May 12, 1976

Ford's African Policy 'Clumsy'

Maybe President Gerald Ford really is clumsy.

After several days in Washington watching him at close range, I am beginning to wonder if all those jokes about his awkward accidents are just funny coincidences.

It's not that he bonks his head a lot on the door of the presidential helicopter.  He did that last week for the third time - to the great amusement of the local press.  However, he was saying good-bye to Actress Elizabeth Taylor, and any red-blooded man would be less than attentive to his pathway under the same circumstances.

No, I'm concerned about his performance on the more serious affairs of state.

For example, the "African policy" enunciated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is a disaster for both Ford and this nation.

You will remember that it was on a recent junket to southern Africa that Kissinger proclaimed our "unrelenting opposition" to white-led Rhodesia.  He proposed giving $12 million or so of U.S. tax money to help the Marxist dictator of Mozambique overthrow the whites on the Dark Continent.

It was a strange statement and proposal.  In the midst of a heated presidential campaign it was unbelievably ill timed.

The political conservatives of Washington have been after Kissinger's hide for a year or more.  In my tour last week I found even the liberals shaking their heads and declaring it was time for the jet propelled secretary to go.

Those Republicans who early jumped on President Ford's band wagon now rage about Kissinger's toadying to African terrorists.

The GOP stalwarts are urging the president, both publicly and privately, to fire Kissinger immediately.  Some say that Ford has been denied the election, and perhaps even the nomination, by Kissinger's latest one-man-show.

They may be right, but Kissinger is not to blame.

Knowledgeable Republicans told me that the new United States stance toward nationalist black nations is a policy fully endorsed, if not conceived, by Ford himself.

White House aides admit that Kissinger and Ford discussed the African trip in detail before the secretary went and by trans-Atlantic phone after he got there.

The inescapable conclusion is that Ford meant for Kissinger to say and propose the things he did, preposterous as they may sound coining from a politician who must reflect a broad outlook.

Regardless of how you may feel about the white-black power struggle going on in Africa, dragging it into the current political campaign turns it into a racial issue.  We need this in 1976 like a sharp stick in the midriff.

It was a clumsy maneuver.

It turned an even-up primary contest in Texas into a massive win for Reagan - or, more accurately - a rout for Ford.  It cost the President at least a million votes this fall in the Deep South and the bus-weary North.

It has been speculated that "perhaps" Ford and Kissinger took sides in the controversial African race war in order to defuse it.  The argument is that by assuring the black terrorists and Cuban communists poised on the Rhodesian border of ultimate victory they will go slow.

Kissinger is represented as convinced that an all-out race war was inevitable "in nine or ten months" otherwise.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried the same tactic with the Nazis poised on the Czechoslovakia border back in 1938.  Appeasement was stupid then, and is more so now simply because the black dictators don't even pretend to listen.

Chamberlin neither avoided conflict nor saved his job.  It is lesson for Ford to ponder.

President Ford tries hard - witness his courageous vetoes of the massive spending bills churned out by Congress.  Yet, he surrounds himself with big-name incompetents.  His campaign stumbled under Bo Callaway who couldn't even save his own job as chairman.  The Republican National Committee under Ms.  Louise Smith is strangely silent.  Press Secretary Ron Nessen has touted Ford into some embarrassing interviews.

Ford is attempting to build a new "image" by hiring a producer of television commercials to coach him.  Roger Morton, the new presidential campaign manager is flinging dollars right and left in an effort to stop Ronald Reagan.  Press conferences have been drastically reduced.

Now, if they will only enlarge the door on the helicopter.

Author: Lindsey Williams