When the Center Held by Donald Rumsfeld

Author:Donald Rumsfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

 11

Commander in Chief

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

May 9, 1975

8:32 to 9:09 a.m.

We believe freedom is a God-given right of man and that it’s a natural state and, therefore, it is worth preserving.1

Nearing the end of the first full year of his presidency, Gerald Ford was earning respectable marks from the press for his efforts on the world stage, and had received a significant bump up for his successful handling of the Mayaguez incident. But throughout his tenure, he found himself squeezed between two foreign policy impulses, impulses picked over by professors of international relations, but given real-world weight by the sprawling policy infrastructure inside the D.C. Beltway. One was traditional. The other, while it certainly reflected ideals and experiences of the American tradition, represented something distinctly contemporary.

The traditional impulse was the classical realism of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which held that stability in the international realm was best assured by balancing the power of different states. The challenging view, championed prominently on the right by Ronald Reagan—and soon after by writers and scholars who became known as “neoconservatives”—argued that a more aggressive posture, paired with concern for human liberty, was preferred. “Peace through strength,” Reagan would avow as an echo of Eisenhower and Washington before him when challenging Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980.

Looking back, it’s interesting that all five of the presidents preceding Ford and six of the seven following him were considered by historians and journalists to have a foreign policy “doctrine.” With the shortest time as President, it is not surprising that President Ford’s set of beliefs about America’s responsibilities and duties remain less definable. With all the challenges he was facing as one who had never run for the office, President Ford was too preoccupied with the problems of the present to set forth a “long view.” In other words, one of the more significant disadvantages of his instant presidency was that he was never afforded an opportunity to map out his own distinct vision for America’s role.

That is not to say Ford didn’t have strong views when it came to foreign policy. He had a streak of idealism when it came to overseas actors and their motivations. He was concerned by the never-ending strife in the Middle East. He knew war. “War is devastating—destructive—and kills the faith and hope of all mankind,” he lamented to Kissinger in a letter in January 1975. Yet there was no doubt he was in his core an optimist. In that letter, he proposed the creation of a “Middle East Common Market” between Arabs and Israelis that might “give all their peoples a life of peace and tranquility.”2

Because he was President such a short time, he never enunciated a Ford Doctrine. What Ford did do was balance the policies of the inherited Nixon presidency with the growing movement for a stronger tone from the Republican right. But even in his short tenure, Ford made a series of decisions that arguably helped set the stage for America’s Cold War victory.

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