Summer 1975: Ford Angers Conservatives by Refusing to Meet with Soviet Dissident

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. [Source: Catholic Education (.org)]Famed Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks at an AFL-CIO meeting in Washington. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), a hardline conservative hawk who, in the words of author J. Peter Scoblic, is “an absolutist who saw the Cold War as a struggle being waged on ‘every continent’ and who was eager to speak up ‘in favor of freedom and against Communism, wherever it was found,’” attempts to arrange a meeting between Solzhenitsyn and President Ford. Ford, with an upcoming trip to the USSR and a meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, refuses, fearing that meeting with Solzhenitsyn might sour the meeting with Brezhnev. (Ford overrides the arguments made by his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, who presses Ford to meet with the dissident.) Conservatives are outraged at what they see as naked political amorality—refusing to meet with a legitimate anti-Communist hero in order to placate a Communist leader. Conservative pundit George Will writes that the Ford White House is “showing a flair for baseness that would have stood them in good stead with the previous [Nixon] administration.” [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 76, 78]