The selling of a treaty
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The television played the Blue Danube waltz, the camera showed Rosalynn Carter staring at Austrian baroque, while the announcers indulged the American taste for medical description and diagnosis by speculating on the deterioration of Leonid Brezhnev's arteries. Then, in a trice, the signing was over and Mr Carter was back in front of a joint-session of Congress, his shirt collar too large for him as though he'd shrunk or gone frail. So lacking in presence was he that he looked like someone who'd been famous long ago, a name forgotten but just on the tip of the tongue, a popular singer whose ballads our parents loved.
You could tell it was an important speech since it was one of the 'rare ones giving evidence of his having read through it in advance: at least there were only two or three spots in the text where he misplaced an emphasis or inserted a disconcerting pause. After all, this message was about the `nookiar age'; but for all his practice, and the importance of the topic, the legislative branch of government gave him scant applause during a presentation that was more than a trifle long on discussions of the 'throw-weights' of missiles and more than a little short of inspiration. He was interrupted by clapping only four times in 40-odd minutes and three of those times came when he had something to say about Russia moving around in the Third World or the Cubans mucking about in Central America. SALT II, then, is in trouble.
Just before the President took off for Vienna, Senator Henry Jackson, the conservative Democrat from the state of Washington, likened the treaty to the appeasement of Munich: a bad sign, coming from such an influential fellow party member so early in the ratification struggle. However, since to most Americans under the age of 40, Neville Chamberlain is as familiar as Sir Robert Peel, the nastiness of the crack may have passed over their heads, but so has the entire SALT debate thus far. All soundings of the state of public knowledge indicate that, while a majority are in favour of an arms limitation agreement for the same reason they are in favour of a cancer cure, almost nobody has anything but the dimmest appreciation of what's actually in the documents. Thus far they aren't interested, which means that unless they are ignited, the contest is going to be fought in a diminished public arena which is prone to be against the treaty.
The reason for that is that the people who are against the treaty know why they are against it, while those who are for it don't know why they are. The 'antis' are energetic and vividly persuasive in their opposition. The former Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, is already hopping from television station to station with a marvelously frightening display of model war toys showing America's tiny little rockets up against Russia's monsters. Speaking in favour of the treaty are men like Cyrus Vance, who wear their personalities like old grey tweed coats with raglan sleeves. The pro-treaty people, operating under the name of the Committee for East-West Accord, have made a film starring Averell Harriman, a name scarcely better known to young Americans than Peel, Chamberlain or Asquith. Once you get over the shock of realising he's still alive, you hear him say the same good, bleached-out things in his patrician accent that Jimmy Carter says in his 'nookiar', red-neckese.
The anti-treaty group claims that under SALT's terms the Russians can develop A first strike capacity so that, by the middle of the next decade, they will have the same dominance relative to American power that the United States had when John Kennedy gave Khrushchev the atomic ultimatum. Moreover, they insist the Russians will cheat and, if they don't cheat, it's because SALT's provisions are so generous they won't have the motive. In reply the Administration and the President mumble about stability and predictability: at the same time, they boast that under SALT the United States is going to remodel, modernise and make more powerful its major weapons systems. This doesn't satisfy the conservatives who don't believe it or don't think that it is enough.
The Administration's argument translates into the anaemic observation that the treaty can't hurt and, who knows, it might help. In the end that may be the way it will be sold — as something too innocuous to worry about, but which, if rejected, would bruise the sensibilities of the communist brute. It bs around such tepid banners that the editorial boards of the mass media corporations can be assembled to write judicious leaders in which the adjectives 'responsible' and 'reasonable' appear with torporous frequency.
The fun will begin with the debate outside the halls of the Senate, and those within which will begin after the 4 July Independence Day recess with hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, Frank Church of Idaho, is pro-treaty. That makes him different from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., of Massachusetts, who chaired the same committee during the League of Nations treaty debate to which SALT II has been corn pared, partly because Woodrow Wilson. like Jimmy Carter, insisted it must be voted up or down without change.
Had Wilson accepted changes in the lan guage, changes which the other signatories probably would have agreed to, the treaty would have been ratified. But Wilson was irrationally unbending, while Carter's reasons for resisting any change are certainly not out of prideful stubbornness, but because any rewording of it will unstick the deal. Wilson was also shot down because he negotiated the treaty personally and nearlY alone, without Democratic, much less. Republican consultation and did so in secret; the text wasn't known here until the Chicago Tribune stole a copy and published it. This President has acted in an entirely different and more politic manner. The treaty isn't a surprise bursting out of a secret closet, since the major provisions were made public almost as quickly as they were arrived at: nor is there anything especiallY Democratic about the document. As Carter has been at pains to stress, SALT ll was begun by Republic Nixon and carried forward by Republican Ford: Republican Kissinger is for it, as are many of the banking and stockjobbing elements in the Republican Party. And so the vicious partY divisions which characterised the League of Nations fight are absent here. If Wilson had had Carter's political tact and modestY, the league would have passed, but if Carter only had Wilson's marvellously exciting oratory, his command of the rhetoric uf inspiration, his ability to make the starriest idealism concrete in men's imaginations, SALT II would be irresistable. Our dear, wrinkled, thin-necked Jimmy lacks 11(lt stature but the appearance of stature. The strategy of 'the irreconcilables', as the Senators who led the fight against the league were called, was delay. Wilson returned from Europe to a pro-League eta' torate which, like today's pro-SALT eleetorate was in favour of the general idea but fuzzy on the particulars. The irreconcilalr lest believed, correctly as it turned out, that, if they could seize the national podium all° point out those particulars, they could per' suade the nation that the treaty was an, unconstitutional delegation of national' sovereignty. The same is true of todaY s irreconcilables. They seek to persuade the country that SALT II is a dangerous 10ering of the nation's defences. The debating has already started on an the television channels as the 'antis', wh° also have their own propaganda fir; attempt to win over public opinion. If the' succeed, the effects on military .Pr,,,° curement and weapons development W111 11 since the treaty allows for virtual*: everything, but the confusion in Washings ton will be immense. If the treaty Pe down, the United States will be without foreign policy direction concerning the Soviets, since the men who willhav.r brought it down have little to tell thele fellow-countrymen except 'build iNr bombs'.
Previous page
