ABSTRACT
By the summer of 1974, when Gerald R. Ford took over as president, Richard M. Nixon’s foreign policy had become controversial. Liberals chastised him for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted his administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of detente, which, in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology. A nation’s foreign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the convictions of its leaders and the pressures of its environment. To understand the Nixon administration’s approach to East–West relations—and the controversy that bedeviled Ford—it is necessary to describe the situation that Nixon inherited. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for the remainder of Nixon’s term, an increasingly acerbic domestic debate over the nature and the priorities of American foreign policy broke out. With brief interruptions, it has continued to this writing. The liberals’ reversal of position was soon being echoed by various conservative groups.
