Great All-American football star President Ford is staggering in his effort to carry both Henry Kissinger and Kissinger’s top assistant Helmut Sonnenfeldt up to election day.
When Henry Kissinger agreed in Paris to let the North Vietnamese troops remain in South Vietnam, and even to bring in new divisions and weapons, he lost Southeast Asia and wiped out the long effort by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon to save freedom in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Last May Kissinger persuaded President Ford to sign the Helsinki Agreement with dictator Brezhnev. It involved the Sonnenfeldt doctrine, first stated off the record to American diplomats in Europe by Helmut Sonnenfeldt in December 1975, namely, that all the Eastern European countries must accept their status as satellites of the Soviet Union, or else detente will fail and the threat of nuclear war might increase.
When President Ford was asked about Eastern Europe in his foreign policy debate with Jimmy Carter, Ford first answered with what Sonnenfeldt and Kissinger apparently had told him, that the Soviet Union does not really control Eastern Europe.
The next day, President Ford tried a different answer: “The Poles do not believe that they are going to be forever dominated, if they are, by the Soviet Union.”
Roars of protest bit the White House from millions of Polish Americans, Czech-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Croatian Americans, Baltic-Americans, Bulgarian and Romanian-Americans, and Ukrainian-Americans.
In response, President Ford shook himself loose from the Kissinger-Sonnenfeldt advice and issued this splendid and courageous statement: “The United States never has, does not now, and never will recognize, accept or acquiesce in this Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”
This is in full accord with the Republican Platform, which promises: “Our support for the people of Central and Eastern Europe to achieve self-determination will continue.”
President Ford’s own position is thus in sharp contrast to Jimmy Carter’s, who tried to give the impression to ethnic groups that he is not only aware of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but that he might challenge it.
However that is not his position at all. On August 5, Carter told the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES that “he would do nothing to disrupt Soviet control of Eastern Europe” because he would not want “to disrupt our relationship with the Soviet Union.
Since the Communist system provides no orderly method of transferral of power from one ruler to another, the one big opportunity the Captive Peoples have to bring about a change in government occurs when a dictator dies. We are witnessing one of these power struggles in Mainland Chuna since the death of Mao.
Leonid Brezhnev is old, ailing, and a heavy smoke. Tito is older and has even more health problems. It is time to start preparing our plan of action for the government crises that will inevitably come to pass.
