FOREIGN POLICY: Seeking the Last Exit from Viet Nam

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SOVIET TRADE. Ford was similarly acerbic in protesting congressional insistence that improved trade relations with the Soviet Union must be conditioned upon greater freedom of emigration. He said that this restriction had been "self-defeating." Although he did not note that it too had been championed by his potential 1976 rival, Senator Jackson, he said that it had both "harmed" relations with the Russians and resulted in a lower level of Jewish emigration. Western Europe and Japan, moreover, had stepped into the breach to supply trade credits to Moscow, to a total of $8 billion. The result, according to Ford, was that Americans had lost jobs and business that they otherwise could have had.

INVESTIGATING THE CIA. Ford drew his best applause with an assault upon the "sensationalized public debate over legitimate intelligence activities," meaning press and congressional inquiries into alleged abuses of CIA authority at home and abroad. He said that he would cooperate in any "responsible" review of the CIA so long as "vital information" was protected, but again charged that the investigation "ties our hands" and threatens to cripple "a vital national institution."

Ford's survey of the rest of the world was disappointing in its predictableness, and was delivered in a manner that at times suggested he did not have a firm grasp of what he was talking about. Instead of a thorough reassessment of U.S. foreign policy, which he had promised, Ford pretty much reaffirmed long-held U.S. positions. As expected, he declared that the U.S.'s difficulties in Indochina did not mean that the U.S. had been rendered impotent elsewhere. "Let no potential adversary believe that our difficulties or our debates mean a slackening of our national will," he warned. "We will stand by our friends. We will honor our commitments. We will uphold our country's principles." Although those terse sentences seemed pointedly designed as applause lines, they drew little.

While generally devoid of new initiatives or concepts, Ford's speech did announce some new diplomatic moves. He said that he intended to meet with the leaders of Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Indonesia, as well as other Asian nations, to reassure them personally that the events in Indochina would not affect America's resolve to retain close ties with them. He revealed that he plans to go to Peking "later this year." As for the breakdown of Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, Ford repeated the willingness of the U.S. to take the issues to a Geneva conference or to pursue any other avenues that the Arabs and Israelis ask the U.S. to undertake.