THE PERIL OF THE RED PERIL

David Hume Kennerly, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It was a dark and stormy night (at least somewhere) on October 6, 1976--one month before the Presidential election. President Gerald Ford was debating with the Democratic candidate--Georgia Governor and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter--on national television. The Republican brass had been nervous about agreeing to the first Presidential debates since the Nixon-Kennedy fiasco in 1960; however, Ford had done very well in his first session with Carter in the previous month. It also seemed probable that he would clean Carter's plow in this second encounter.

Then, disaster struck.

Max Frankel from the New York Times asked what should have been a softball question about the potential expansion of the influence of the Soviet Union; as part of the question, he referenced the then-current domination of that country in Eastern Europe. In his response, President Ford indicated that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration." Frankel, obviously gobsmacked by this revelation, explored the topic further, providing the President with ample opportunity to ameliorate his position or otherwise do damage control on his dogmatic utterance. The President instead decided to repeat his verbal gaffe and dig himself in deeper.

Those folks who are too young to have been sentient in 1976 might not realize the extent of the absurdity of President Ford's assertions. The Soviet Union had occupied most of Eastern Europe since 1945 and had firmly in place, in most of the Eastern European nations, strong pro-Soviet governments who were tied to the Soviets militarily through the Warsaw Pact. Those countries who had tried to sever their links with the Soviets, such as Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, found Russian tanks rolling through their streets. In 1976, the Soviet Union was an 800-pound gorilla of a superpower with most of Eastern Europe firmly clutched within its massive hirsute paws.

Viewers of the debate had to choose among one or more of the following options: 1)  The President was an idiot who truly did not believe that the Soviets dominated Eastern Europe, 2)  the President knew that he screwed up but was too incompetent to clean up the damage, and/or 3)  the President realized that his statement was BS but had such contempt for the intelligence of the American public that he figured that he could sell his absurd statements anyway. Enough of these viewers voted for Carter (who until this debate was perceived as the candidate who had a much weaker grasp on foreign policy issues) to provide him with a narrow victory over Gerald Ford. The rest is history.

In defense of Ford, most historians agree that what he really was trying to say was that the loyalty of the citizens the Eastern European nations was not vested in the Soviet Union and that the U.S.S.R. did not dominate their hearts and souls. Unfortunately, that message was totally obfuscated by Ford's poor choice of wording.

To view a video of the relevant portion of the October 6 disaster, click here.