John Connally, former Cabinet official and Governor of Texas, recently predicted that President Jimmy Carter will be “tested” by the Soviets within the first 90 days of his new administration.
This statement by Governor Connally shows unusual perception about the men in the Kremlin. Those who understand the Communists find it easy to forecast their actions. It is the regular practice of the Soviets to test each new American President to see what stuff he is made of, and whether he can be deceived, brainwashed, pushed, shoved, or intimidated by Soviet demands.
Khrushchev tested President John F. Kennedy within five months of his taking office. Kennedy never gave an official report on his private conferences with Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961, but eventually the major facts leaked out. The crude and earthy Khrushchev ranted and raved, bullied and shouted.
He threatened to move against West Berlin with all the might of the huge Soviet conventional military forces. He even threatened the use of nuclear weapons. He reminded Kennedy that the Soviets had developed the world’s first ICBM even before they successfully orbited the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I.
After making his personal estimate of Kennedy’s character and vulnerabilities at Vienna, Khrushchev followed up with an additional test. Through the poet Robert Frost, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a message. It was a taunt that the United States was “too liberal to fight -— even in defense of U.S. vital interests.”
When President Kennedy made no response, Khrushchev conspired with Kosygin and Castro to secretly. ship offensive missiles to Cuba, thereby bringing most U.S. major cities within minutes of nuclear incineration.
Gerald Ford was tested by the Soviets three months after he became President. Brezhnev invited Ford to a get-acquainted visit in Vladivostok in November 1974.
When President Ford arrived, Brezhnev bear-hugged him and then put him through an intensive nine-hour eyeball-to-eyeball negotiating session on strategic arms. Ford was suffering from fatigue and, jet-lag after a 17,000—mile trip to the Far East that had been crammed with ceremonial duties.
Brezhnev was rested and relaxed in his own home territory, and was supported by the two most experienced and dishonest negotiators in the world, Andrei Gromyko and Anatoly Dobrynin. Those were the game two diplomats who were publicly denounced by President Kennedy for lying to him about missiles in Cuba in 1962.
Brezhnev came out of that smoke-filled room with a SALT II agreement that puts no lid on the Soviet attainment of a first-strike capability against the United States. The Vladivostok agreement will permit the Soviets to MIRV all their giant 5S-18 ICBMs plus a thousand other ICBMs. This total will be more than adequate to knock cut all our Minuteman missiles.
To the men in the Kremlin, President-elect Jimmy Carter is an unknown quantity. They will surely test him within months of his taking office, probably in an ordeal of summitry, in order to find out if he is made of steel or cotton-candy in dealing with the Russians.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed. President-elect Carter needs advisers who have Brezhnev’s number, and John Connally fits that prescription. It is unlikely that he would be intimidated or ambushed by the Kremlin bullies. The best appointment President Carter could make would be to name John Connally as Ambassador to Russia. He would be a good counterweight to Ambassador Dobrynin.
