TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/80/80capsov.2

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COVER STORIES
Carter Takes Charge

Buoyed by victory in Iowa, he issues a major warning to Moscow

February 4, 1980

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered."--Thomas Paine

For Jimmy Carter, these were indeed the times that try men's souls.
For weeks he had been striding angrily around the White House,
frustrated over his inability to free the 50 American hostages in
Tehran and outraged over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  He had
been uncharacteristically short-tempered with aides, sometimes
snapping at them for no good reason.  On occasion he seemed distant
and depressed.  He prayed more often than usual.  Finally, this phase
of Jimmy Carter's time of trial seemed to end last week as he emerged
from the White House to try seriously to take charge of the nation's
fortunes.

In the first real test of his campaign for re-election, he gave
Senator Edward Kennedy the walloping of his life at the Iowa
Democratic presidential caucuses.  Without a doubt, as once
predicted, Carter did "whip his ass."  Then, standing in the glare of
TV lights in the House of Representatives, the President sent the
Soviets a forceful warning in his State of the Union address:  "Let
our position be absolutely clear:  An attempt by any outside force to
gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United States of AMerica.  ANd
such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including
military force."  To make that warning more credible, Carter reversed
a policy of just a few months ago and decided to ask Congress to
authorize the registration of young Americans--perhaps including
women--for the draft.

The sense of decisiveness that Carter projected in his speech was
reinforced throughout the week.  The House voted 386 to 12 to back
the President's request that the Summer Olympics be moved from
Moscow, canceled or boycotted by the West; the Senate is expected to
follow suit soon.  Congress granted China most-favored-nation status,
which has long been denied to Moscow, meaning that tariffs on
Peking's goods will be reduced to the lowest rates levied on imports
from other U.S. trading partners.  The Defense Department announced
that the U.S. is now willing to sell China military equipment,
including trucks, communications gear and early-warning radar, but no
weapons.  The Air Force flew several B-52s from Guam over Soviet
ships in the Indian Ocean to demonstrate U.S. ability to project
military power in the area.  Said a Pentagon official:  "If that
message was lost on them, their hearing aids were turned off."

There had been advance speculation that the President was drawing up
a "Carter Doctrine," something comparable to Harry Truman's 1947
decision to aid Greece and Turkey in resisting Soviet expansionism.
Carter's speech was hardly that.  There were too many ambiguities,
too many loopholes, too many major things that should have been faced
but were not.  Nonetheless, the speech marked a turning point in U.S.
global policy.  For the first time since the Viet Name War, a
President was stating his willingness to sent troops to defend U.S.
vital interests in a faraway place.  In explicitly extending the U.S.
defense shield to Southwest Asia, Carter was officially laying to
rest the so-called Nixon "Doctrine" of 1969, by which Washington was
supposed to rely mostly on regional allies to protect themselves and
American interests.

For Carter, this was a deep and difficult change.  He had entered
office believing that detente meant cooperation between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union.  He had promised to cut military spending, withdraw
U.S. troops from South Korea, reduce arms sales abroad and
demilitarize the Indian Ocean.  In May 1977, Carter stood in cap and
gown at the University of Notre Dame commencement and exulted that
the U.S. was "now free of that inordinate fear of Communism, which
once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear."
Henceforth, he said, the U.S. would try "to persuade the Soviet Union
that one country cannot impose its system of society upon another
[through military force]."  Despite arguments over human rights and
various conflicts in Africa, Carter clung to his faith and
emotionally embraced Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev
when they signed the SALT II agreement at last year's Vienna summit.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Brezhnev's at best misleading
explanation on the hot line to Washington Struck Carter as a personal
betrayal.  Many said he had brought the crisis on himself, that his
policies conveyed an impression to the Soviets of weakness and
indecision.  If that was the Soviet impression, Carter was plainly
determined to wipe it out.

As the President struggled to define a U.S. response to the crisis in
Tehran and Afghanistan and formulate his new position on Soviet
adventurism, aides found him extraordinarily preoccupied.  He
uncharacteristically left to them most of the day-to-day details of
his re-election campaign.  He came as usual to the Oval Office at
5:30 a.m., often brooding alone and scribbling notes at his big
carved oak desk.  He summoned outside foreign policy experts, such as
former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and former U.N. Ambassador
Henry Cabot Lodge, to supplement the views that he was getting from
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski.  Almost daily, the President asked aides to obtain old
Government reports and history texts on how his predecessors handled
international crises.  He consulted by phone with foreign leaders.

In the evening, he often worked in his living quarters until
midnight, cutting back on his sleep by about an hour, to no more than
five hours.  Though he seemed well rested in the morning, he tired
noticeably by the end of the day.  he had less time for jogging,
about three miles a day instead of his usual four or five.

When Rosalynn was at his side, in between her repeated campaign
forays to Iowa and New England, she continued to perform her
extraordinary role as the President's most trusted adviser.  Around
the White House she is known as a "Brzezinski-liner" because she has
long shared the security adviser's hawkish views, both on the Soviets
and on the plight of the American captives in Tehran.  She has warned
that Soviet assurances of future cooperation should be mistrusted.
She has also argued that persuasion has no effect on the Ayatullah
Ruhollah Khomeini, and as far back as when the hostages were first
seized, she favored blockading Iran's ports.

In preparing his State of the Union speech, Carter followed his
normal practice of asking aides for suggestions, then meeting with
them individually and in groups to discuss their ideas.  it quickly
became apparent that even though he was beset by inflation and other
economic problems at home, he wanted the speech to be devoted mostly
to foreign policy and that he wanted to take a stronger approach to
Moscow than had previously been favored by the State Department.

One major debate within Carter's inner circle was over whether he
should call for revival of draft registration, which ended in 1976
when Congress put the Selective Service System in hibernation.
Carter was opposed to restoring the draft itself, but Vance and
Secretary of Defense Harold Brown argued that by resuming Selective
Service registration, Carter would underscore his intention to stand
firm against further Soviet expansionism.  Carter was still not
persuaded, and draft registration was not part of the speech that he
took with him to Camp David on the weekend before he was to deliver
his address.

At the presidential retreat, with no advisers but his wife, Carter
practically rewrote the entire speech.  On Saturday he inserted draft
registration to give the address more bite.

By the time Carter returned to Washington on Monday, he had a new
speech that an aide described as "tougher than what went with him to
Camp David."  It was a hard, anti-Soviet address that largely
reflected Brzezinski's views, rather than those of Vance.  Said a
senior State Department official:  "Zbig's finally got his cold war."
Indeed, is struck some foreign policy experts as ironic that
Brzezinski's longstanding advocacy of a tough line had apparently
been vindicated by a crisis that his arguments, his Moscow-baiting
and his tilt toward Peking may have helped to cause.

That evening, Carter took a break to watch the caucus results from
Iowa on TV.  At 9:30 p.m., Appointments Secretary Phillip Wise phoned
to congratulate Carter on his overwhelming victory.  The President
and his wife were ecstatic.  Said an aide:  "You could practically
hear him grinning from ear to ear."  Rosalynn was even more
emotional.  Said another staffer: "She was so excited that she was
just flying."  Next morning, Carter greeted a top adviser with "the
biggest smile that I've seen in a long time," but he quickly got back
to the speech.  When another aide raised the subject of politics
later in the morning, the president snapped:  "Get out.  Stop
bothering me.  I don't have time to talk about it."

By then, some key aides were objecting that the address drew too
specific a line against the Soviets and contained to many details.
it described, for example, how U.S. forces would eventually be based
at defensive facilities around the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean (the
U.S. is negotiating for use of ports and airfields in Kenya, Oman and
Somalia).  It was argued that by making the speech more ambiguous,
the President would retain more flexibility on critical questions,
such as what specific Soviet actions would constitute a threat
against U.S. interests in the Gulf region and how the U.S. would
respond.  Another debate was over how Carter should refer to the area
he was proposing to defend.  he finally decided that "the oilfields"
sounded too crass, and settled on "the Persian Gulf region."

By Wednesday morning Carter had slightly blurred the speech,
disappointing the hawkish faction among his White House advisers, who
feared that the Soviets would view it as mostly rhetoric.  One of the
President's aides took consolation in describing the speech as
"forcefully ambiguous."  Vance was also unhappy with the rhetoric,
but for a different reason.  According to a close associate, he was
concerned that the language was too flamboyant, giving the impression
that Carter was overreacting and raising the danger that he would not
be able to deliver on his threat of repelling a Soviet assault in the
Persian Gulf.

That evening, as Carter stood at the polished walnut lectern, he
looked nervous for only a moment, first licking and then biting his
upper lip.  Then he began moving somberly but smoothly through the
32-minute address, before a packed audience of top Administration
officials, Supreme Court Justices, Congressmen, Senators and
diplomats--and a TV audience of tens of millions.

Among his key points:

- He is firmly opposed to sending a U.S. Olympic team to Moscow
because of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.  (This was greeted with
15 seconds of applause, the longest ovation of the speech.)

- The long-pending CIA charter must be enacted to improve U.S.
intelligence.  The legislation would tighten the agency's control
over sensitive information and broaden the range of covert activities
that it could conduct without specific presidential approval.

- Energy legislation left from last year, including the windfall
profits tax, must be passed promptly.  U.S. dependence on foreign oil
is "a clear and present danger to our nation's security," said
Carter.  But he did not call for any new energy measures, and he
failed to emphasize the obvious need for an all-out drive to cut U.S.
oil consumption.*

All in all, it was one of the best-received speeches of Carter's
presidency.  It was firm, measured, strongly felt.  He was stopped by
applause 20 times.  As he left the House chamber, he waved
exuberantly, grinned broadly and plunged into the crowd like a
campaigner, grabbing for arms with both hands.

Reaction to the speech in Congress was sharply partisan.  Democratic
Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, a proponent of increasing
military strength and generally no Carter ally on foreign policy
issues, called the address "a good beginning on hammering out a
doctrine [on Southwest Asia]."

 South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who favors less military
spending, described the speech as "a good and constructive effort."
Florida Democrat Richard Stone, chairman of a Senate subcommittee on
the Near East, said that Carter outlined "a clear containment
doctrine, and, if it means what it implies, it is the strongest
statement that any President in recent years has made."  By contrast,
House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona accused Carter of
"rattling the scabbard without anything in it."  Said Senate Acting
Minority Leader Ted Stevens of Alaska:  "If the Carter Doctrine had
been in effect before Afghanistan we'd be at war with the Soviet
Union now.  We're attempting to speak strongly while carrying a short
stick."

The initial Soviet reaction also involved sticks.  Said Soviet
newspaper Izvestia:  "The Carter Doctrine is an attempt to revive
President Theodore Roosevelt's 'big stick' policy.  [It portends a]
rapid and global interference with a view to suppressing the national
liberation movement of the peoples and protecting the colonial
interests of the dollar empire."

Among U.S. allies in Europe, only Britain, which has consistently
backed the U.S. in the Afghanistan crisis, expressed immediate
support for Carter.  With Prime Minister MArgaret Thatcher nodding
agreement, Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Ian Gilmour declared in the
House of Commons:  "We and our American allies will use all possible
measures to contain this [Soviet] threat."  A West German Chancellery
official complained that Carter's "warning about the Gulf states
could have been made more subtly.  A lower, very steady tone would be
better than stridency."  Many foreign diplomats in Washington agreed.
Said a French diplomat who represents the Common market:  "Carter's
rhetoric is tough, but the program is not."  Added an official in the
British embassy:  "The proof of Carter's intentions will be in the
execution.  If you don't follow up, you risk inviting Soviet
influence into the area."

That may be, at least in the short run, a critical deficiency in
Carter's policy.  The U.S. at present does not have the military
forces to repel any Soviet invasion of the Persian Gulf area.  The
U.S. now has 21 warships, including two aircraft carriers, in the
Indian Ocean.  But their planes can be used only for lightning
strikes.  Pentagon officials admit that the U.S. would require at
least a month of preparation before landing units that could fight
for any length of time.  The problem is primarily one of supply.  The
troops could be moved in quickly, but the U.S. lacks the ships or the
planes to deliver all the equipment required by a modern army:  from
tanks and trucks to food and fuel.

The President decided last fall to assign 100,000 men--basically
members of the Marine Corp's 1st and 3rd divisions and the Army's
82nd and 101st airborne divisions--to a Rapid Deployment force that
eventually will be able to respond quickly to emergencies anywhere in
the world.  The force will be supplied by a fleet of 15 ships, most
of them stationed near areas of crisis, and an undetermined number of
new cargo planes probably based in the U.S.  Total cost:  about $10
billion.  But the ships and planes exist only on drawing boards.  The
force is not expected to be in operation for at least three years.
Scoffs Richard Helms, the ex-CIA director and former Ambassador to
Iran:  "What is a doctrine without power?"

Another uncertainty about Carter's policy is his unwillingness to
define the extent of the Persian Gulf area or what U.S. "vital
interests" really are.  A senior Administration official tried to
make a virtue out of this imprecision, maintaining that it gives
Carter room to maneuver.  Moreover, if Carter went so far as to draw
a clear line against the Soviets, he might inadvertently encourage
adventurism on the other side of that line.  But the Soviets are just
as likely to regard Carter's ambiguity as a sign that he himself is
unclear about the area covered by his warning.

The minimum U.S. interests in the area are obvious.  Raymond Hare, a
ranking U.S. ambassador in the Middle East in the 1950s, summed them
up as "right of transit, access to petroleum and absence of Soviet
military bases."  But how willing are the countries involved to have
the U.S. intervene to protect those interests?  A quarter of a
century ago, the U.S. tried to answer that by helping to organize a
Southwest Asian defensive alliance that included Turkey, Iran and
Pakistan, but the fall of the Shah last year brought the end of that
alliance.

As Carter considered the prospect of some new alliance, he could only
be vague.  Said he:  "We are prepared to work with other countries in
the region to share a cooperative security framework that respects
differing values and political beliefs, yet which enhances the
independence, security and prosperity of all."

The statement had its origins in a policy memorandum that Brezinski
sent Carter in February 1979, after the Shah's fall.  Brzezinski
proposed that the U.S. form a protective umbrella over North Africa,
the Middle East and southwest Asia.  it would include signed
understandings with several governments in the area--at the very
least with Egypt, Jordan and Israel--and an American military shield
that would stretch as far west as Morocco.  If Carter is still
thinking along those lines, the shield now has been extended as far
east as Pakistan.

Because of rivalries and internal instabilities in the region, no
alliance in the NATO mold is even remotely possible.  But a senior
White House adviser insisted last week:  "There could be a variety of
relationships, depending on the nature of the security interests of
the countries concerned, their relationships with us or one another."
These might include economic and military aid, permission for the
U.S. to use airfields and seaports, or promises of mutual assistance
in the event of attack.  Still, Carter's "security framework" seems
an idea that was launched with only the hope that support for
cooperative arrangements with the U.S. would grown with more obvious
Soviet threats.

It is far from certain that this will happen.  Says James Akins, a
former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and now a consultant on
persian Gulf business:  "It would be a grave error to think that the
moderate Arab nations regard the Soviets as the enemy.  At this point
the consensus is that the superpowers are equally evil."  Kuwaiti
Foreign Minister Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah criticized both
Washington and Moscow last week and urged Arab countries to develop
"a common strategy to stand up to superpower pressures."  He added:
"The occupation of Arab territories and Jerusalem by Israel, with
American support, is no less worrisome than the Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan."  In the United Arab Emirates, the newspaper al-
Ittihad complained:  "The big powers only want us as a market for
weapons, a source of oil and an experimental battlefield."  Said a
top Western diplomat in the Middle East:  "The Gulf states want to be
securely defended, but they also want any U.S. presence to be beyond
the horizon."

As Akins and other experts note, any U.S. defense agreement with the
Saudis and other Arab countries is probably impossible until the
Palestinian problem is settled or until there is a clear sign of
major progress.  The so-called autonomy talks between Egypt and
Israel on the future of Palestinians in the West Bank are as of now
hopelessly stalled.  Both sides are talking of the need for a new
Camp David summit to break the deadlock.  Yet Carter, who will have
to exert more pressure on the Israelis if there is to be any
progress, recommended no policy changes in this crucial matter--the
one that could most quickly win U.S. support in the Persian Gulf
area.

Carter's speech also failed to deal with the complexity of potential
crises in the Persian Gulf area.  The threat to the U.S. is not so
clear cut as a Soviet invasion of the oilfields.  Hardly anyone
expects that.  Instead, the U.S. faces the same kind of challenges
in Southwest Asia that have frustrated Washington for several years:
local revolts, radicalism, tribal rivalries, religious extremism and
instability bordering on anarchy.  The oilfields of the Persian Gulf
are in jeopardy not so much because of Soviet tanks in Afghanistan as
because of local outbreaks like the dissident Arab invasion of the
Sacred Mosque in Mecca and the Iranian militants' seizure of the U.S.
embassy in Tehran.  The biggest disaster that has befallen Western
interests in the area in the past decade remains the collapse of the
Shah--for which Moscow was not responsible.  And the worst threat to
Western interests in the near future is a spread of turmoil to Iraq,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, for which the Soviets might or
might not be responsible--and for which Carter's proposals offer no
remedy.

This does not mean, of course, that the area is beyond salvation.  In
a negative sense, Soviet aggression often brings a sobering new sense
of the need for defensive action.  The Saudi monarchy, the Pakistani
military government and the crisis-prone leaders of Turkey may be
sufficiently frightened by the example of Afghanistan, and impressed
by the new look of the Carter Administration, to become more
amenable to U.S. efforts to protect them and help them put their
houses in order.  Perhaps the Saudis will be more receptive to
American pressure for a crackdown on corruption, one of several slow-
burning fuses in Riyadh.  Perhaps Pakistani President Mohammed Zia
ul-Haq will allow the U.S. to push him more quickly toward restoring
a broad-based democratic government.

But for these things to happen, Carter will have to mount a long
diplomatic campaign on several fronts.  Observed a top aide:  "Our
program is for tomorrow more than today, and it calls for a sustained
effort, not just a single knee jerk."

To build his prestige in the Persian Gulf region, Carter could try
new approaches to solving the hostage crisis in Tehran; he took a
step in this direction last week by urging Iran to recognize the
Soviet Union as by far its greatest threat.  To win respect and
influence throughout the Muslim world, he could lean on Israel to
settle the Palestinian problem.  He also could push harder for
American energy independence, which would free the U.S. from OPEC
blackmail.  At the same time, he could plan on eventually resuming
his campaign for Senate approval of the SALT II pact, for
stabilization of the superpowers' strategic capabilities would
benefit the U.S. as well as the Soviet Union, and the longer that
treaty is delayed, the more inevitable will be a major new nuclear
arms race.

In international relation as in domestic U.S. politics, perceptions
can be almost as important as actions, and image can be almost as
important as reality.  Is the President perceived to be tough,
decisive, realistic?  Is the U.S. perceived to be standing up to the
Soviet Union?  Until recently, the answer was no.  Last week Carter
sought to correct those problems of perception and image, and in
large measure he succeeded.  As Commander in Chief, he made the U.S.
sound as though it is determined, in a way that it was not before, to
stand up the Soviet Union.

* Carter also blamed imported oil for much of the U.S.'s inflation
problem.  Three days earlier, on NBC's Meet the Press, he had claimed
that "all the increases [in prices] for practical purposes of
inflation rates since I have been in office have been directly
attributable to increases in OPEC oil prices."  It was a stunning
misstatement, which he corrected in his State of the Union address,
in which he accurately described OPEC's price hikes as "the single
biggest factor in the inflation rate last year."  Carter's chief
inflation fighter, Alfred Kahn, told a congressional committee last
week that 2.2 percentage points of last year's 13.3% inflation rate
were directly due to higher energy prices.

Minority Report

Vernon Jordan, head of the National Urban League, regularly uses the
President's State of the Union message as an occasion to offer is own
report on the state of black America.  Last week's installment, like
its predecessors, was grim.  Describing blacks as "boat people
without boats," Jordan said that their average wages had shrunk from
61% of white wages in 1969 to 59% in 1978.  And despite the reports
of a growing black middle class, the number of blacks in that
category remained stationary at about 25% throughout the 1970s; so
did the larger number of black poor at 28%.

Not only is the problem not being solved, Jordan declared, but the
efforts to solve it are fading.  Said he:  "The nations's energies
are being focused on inflation, energy and defense to the neglect of
racial equality, full employment and urban revitalization."  The
prevailing philosophy, he added, has become one of, "He who has
keeps, and he who has not doesn't get."