2/23/1993


Washington Times



By Arnold Beichman


    There is a piece of unfinished business facing President Clinton.

    Over the last twenty years, four Presidents of the United States--Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush--refused to receive Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the White House for various reasons and on various pretexts.

    This shameful chapter in American history must be rectified by Mr. Clinton. Mr. Solzhenitsyn, one of the heroes of the victory over Communism, is owed something by the United States. Or is Mr. Solzhenitsyn to return to his native land never to have had the symbolic recognition that is his due?

    The man responsible for the anti-Solzhenitsyn appease-the-Kremlin policy is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  As an act of atonement, Mr. Kissinger himself should appeal to Mr. Clinton to receive this great writer and Nobel Laureate at the White House.

    Mr. Solzhenitsyn will be returning to Russia within a few months. Since 1973, the author of the "Gulag Archipelago" has been living with his family in Cavendish, Vermont, where he continues his writing. He and his wife have decided that the time had come for him to return to their homeland, one which in the days of the Bolshevik dictatorship forced them into exile.

    When the history of the last decade is finally written, Mr. Solzhenitsyn will be a dominating figure whose courageous role in creating a free Russia was indispensable. More than any man, he imbued his opposition to Communism with a sense of outraged morality. This man alone became an opposition State, a parallel government, competing with the official State in a land where no opposition was permitted, a land of political prisoners, refuseniks, dissidents, rebels and defectors.

    It will be recalled that Solzhenitsyn, having been charged by the Soviets with treason February 13, 1974, and expelled from the USSR with his family, eventually came to live in the United States.

    There is a piece of unwritten history about Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Solzhenitsyn. It happened at the August 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri when President Ford, Richard Nixon's successor, faced a serious challenge from former Governor Ronald Reagan. The Reagan advisers moved to insert into the G.O.P. platform a plank which impliedly called upon the White House to receive Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

    President Ford, on the advice of Mr. Kissinger, had declined to invite Mr. Solzhenitsyn in 1975 when the Russian writer was to be honored at a dinner in Washington, D.C. tendered by AFL-CIO President George Meany. Mr. Solzhenitsyn could easily had taxied over to Pennsylvania Ave. before or after the dinner. Not only was no such invitation forthcoming but on behalf of Mr. Ford, Mr. Kissinger forbade Cabinet members from attending the Solzhenitsyn dinner.

    To their everlasting honor, three Cabinet members defied the Secretary of State's edict and attended the dinner. They were: Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Labor Secretary John Dunlop and USUN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a member of the Cabinet by virtue of his position.

    Angered by this appeasement of the Kremlin--why else would Mr. Kissinger have ignored the Solzhenitsyn presence?--the Reagan advisers moved to insert a plank in the GOP platform under the title, "Morality in Foreign Policy." The crucial paragraph, written by Martin Anderson, read:

    "We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny...Ours will be a foreign policy which recognizes that in international negotiations we must make no undue concessions; that in pursuing detente we must not grant unilateral favors with only the hope of getting future favors in return."

    When this paragraph was read to President Ford, he was ensconced in the convention hall with his advisers: Mr. Kissinger, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller (who was being replaced on the ticket by Senator Robert Dole), James Baker and Bryce Harlow. Messrs. Upon hearing the text, Messrs. Kissinger and Rockefeller "went ballistic." The Ford convention floor leader told Mr. Harlow who told President Ford that --even if Ford objects, the delegates would vote for the Reagan proposal no matter what the Administration's attitude would be. So President Ford went along with the Reagan plank over the Kissinger-Rockefeller objections.

    And the supreme irony is that in the eight years that Ronald Reagan served as President he never welcomed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into the White House.

    Was Marlin Fitzwater speaking for himself or for President Bush? When the former White House press secretary was asked about Salman Rushdie's presence in the United States, he replied dismissively that the target of Muslim fundamentalism "is just an author on a book tour." But George Stephanopolous, the new White House director of communications, recently said about Rushdie:

    "We don't believe that people should be killed for writing books. We regard the fatwa [religious edict] as a violation of Mr. Rushdie's basic human rights and therefore a violation of international law."

    Perhaps it will take Mr. Clinton with the help of Mr. Stephanopolous to lift the presidential ban on Mr. Solzhenitsyn before he and his family return to Russia sometime this year.

--end--

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution Research Fellow, is a Washington Times columnist. He is the author of the just published "Anti-Americanism: Its Causes and Consequences."


Henry Kissinger himself. He successfully advised President Ford to bar Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the White House

              It should be recalled that Solzhenitsyn was never invited to the White House either by Presidents Ford, Carter or Reagan and at this writing by President Bush. (Nevertheless, with what must have been unconscious irony, President Reagan quoted from the writings of Solzhenitsyn to Soviet audiences during the May 1988 summit in Moscow.)

              Kissinger with Brent Scowcroft, then as now the president's National Security Adviser, prepared a servile   memorandum in June 1975 to warn President Ford against receiving Solzhenitsyn at the White House or attending a dinner in Solzhenitsyn's honor tendered him by then AFL-CIO President George Meany. The memorandum said in part:


           "The Soviets would probably take White House participation in this affair as either a deliberate negative signal or a sign of Administration weakness in the face of domestic anti-Soviet pressures. We recommend that the invitation to the President be declined and that no White House officials participate...

           "During Solzhenitsyn's Washington visit another problem may arise: Pressure may be generated by Meany, members of Congress or others for the President to receive Solzhenitsyn in the White House. He is a Nobel Prize winner, he is widely admired in the United States and the Senate has passed a resolution granting him honorary United States citizenship (if the House follows suit he would be the only person except Churchill so honored.)....The arguments against such a meeting are as compelling as those against accepting the banquet invitation, but more difficult to defend publicly."*

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footnote to appear on same page

* While the Senate unanimously adopted a resolution conferring honorary U.S. citizenship on Solzhenitsyn, the House of Representatives, acting on the formal request of Kissinger's State Department, killed the resolution in the House Judiciary Committee, chaired to his everlasting shame by former Rep. Peter Rodino. [Dunlop: 1985]

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Sickening Servility


           And then came these sickening sentences in the Kissinger-Scowcroft memorandum:


           "Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents. Not only would a meeting with the President offend the Soviets but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn's views of the United States and its allies...Further, Solzhenitsyn has never before been received by a Chief of State and such a meeting would lend weight to his political views as opposed to his literary talent."


           There is more of this prose which, when the memorandum leaked, impelled George Will to write in the Washington Post, July 11, 1975:


           "The United States government may have to expel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the republic, not only as a hands-across-the- barbed-wire gesture of solidarity with its detente partner, the Soviet government, but also to save the president and his attendants from nervous breakdowns.... Detente has conferred upon Brezhnev a veto over the appointments calendar of the President of the United States."


           It should be added that in the era of the Reagan- Gorbachev detente, the Kissinger-Scowcroft policy over the president's appointments calendar was still in effect, at least where Solzhenitsyn was concerned.