CLINTON VS OBAMA — DEBATE OR SHOW?

By Edwin Cooney
Dated Friday, August 3rd, 2007

It had to happen, you know. It was just a matter of time. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were bound to have a difference the media would find compelling and on which you and I could take sides.

The question is whether there is really an issue of experience vs. naïveté here or whether this is a contrived quarrel

It all began during a CNN/YouTube Democratic debate on the night of Monday, July 23rd. Senator Barack Obama responded affirmatively to a question as to whether or not he would agree to meet with rogue leaders of such countries as Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela during the first year of his administration. Senator Clinton wasted little time suggesting that Senator Obama’s response was reckless and naïve and indicative of his lack of experience so essential to any successful presidency. A few days later on the campaign trail, Senator Obama upped the intensity of the “debate” by asserting that what America doesn‘t need is “Bush Lite” in the White House.

From what I’ve gathered, the consensus is that Senator Clinton has come out ahead on this “issue” because everyone knows that any substantive bilateral meeting or “summit” necessarily requires careful preparation. Pre-summit preparedness was one of the rare issues on which John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon concurred during their second debate in 1960.

“Ah, but that’s politics,” you say — but that’s just the point. JFK and RMN had little to gain by disagreeing on the need for pre-summit preparation, but Barack and Hillary both have something to gain by debating this issue.

Senator C. wants to demonstrate that Senator O.’s inexperience is shown by his willingness to consider summitry with “rogue” leaders during the first year of a possible Obama presidency. She wants you to think that she’s experienced and he’s merely naive.

Senator O. wants to demonstrate that Senator C. is simply taking the path of least resistance or “the establishment position” just as she did when she voted to authorize President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq — which he, with all of his inexperience, opposed. He wants you to see him as bold and creative and to view her as dangerously narrow and cautious.

What neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama is expounding much on is what it takes to conduct a successful summit. Neither are they speculating much about the significance of past summit meetings. So, perhaps a quick look at some questionable summit meetings might be helpful.

Since May 8th, 1945, which we celebrated as VE Day, there have been 18 meetings between American presidents and Soviet leaders. The first one, held at Potsdam just outside of Berlin, Germany, has been considered a failure by many historians and commentators because it solidified and officially sanctified the Soviet Union’s tyranny over Eastern Europe. No one, in-so-far as I’m aware, chalks that failure up to President Truman’s mere three months of presidential experience—and they shouldn’t. After all, post-war spheres of influence by the great powers were regarded as inevitable throughout the war. As for preparedness being a factor at Potsdam, it could hardly have been a factor especially since the British government changed hands in the middle of the conference. Winston Churchill came to the Potsdam conference as Prime Minister and was replaced on July 23rd by Clement Atlee… so much for summit predictability or continuity.

The second post-war meeting between the two “Super Powers” didn’t occur for ten years after World War II. American-Soviet meetings were “conferences” during the war. However, now that the war was over, we and the Soviets were adversaries rather than allies, thus our meetings became “summits” rather than conferences.

By July 1955, President Eisenhower felt that the Soviet Union might well be ready for the easement of international tensions. The Soviets, after all, had agreed to the independence of Austria the previous May (thereby allowing for the restoration of Austria’s constitutional monarchy) and had expressed a willingness to discuss the limitation of nuclear stockpiles.

The American people weren’t so sure of the wisdom of an American - Soviet meeting at “the summit.” Many believed (I think incorrectly) that FDR was either bullied by Stalin or bamboozled due to naiveté and illness into “giving away” Eastern Europe to the Russians during the Yalta conference of February 1945. They thought that this allowed for the drawing down of the “Iron Curtain” and they didn’t want to see any more presidential “surrendering” to the Soviets.

According to Cary Reich, one of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s biographers, Secretary of State Dulles tried to talk Ike out of the conference going so far as to insist that Geneva, Switzerland, where the summit was to be held, would be too packed with summer tourists. Ike wasn’t buying it, however.

It wasn’t until President Eisenhower made his dramatic “Open Skies” inspection proposal that either the President or the Secretary of State was sure who was making the decisions on the Soviet side. Winston Churchill had been calling for a “Big Four” summit for two years. The Soviet government was still in transition following the death of Josef Stalin. No one knew for sure whether the goateed Premier Nikolai Bulganin or the bald and beefy First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev was in charge. As a result, President Eisenhower, Churchill’s successor Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain, Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France, and the Soviet leadership met at the Palace of Nations, the old League of Nations headquarters, on Monday, July 18th, 1955.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, President Eisenhower -- without consulting either the British or the French -- announced that the United States would be willing to allow Soviet aerial inspection of its military installations for purposes of verification if the Soviets would do the same. Amidst everyone’s astonishment at the President’s proposal, a sudden loud thunderclap caused the lights to go out — as if nature itself were applauding Ike. Soviet Premier Bulganin’s comments followed Mr. Eden and Mr. Faure’s favorable responses. The Premier said that the President was obviously sincere and that the Soviet Union would give the proposal serious consideration.

Once the meeting broke up, Nikita Khrushchev cornered Eisenhower and made it plain that, as far as he was concerned, such inspection was a bald espionage ploy. Secretary Khrushchev went on to question why, if the United States was so peace-loving, it didn’t get down to business with the recent Soviet proposal for disarmament talks. Ike responded that he’d be happy to do that if the Russians would accept his proposal. Khrushchev turned and walked away.

The summit was ultimately considered a success because of the propaganda and psychological advantage the United States had gained in the eyes of the world by offering to expose its military to inspection if the Russians would do the same. In addition, our government came out of the summit with a better understanding of who was making the decisions in the Soviet government.

The first American - Soviet summit became known to the world as “The Open Skies Summit”. While “the Spirit of Geneva” wasn’t any more long-lasting than “the Spirit of Camp David” four years later in 1959, I think it’s reasonable to say that summitry was useful because the easing of tensions encouraged the leadership on both sides of the “Iron Curtain” to seek out face-saving methods of survival in the event of potentially lethal crises.

The Camp David summit occurred at the close of Nikita Khrushchev’s September 1959 visit to the United States. It set up the “Big Five” summit scheduled for Paris in May of 1960. That summit was scuttled by Khrushchev after the Russians shot down our U-2 flight and captured both the pilot and the spy plane. That failure was a failure of calculation rather than preparation.

When JFK met Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, the President was under two disadvantages. The first was as the result of our participation in the recent disaster at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The second disadvantage was the occurrence of the “Freedom Riders” antidiscrimination campaign back home which exposed to the world the citizen inequalities existing in the United States. The ’61 summit would be followed by the Berlin crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Luckily, JFK’s knowledge of Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s knowledge of JFK enabled both leaders to find face-saving ways to avoid a disastrous confrontation. It might even be argued that the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was one of the results of the 1961 Kennedy/Khrushchev summit meeting. (However, the immediate aftermath of the 1961 Kennedy Khrushchev summit meeting was the construction of the Berlin wall along with tanks muzzle to muzzle in the streets of Berlin, bomb shelter construction here at home, and missiles and quarantine in the Gulf of Mexico in October of 1962.)

President Nixon and Soviet President Brezhnev were both well prepared for the 1972 Salt I Treaty summit meeting in Moscow and there was much ceremony and even hope, despite the yet unresolved Vietnam War. However, when they were together at Nixon’s home in San Clemente in 1973, there occurred a spontaneous disagreement over the Middle East in the middle of the night. Brezhnev had gone to bed in Tricia Nixon Cox’s room and suddenly, without warning, he called for a late night meeting with the President. The discussion, as reported by President Nixon in his memoirs, was both spontaneous and even “brutal”, but Mr. Nixon said, it paid dividends during the Yom Kippur War the following October.

In summation then, summitry can be a treacherous emotional minefield regardless of the degree of “spadework” or preparation. Neither Obama’s creativity nor Clinton’s calculated caution adequately addresses the subject of summitry for the edification of the American people. Now that Senator Obama has been creative and Senator Clinton has been defensively cautious, it should be noted that neither one of them has been through a summit meeting. Thus, it’s clear to this observer that this “debate” is much less about issues than it is about political positioning and theater.

As I said at the outset, the debate may be both entertaining and even instructive as to the judgment, creativity, and temperament of both candidates. It may even be necessary.

But even though it’s a hell-of-a-good-show, I believe those smirking people out there buying popcorn are Republicans.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY