Carter Defuses a Crisis

Getting rid of the issue, if not the Soviet brigade, but at some cost

It was like trying to fly a 747 through Washington's Rock Creek Park." So observed a top White House adviser of the way in which Jimmy Carter last week tried to extricate himself from a predicament mostly of his own making: the inflated fuss over the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba. In a straightforward speech to the nation, he largely defused the diplomatic issue, but by no means satisfied all his critics. Nor did he add any much needed decisiveness to his image as a leader. The net result may, in fact, be the loss of some Senate votes for the SALT II treaty.

The speech was one of the most important of his career, and he showed the strain. He looked pale, drawn and more nervous than usual, and with good reason. He knew he had to put the best possible face on what amounted to retreat. Because the Soviets had refused to back down, Carter was forced to rely on Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's private assurances that the troops would be used only for training purposes.

In a diplomatic sleight of hand, Carter converted this protestation of innocence into a Soviet pledge. Said he: "Although we have persuasive evidence that the unit has been a combat brigade, the Soviet statements about the future noncombat status of the unit are significant." He admitted that Moscow has been building up its military presence in Cuba, contributing to "tensions in the Caribbean and the Central American region" and adding to the "fears of some countries that they may come under Soviet or Cuban pressure." But he concluded that the issue is "certainly no reason for a return to the cold war ... The greatest danger to all the nations of the world is a breakdown of a common effort to preserve the peace, and the ultimate threat of a nuclear war." At the same time, Carter ordered a series of limited diplomatic and military moves that are designed to keep closer watch on Cuba and to deter the Soviets from further adventurism in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

After the speech, a vastly relieved President walked from the Oval Office to the Roosevelt Room, where 50 friends and aides toasted him with champagne in celebration of his 55th birthday. He still had enough breath left to blow out the eight candles on his birthday cake. "Eight years!" the celebrators shouted. "All right!" replied an obviously pleased President. (He will formally announce his candidacy for re-election on Dec. 4.)

Temporarily at least, he was off the hook. As a key adviser put it, "Cuba was not a serious foreign policy problem, but it grew into a major domestic problem." Added a top State Department official: "The President got his priorities in order again. For a while, they were upside down." The trouble started in August, when Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called a press conference and insisted that the brigade be withdrawn. Otherwise, he said, the Senate would not approve SALT. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made matters worse by declaring that the U.S. would "not be satisfied with the maintenance of the status quo," a statement that he had worked out with Carter. The Administration was off on a course that nobody intended or wanted, one that could have resulted in a nasty and needless confrontation with the Soviets and the defeat of the SALT II treaty in the Senate.

The problem was how to repair the damage. For weeks the Administration pressed Moscow in behind-the-scenes negotiations to back down. But the Soviets would not budge. In a letter to Carter, Brezhnev promised only that the training unit would not change its function or status. No matter how distasteful, the Administration would have to accept the status quo.

Concerned that the White House was reacting too slowly and indecisively, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler and Senior Adviser Hedley Donovan urged Carter to seek help from the nation's veteran foreign-policy makers. Fifteen prominent men, including Presidential Troubleshooter Clark Clifford, former Secretaries of State Dean Rusk and Henry Kissinger, former Under Secretary of State George Ball and Panama Canal Negotiator Sol Linowitz, were summoned to the White House. First, they were given an intelligence briefing that established the existence of the Soviet brigade. It comprised 2,600 soldiers assigned to two garrisons under the command of a Soviet army colonel. The unit was equipped with 40 tanks, 60 armored personnel carriers and other military hardware. Said an official: "It is clear that the brigade is not there to train Cubans. There is no substantial interplay with Cubans. If it were really a training unit, it was training itself." Though the brigade's purpose remains unclear, the unit does provide a degree of protection for the island while Cubans are busy elsewhere. There are now some 35,000 Cuban troops, technicians and civilian advisers in Africa. In the Caribbean, there are about 450 Cuban advisers in Jamaica, 250 in Nicaragua, 75 in Grenada, 70 in Guyana and 30 in Panama.

Over the weekend the President and his top aides repeatedly consulted the veteran advisers, who were, inevitably, dubbed the wise men. Taking nothing for granted, and drawing on their own experience in Washington, they peppered Administration officials with questions, expressed their doubts and reservations and argued among themselves. Opinion ranged from hawkish to dovish, with most of the group falling somewhere in between. On Saturday morning they attended a meeting in the White House with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Though he had been on vacation when the Cuban uproar began, he agreed with Vance that it had been overblown. But Brzezinski wanted to use the troop issue as the occasion for initiating broader talks with the Soviets about their activities around the world, while the more lawyerly Vance wished to focus on the brigade alone.

Brzezinski asked the wise men to comment on four issues involved in the crisis: the brigade, Caribbean stability, Soviet-Cuban actions in general and SALT. Then he rushed upstairs and dictated a summary of each man's position to his secretary and took a copy to the President.

By the time that Carter met the group for lunch, he was ready to outline the moderate course that he planned to follow. Said a participant: "It was a concise, brilliant exposition. It was better than his Monday speech." Afterward some of the wise men urged using the troop issue to force a confrontation with the Kremlin over Soviet expansionist policies; others advised playing down the matter because it was too trivial. The majority supported the President. Said one of the moderates: "It was a wise choice diplomatically but tough politically."

After the session, Carter left for Camp David with his wife Rosalynn, who has become increasingly involved in the drafting of his speeches. Described by an aide as "feisty and fierce" these days, she feels that the professional speechwriters are not helping Jimmy get across his simple populist message. Acting as an editor, she put some of the finishing touches on Jimmy's Cuban speech.

The military moves that Carter pledged were not much more menacing than the brigade, a response that indeed fits the provocation. He promised to increase surveillance over Cuba, which he had cut back when he took office in an effort to prepare the way for normalizing relations with Fidel Castro. Carter said he would establish a Caribbean military headquarters in Key West, which a Pentagon official said would be a largely symbolic gesture intended to "show the flag 90 miles north of Cuba." Military maneuvers would be expanded in the Caribbean (including amphibious landings of Marines on the beaches at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba). Finally, Carter gave assurances that he would speed up development of rapid deployment forces, a group of 100,000 servicemen that will be equipped to fly to any crisis spot in the world on short notice.

Carter's diplomatic moves will probably be more upsetting to the Soviets. Though the Administration officially denied that these actions were linked to the brigade, they were clearly a demonstration of Brzezinski's "principle of reciprocity"; that is, when the U.S.S.R. does something considered damaging to American interests, the U.S. will respond in kind. Last week the Pentagon disclosed that Defense Secretary Harold Brown would go to China at the end of the year to discuss mutual security problems.

News was also released of a Defense Department contingency study on the possible sale of weapons to China and the exchange of intelligence in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the West. Moreover, although the U.S. announced that it was permitting the Soviets to buy a record amount of wheat and corn--25 million metric tons--in the coming year, the Defense Department blocked a sale of advanced computer technology to the U.S.S.R.

The White House actions, however, did not build any momentum behind SALT, whose prospects were set back by the flap over the brigade. Some previously uncommitted Senators seemed to move toward the opposition. Said Minority Leader Howard Baker, who has been against the treaty since June: "I'm afraid what Carter did was nothing at all. In this case, he stood toe to toe with the Soviet Union, and unlike 1962, we blinked."

Though Church claimed to be in favor of the treaty, he was drafting a reservation that would require the disbanding of the combat unit before the pact could go into effect. Complained Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, an influential figure in the SALT debate: "The Soviet Union's mounting military activity in Cuba is the symptom, but Cuba's growing military activity in the Third World is the underlying disease."

Public reaction to Carter's disposal of the Cuban issue ranged from the mildly relieved to the immoderately outraged. Stormed the Dallas Morning News: "Frankly, we wonder if the American people aren't ready for Carter to get angry about something. Anything." On the other hand, the Boston Globe praised Carter for backing out of the Cuban impasse "with as much grace and political sure-footedness as was possible under the circumstances." Overseas, complaints about weak American leadership were mingled with gratitude that the conflict did not escalate. In a communique from Bonn, where they were meeting, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing urged that SALT be ratified "whatever other problems there may be on the international scene."

At week's end Secretary Vance indicated that through traditional diplomatic efforts, the U.S. had received more specific assurances from the Soviets about the brigade than Carter indicated. Going a bit further than any other U.S. spokesman had previously, Vance told TIME: "The Soviets have stated that Soviet personnel in Cuba are not and will not be a threat to the U.S. or any other nation The unit can do nothing more than conduct training functions. It will not be enlarged and it will not be given additional duties." If that is true, the issue should soon subside into the obscurity of the historical footnote that it probably deserves.

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