He did not want any “dancing on the Wall” or “rubbing the Soviets’ noses” in their catastrophically historic defeat. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, said the US strove “not to be braggadocio or triumphalist in our comments. Kissinger had persuaded Ford not to invite visiting Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House in 1975 for fear of offending Moscow. Five years earlier, a Lithuanian sailor jumped from a Soviet trawler onto a US Coast Guard cutter off Cape Cod and tried to defect. These historical incidents resonate today in the constant tension between prudence (or “accommodation”) and assertive morality (or “provocation”).
