Brezhnev himself said as much. In his address to the twenty-fifth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, he stated candidly: “We make no secret of the fact that we see détente as the way to create more favorable conditions for peaceful socialist and communist construction.” Détente enabled the Brezhnev doctrine in supporting Communist ideology and assisting “national liberation movements” around the globe.28
Less openly, in a secret speech in 1973, Brezhnev had told fellow Communist leaders in Prague: “We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist. We have been able to accomplish more in a short time with détente than was done for years pursuing a confrontation policy….Trust us comrades, for by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives.” Brezhnev’s brash declaration was downplayed by most of the major media when it became public four years later. When Reagan learned about it, he devoted a number of his syndicated daily radio commentaries to the speech, alleging that it “should have been front page in every major paper in the land.”29
In fact, the USSR heartily supported Communist forces that opposed democracy and basic human and property rights. Under détente in the latter 1970s, the Soviets added, according to slightly varying accounts, ten or eleven nations to their list of client states.30 Such gains alarmed many in the West who did not expect détente to produce such results, and the policy at last began to fall into wide disfavor.
THE 1976 PRESIDENTIAL BID
As the bicentennial of America’s independence approached, Reagan had enough of those who robbed independence. He decided to seek the seemingly impossible: to challenge the incumbent president’s bid for reelection, an incumbent from his own party. During his vocal anti-Communist campaign in the 1970s, Reagan had attacked not just détente, but also the Republican administration of Gerald R. Ford that favored the policy.31 While on the campaign trail, Reagan did not hesitate to reiterate his sharp critiques of Ford policy. To cite one, in an October 1975 radio broadcast, he wrote, “We are blind to reality if we refuse to recognize that détente’s usefulness to the Soviets is only as a cover for their traditional and basic strategy for aggression. Détente is for the Soviet Union a no-can-lose proposition.”32
In addition, Reagan opposed Ford’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975, a product of détente which he perceived as a human-rights farce. It was nothing more than a “propaganda plus” for the Kremlin, Reagan wrote in a February 1976 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. By signing the accord, the United States had, in effect, “agreed to legitimize the boundaries of Eastern Europe, legally acquiescing in the loss of freedom of millions of Eastern Europeans.” Worse, said Reagan, Helsinki did nothing to constrain the Soviets outside of Eastern Europe. “After Helsinki,” wrote Reagan correctly, “the Soviet Union quickly made it clear that the so-called ‘wars of national liberation’ of which they are so fond, would not be affected by the document.”33 For Reagan, Helsinki was a bitter example of how détente only resulted in further Soviet legitimization and strength. Like détente itself, Helsinki was contemptible.
Throughout the campaign, Reagan hit détente so hard that there was a consensus that President Ford stopped using the term because Reagan had made it a dirty word.34 New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis said Ford not only dropped the word from his vocabulary but fully abandoned it in his foreign policy, and, worse in Lewis’ judgment, Ford was beginning to sound like Reagan—“more hysterical, more xenophobic.”35 Similarly, Jon Nordheimer of the New York Times reported that Reagan was attempting to place an “indelible stain” on the policy of détente “as exercised” by Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.36 So successful was Reagan that the Times, in a May 14, 1976 editorial titled “Mr. Reagan’s Veto,” claimed that the former governor had “won something approaching veto power over the Ford Administration’s foreign policy.”37 In another editorial, titled, “President Under Seige,” the Times opined: “Governor Reagan has become a credible candidate while President Ford has slipped from almost certain victor to underdog.”38 Reagan was making a dent.
Ford knew he was suddenly vulnerable. After New Hampshire, he had surged to five consecutive decisive victories, at times by big margins. These wins came in mostly eastern states, including the liberal northeast. As Martin Anderson remembered, the unasked question to Reagan by his campaign staff was, “When are you going to quit?” Reagan, however, was adamant. “I’m taking this all the way to the convention in Kansas City,” he declared defiantly, “and I’m going even if I lose every damn primary between now and then.”39 Reagan laid out a plan of action, while his doubtful handlers observed in disbelief, dreading the specter of twenty-some painful primaries ahead.
Immediately after that decision, Reagan won North Carolina, claimed a huge triumph in Texas, and followed with victories in Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama. The Ford team began shaking in its boots. In a stunning turnabout, a new question was posed: Could Reagan go to the convention and win enough delegates on the first ballot? Reagan estimated a “very great possibility, if not probability,” that he could do just that.40
Reagan’s affront had been so productive that Ford not only dropped the word “détente” but replaced it with the preferred phrase of Reagan: “peace through strength.” This Reagan credo, which became more pronounced in the 1980 campaign and the presidency that followed, proffered that a strong America, equipped with and embarking upon a military and technological buildup, could (among other things) hurt the USSR by prompting it to spend money that its economy did not have. “The Russians,” declared Reagan that May, “know they can’t match us industrially or technologically.”41
In a pronouncement that signaled a startling concession, a waffling President Ford declared: “Our policy for American security can best be summarized in three simple words of the English language: peace through strength.”42 Reagan chuckled, noting it was “a slogan with a nice ring to it.”43
PREPARING FOR THE CONVENTION
As the convention drew nearer, Reagan’s rhetorical victories over Ford had become increasingly clear. Not only had he succeeded in changing the Republican perception of the word détente, but his supporters also sought to add a plank titled “morality in foreign policy” to the party platform:
We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny. Ours will be a foreign policy that keeps this ever in mind….
Agreements that are negotiated, such as the one signed in Helsinki, must not take from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day gaining it….
Honestly, openly, and with conviction, we must go forward as a united people to forge a lasting peace in the world based upon our deep belief in the rights of man, the rule of law and guidance by the hand of God.44
The plank was widely reported as a repudiation of Ford-Kissinger foreign policy.45 Fittingly, it quoted Solzhenitsyn, the esteemed Russian dissident who was among the more eloquent and credible critics of détente. In the summer of 1975, Solzhenitsyn had said the following to an AFL-CIO audience in Washington, DC: