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By Root 1954 0

ahead to 1976, Ford did not feel presumptuous in believing he deserved a united party and a clear path into the general election campaign. But many conservatives had another idea and plenty of reservations about a full term for Ford. They were upset for one thing about the Helsinki Accords, which had been signed by thirty-five nations and included provisions mandating respect for human rights and affirming the recognition of national boundaries. Ford’s critics emphasized the latter, viewing any affirmation of Cold War borders as legitimizing the Soviet Union’s control of satellite states. The president and his foreign policy advisors placed greater value on Helsinki’s unprecedented human rights language, which legitimized the right of the United States and other Western countries to insist upon universal standards of human rights, even within the Soviet sphere. American presidents and diplomats would thereafter be as entitled to raise human rights issues as they were to raise matters of arms control or trade preferences with our communist adversaries. Ford believed that Helsinki would open the door to a debate the Soviets could never win, while giving courage to dissenters and protestors across the Soviet empire. And time would show that he was right.

Conservatives who viewed Ford as too prone to compromise with the Soviets also pointed to an episode involving Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian novelist and historian. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1974 that an English translation of The Gulag Archipelago was published. This three-volume masterpiece about the brutal life in Soviet forced labor and concentration camps, some of it based on his firsthand experience, made him famous in America. Having been expelled from his homeland, Solzhenitsyn had recently settled in Vermont and had expressed a wish to meet the president. I thought it was a great idea and advised Ford that by all means a man of such standing should be received in the Oval Office.

But Kissinger and his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, argued strongly against it. While they respected Solzhenitsyn’s courage and genius, they felt that such a meeting, which was being championed by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, could become an irritant in our dealings with the Soviets at a time when delicate arms control negotiations were under way and a summit meeting with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was under consideration. So, initially at least, Ford decided against the meeting with Solzhenitsyn. And though the decision seemed minor at the time, we paid a heavy price for it. That refusal to see the most powerful witness against Soviet tyranny became a centerpiece of the conservative foreign policy case against Ford.

Oddly enough, one decision of the greatest consequence was scarcely remarked on by Ford’s critics. In the fall of 1975, he nominated Chicago federal judge John Paul Stevens to succeed Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Here was a chance to fill a seat on the high court that had last been vacant in 1939, and yet in the Ford White House there was remarkably little discussion as to how to proceed. The president turned the matter over to Attorney General Edward H. Levi. Ed, in turn, conducted a brisk search and settled on a well-regarded judge whom he had known for years. With that, the Senate put the nomination on the calendar and Stevens was confirmed unanimously less than three weeks later. This was just how things were done in those days. Justice Stevens went on to serve nearly as long as Douglas did, with a record equally pleasing to liberals. I like and respect John Paul Stevens a lot more than I do his judicial philosophy, but I’ve wished we had not simply left the choice up to Ed Levi. For his part, however, Ford never regretted the choice he made, and his opinion mattered more than mine. In any case, his sole Supreme Court nomination came and went with practically no objection.

What did wear us down month after month was the portrayal of the president as a hapless, clueless bumbler.