éYEARS OF UPHEAVAL
Détente with the Soviet Union was urged on us insistently when we entered office, hailed as a turning point when we carried it out and later blamed for all our contemporary dilemmas. In the retrospective of a decade, detente is being made to bear the burden for the consequences of America's self-destructive domestic convulsions over Viet Nam and Watergate. The former made Americans recoil before foreign involvement and thus opened an opportunity for Soviet expansionism; the latter weakened Executive power to resist Soviet pressure.
A collective amnesia has seized the participants...