President Ford Averts Another Shake-Up

President Ford

Unusually subdued, U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan stood last week at the bar in the delegates' lounge at the United Nations building, sipping red Dubonnet on the rocks and glumly sidestepping questions. A few minutes earlier, he had canceled a press conference at which he had intended to announce that he was resigning because of criticism of his don't-tread-on-me style as ambassador. But in a series of frantic, last-minute telephone calls, high Administration officials had persuaded him to postpone his decision and talk over his grievances this week with President Gerald Ford.

By that narrow margin, the Ford Administration averted a second damaging shake-up in the highest reaches of the Government. With political reverberations over his Cabinet shuffle of two weeks earlier not yet stilled, the President obviously could hardly afford a second crisis. Thus he was expected to do what he could to assuage Moynihan and keep him on the job. Similarly, a few days earlier, the President had had to mollify Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had privately complained that the Administration was not giving him full backing in his confrontation with the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

Public Support. In Moynihan's case, the problem was his aggressive defense of U.S. democratic principles against a hostile Third World majority at the U.N. Since becoming ambassador in June, he offended African diplomats by correctly describing Ugandan President Idi ("Big Daddy") Amin Dada as a "racist murderer" and indirectly criticizing other African nations because Amin is head of the Organization of African Unity. More recently, Moynihan antagonized Third World ambassadors with threats of retribution for supporting the U.N. General Assembly's resolution equating Zionism with racism.

His outspoken stands won him wide public support in the U.S. but offended a number of State Department officials, as well as some American allies at the U.N. Last week Ivor Richard, the British ambassador to the U.N., chastised Moynihan in a speech by implicitly comparing him with a shoot-from-the-hip Wyatt Earp, a vengeful Savonarola and an angry King Lear raging amid the storm. Moynihan was furious and decided that between criticism from the State Department and from U.N. diplomats, he had had enough. Kissinger urged him to stay. Said the Secretary: "He has done an excellent job. I have absolutely no reason to replace him." The White House later stated that Ford "has full confidence" in Moynihan and "fully approves" of his performance.

The treatment resembled the steps Ford had taken previously to calm down Kissinger, who was caught in yet another struggle by Congress to pry secret information out of the Administration. The Secretary had been outraged when the House committee, led by pugnacious New York Democrat Otis Pike, voted to cite him with three counts of contempt of Congress for not obeying its subpoenas to turn over three sets of top-secret documents. They are: 1) State Department recommendations on covert intelligence actions between 1962 and 1972, 2) National Security Council records of the Central Intelligence Agency's covert operations since 1965 and 3) intelligence reports concerning twelve U.S. charges of Soviet violations of the SALT nuclear-arms accord.

With Kissinger's approval, Ford rejected the subpoena of the State Department recommendations on grounds of Executive privilege. But some of the documents sought under the two other subpoenas were turned over to the committee by White House Counselor John O. Marsh, though the most sensitive portions were deleted for security reasons. Dissatisfied, the committee decided to cite Kissinger for contempt, an unprecedented step that could send the case to the courts for trial.

Some of Kissinger's assistants raised dark suspicions that White House aides had set him up for Pike to attack. They argued that Marsh should have tried harder to head off a confrontation with the committee. Marsh denied the charge, saying that he had done his best. The State Department aides portrayed Kissinger as plunged into pessimism and contemplating resignation. Indeed, the situation was reminiscent of his threat to resign in June 1974 over disclosures of his involvement in the wiretapping of newsmen and some of his assistants.

Election Issue. Now, at the State Department and the White House, many officials were convinced that Kissinger would leave the Government in four to six months, no matter what the outcome of the dispute with the Pike committee. The reason: prospects are dim for further major movement toward an Arab-Israeli settlement or for a SALT II agreement with the Soviets in 1976. In addition, Kissinger will probably become an election issue: conservative Republicans and even many Democrats argue that Russia is benefiting more from detente than the U.S. Thus, the officials suggest, Kissinger may well choose to resign before his public esteem begins to slide. His rumored successor: incoming Commerce Secretary Elliot Richardson.

By week's end, Kissinger's mood began to improve as his characteristically emotional pleas brought support. Ford wrote the committee to explain that the Secretary had acted "on my instructions as President." Senior White House aides made a point of describing Kissinger as indispensable to Ford.

Still trying for a compromise, Kissinger, through Marsh, offered to let Pike examine the sensitive documents in the White House, but without actually turning them over.

The committee was not mollified. Its members voted to send the three recommended citations to the House for action next week after Congress returns from the Thanksgiving recess. Few others in the House want a confrontation with Kissinger over the subpoenas. Some members complained that Pike was grabbing headlines to further his ambition to run for the Senate next year against Conservative James Buckley. Said a Democratic House leader: "There's no love for Kissinger here, but this is an issue that the guys don't want to hit or be hit by. They are looking for a way to get off the hook."

Democratic leaders plan to move to table Pike's proposed contempt citations and thus end the immediate confrontation. But the episode, followed as it was by the Moynihan flap, left the uncomfortable impression of grave weakness in the Ford Administration. Because Ford could not afford the public outcry if he allowed Kissinger to resign, the two men in effect held each other for ransom.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.