to control geopolitical change is limited--and not necessarily useful. "We do not oppose change," he said. "Many of the political currents sweeping the world express a desire we share--the desire for a world in which the legitimate aspirations of nations and individuals have a greater chance of fulfillment." In such cases--and he included Iran--there was no cause for U.S. intervention. Said he: "Those who argue that the United States could or should intervene directly to thwart these events are wrong about the realities of Iran."

At the same time, Carter warned of "the darker side of change." If "others" interfere in Iran, he promised, there would be "serious consequences." His charge: "In the Middle East, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world, we will stand by our friends--we will honor our commitments--and we will protect the vital interests of the United States" (see box). That sounded impressive, though any President would presumably say much the same thing, but it is not easy to apply such traditional principles to the complexities of international politics.

This applies not only to his critics in the U.S. One of the chief lessons from the new series of world conflicts is the extreme limit on the ability of all the great powers to determine the course of events. China, despite its pretensions of becoming a global force, met with no success in its efforts to prevent a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The Soviet Union, despite its nearly one million troops on the Chinese border, was unable to prevent China's openly announced punitive expedition into Viet Nam. The U.S. lost its own direct influence in Indochina in 1975 when the remnants of the once mighty American presence there abandoned the crumbling citadel of Saigon.

In trying to set a policy course to follow in response to the Chinese invasion, the Carter Administration was hampered last week by uncertainty over exactly what was happening in Asia. For one thing, a heavy cloud cover prevented the usual satellite reconnaissance, forcing U.S. experts to rely on intercepted radio messages to determine the progress of the Chinese forces. For another, Administration officials differed in their judgments of both Chinese and Soviet intentions. Immediately at issue was a planned trip by Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal to Peking. Some State Department experts opposed the trip, arguing that a postponement would indicate, to Moscow as well as Peking, that the U.S. was strongly displeased with the Chinese attack.

But National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski differed sharply. He argued that by sending Blumenthal according to schedule, the Administration was sticking to its position that the Chinese invasion is a direct result of the Soviet-encouraged Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and that simply urging all parties to restrain themselves is the best policy. Carter agreed with Brzezinski, and Blumenthal left Washington at week's end.

Reasoned a senior Administration official: "Why should we hurt ourselves by stopping our efforts to enhance our now normal relationship with China? Let's not be so hysterical about this that we do things that endanger our interest." Said one Sino-Soviet expert: "Secretly, I revel in this sort of thing. Of course, there are hazards in it; there is the danger that the war could upset the stability of the entire region. But from a strictly hardheaded standpoint, the best thing might be that there is no outcome to the Sino-Vietnamese-Soviet conflict, that they all sort of exhaust one another in there."

One problem that has plagued Carter's handling of foreign affairs is a disconcerting tendency of his aides to disagree in public about U.S. policy. Despite a stern lecture only three weeks ago, in which

Carter told his staffers to keep policy differences to themselves, another conflict occurred last week when State Department Soviet Expert Marshall Shulman predicted that the Soviet Union would not intervene to punish China. Said Shulman: "If [the war] remains essentially at roughly the same scale, it seems to us not likely that the Soviet Union will respond on the Sino-Soviet border." Others close to the President are less sanguine, worrying that the longer the Chinese-Vietnamese conflict goes on, the more likely some Russian action becomes.

The President himself feels unfairly besieged by the rash of criticism of his foreign policy. He thinks that his show of restraint should be seen not as weakness but rather as the patient forbearance of a powerful nation and its leader. Indeed, in all his public speeches, even as a candidate, Carter usually lowered his voice to make his main points, apparently expecting that he would thus gain more respect than if he indulged himself in stridency.

"We just do not see, substantively, where we would have or should have done much differently," one of his closest aides said last week. "But obviously, we should be saying it differently." Concludes a Washington foreign policy analyst: "The whole post-World War II era is crumbling. The international rules are such that any small country, or even any band of terrorists, can do more or less what it wants, and given the decline in the ability of the great powers to intervene, there is really nothing that we or anybody else can do about it."

Though that may be true, Carter remains determined to press ahead in certain areas that give promise of progress. The most important of these is SALT, which remains a primary Administration goal despite Carter's warnings against Soviet interference in Iran. Said one White House adviser last week: "We want SALT whether our relations with Moscow are good or bad. We want SALT whether we are cooperating or competing."

But even if Moscow finally comes to agree, the chances for Senate ratification of the SALT treaty were adversely affected by Carter's rather passive tone. The bristling confrontation between the Communist powers will strengthen fears about their intentions, and Senate opponents of SALT will argue that Carter has not been tough enough in the negotiations. And to the extent that American power already seems limited, advocates of SALT will have a more difficult time convincing skeptics that the U.S. should accept further limitations on its military might.

The other goal is an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which now more than ever could help stabilize the Middle East. At Camp David, the scene of what seemed last year to be Carter's one foreign policy triumph, Egypt's Premier Moustafa Khalil and Israel's Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan were again negotiating (see WORLD). But after months of stalemate, the omens were not good. Carter himself said that his own efforts as an intermediary had reached "the bounds of propriety," and, perhaps giving away a bargaining point in advance, he added that he had "approached the limit on the legitimate influence" he could bring on Saudi Arabia and Jordan to support an Arab-Israeli accord. If no progress is made at Camp David, Carter's September initiative will have been fruitless, but any signs of progress would slow Carter's ominous slide from a position of leadership. Said Vice President Walter Mondale of Camp David: "We are counting on something there. We have to."

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