Meanwhile, the hard-line antidétente forces were roiling the waters on a number of fronts. In March 1976, Nitze, James Schlesinger, and former Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow had set in motion what in November would become the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). A committee by that name had been established once before in 1950 to back Nitze’s NSC 68. Three Team B members—Nitze, Pipes, and William Van Cleave—served on the executive committee. Among the early supporters were Mellon heir Richard Mellon Scaife and the future Director of Central Intelligence William Casey. Members included Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz, Richard Perle, Dean Rusk, and Ronald Reagan. The CPD’s founding statement warned that the Soviet Union sought dominance through “an unparalleled military buildup” and that under the cover of arms control, it was preparing to fight and win a nuclear war.22
The Team B and CPD efforts to subvert the intelligence community and drive the country to the right were cheered on by a network of newly formed foundations and think tanks funded, in part, by the Scaife family, the Coors family, and William Simon, president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Among the recipients of such largesse were the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Federalist Society, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Institute for Justice, the Hoover Institute, Freedom House, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. These interests backed a series of right-wing publications, including National Interest/Public Interest, Commentary, and The American Spectator.
This burgeoning right-wing network had little use for a relative moderate like Gerald Ford. Its members itched to put a real right winger like Reagan into the White House. Ford and his White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, attempted to mollify Ford’s critics. They engineered a major cabinet shake-up in October 1975, known as the “Halloween Day Massacre.” Rumsfeld took over for Schlesinger at Defense. General Brent Scowcroft replaced Kissinger as national security advisor. Bush replaced William Colby at the CIA. Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld’s deputy, took over as White House chief of staff. And Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was informed that he was off the ticket in 1976. Kissinger, furious, drafted a letter of resignation that he never sent. Many saw Rumsfeld’s fingerprints all over this shake-up. Nixon had described Rumsfeld as a “ruthless little bastard.”23 Kissinger later said Rumsfeld was the most ruthless man he’d ever met.
Spurning his once-moderate views, Rumsfeld had moved steadily to the right, positioning himself as a staunch defender of Team B and foe of Kissinger’s détente policies. He helped block a new SALT treaty in early 1976. “The opposition came from Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I recognized that they held the trump card,” Ford later wrote.24 Rumsfeld began warning that the Soviets threatened to overtake the United States in military strength and that détente was not in the United States’ interests. Ford got the message, announcing in March 1976, “We are going to forget the use of the word détente.”25
That capitulation was not enough to placate the party’s resurgent right wing. Ronald Reagan excoriated the “moderate” policies advocated by Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, which, he believed, were weakening the United States in the fight against its mortal Communist foes. In late March, he accused Kissinger of saying “The day of the US is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union…. My job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available.”26 Kissinger, not surprisingly, denied having ever made such remarks.27
Ford managed to stave off the attack from the neocon-infused Republican Right but was narrowly defeated in November by former Governor Jimmy Carter, a millionaire peanut farmer and longtime Sunday school teacher from Plains, Georgia. Carter, an evangelical Baptist, ran as a populist and an outsider, appealing to blacks, farmers, and disaffected youth. More of a New South agribusinessman than a small farmer, Carter, as historian Leo Ribuffo pointed out, harked back to the pre–World War I progressives, who stressed scientific efficiency and public morality, more than to the New Deal and Great Society reformers, who wanted to strengthen the welfare state.28 Carter promised to restore trust in government and heal the wounds resulting from divisions over Watergate, the Vietnam War, and years of generational, gender, and racial discord.
The little Carter knew about foreign policy came from meetings of the Trilateral Commission, an organization founded in 1972 by Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, who also headed the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Rockefeller and many of his establishment cronies were troubled by recent developments. Not only was the United States suffering a monumental defeat in Vietnam, it was facing a destabilizing economic crisis. Many found Nixon’s response threatening. By abandoning the gold standard and imposing wage and price controls and a tariff on imports, Nixon was undermining the liberal internationalism that had reigned supreme since 1945. When Nixon’s measures were viewed alongside labor’s and Congress’s efforts to limit imports and punish multilateral corporations that shipped jobs overseas, some members of the CFR feared the resurgence of economic nationalism and even the outbreak of an international trade war.29
Looking for a new instrument to help stabilize the international order—the CFR had been rendered largely ineffectual by a sharp split over Vietnam—Rockefeller seized upon the approach suggested by Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his 1970 book, Between Two Ages, Brzezinski called for a “community of developed nations” from Western Europe, the United States, and Japan to guide the international order.30 The two New Yorkers, who vacationed near each other in Seal Harbor, mapped out the kind of organization that could bring this to fruition.