The Turkish Arms Embargo. James F. Goode
week, delegates representing the organization’s 50,000 members focused on Cyprus and what they considered the failed policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations. On August 21 a delegation visited UN headquarters to meet with Undersecretary-General Frank Bradley Morse to express their concerns. Two days later, AHEPA supreme president William P. Tsaffaras and two other delegates met with the secretary of state in Washington to hear his defense of US policy. They reported a subdued Kissinger who blamed the US failure to respond to the threatened Turkish invasion on the disordered situation in Washington, with one president on the point of resigning and another unelected president about to take office. The delegates told him that if justice for Cyprus were not forthcoming, AHEPA members and Greek Americans in general would turn their anger against the president. “We will know what to do in the next election,” they warned.31
Kissinger introduced the delegates to the new US ambassador to Greece, Jack Kubisch. On the spur of the moment, in response to an invitation from the delegates, Kissinger told the ambassador to go to Boston immediately and speak to the convention. He did, and for a moment, Kubisch became a symbol of the new administration’s good intentions.32
On August 24, the final day of the conference, AHEPA took two important steps. It voted to raise $100,000 through its many chapters to continue to seek justice for Cyprus. It also approved the creation of an ad hoc Justice for Cyprus Committee to lead the campaign.33
It is little wonder that the Ford administration often seemed overwhelmed at the extent and vociferousness of these lobbying efforts. Activists seemed to be everywhere, sending postcards and telegrams; placing ads in local, regional, and national newspapers; and sponsoring rallies for Cyprus. Gerald Ford had assumed the presidency in the middle of the Cyprus crisis, and he had no time to ponder this issue or any of the others he had inherited from his predecessor. He had little choice but to retain most of Nixon’s appointees, even if their personalities clashed with his own, such as that of Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. In time, these awkward relationships would be resolved. Fortunately, Ford worked well with Kissinger, who was delighted to continue his tenure as secretary of state and national security adviser.
President Ford, Secretary of State Kissinger, and other top State Department officials met on numerous occasions with the AHEPA committee, Archbishop Iakovos, and delegations of congressmen who supported an embargo. The administration tried to be patient, but increasingly it came to view the Greek American activists as representing a special interest, to the detriment of the broader American interest. The executive needed to have a relatively free hand to negotiate with foreign countries, and the White House believed that an embargo would make the Turks less amenable to compromise. President Ford liked to tell visitors that he was a member of the AHEPA chapter in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and that he counted a number of Greek Americans there as his friends. But these connections were of little help to him in Washington.
When President Ford appeared on television and stated that “our foreign policy cannot be simply a collection of special economic or ethnic or ideological interests … the executive must have flexibility in the conduct of foreign policy,” AHEPA responded with a challenge. “One can only assume,” it said, “that the President believes that Americans of Greek descent need to be ‘put in their place’ and that we should be reprimanded for voicing our opinions on the Cyprus matter! … Is foreign policy the sole possession of one, two, or twenty men?”34
In part, the president was grappling with a new phenomenon spawned by the civil rights movement: an ethnic revival that exhibited nationalist fervor whenever issues related to the homeland cried out “for emotional involvement.” For many, ethnicity had become a social good. As historian Salim Yaqub recently wrote, “By 1970, it was much safer and more acceptable for people with dark complexions, strange names, and in some cases foreign accents to criticize the United States … boasting their own long heritage of stable and industrious ethnic communities in America.” This movement was a protest against “the very fabric of WASP culture,” and in this case, President Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and even Secretary Kissinger represented the WASP establishment, which was trying to dictate how Greek Americans should behave. But that minority was not going to be shamed into silence.35
At the local level, too, new activist groups sprang into existence around the country to pursue goals similar to those of the national organizations. In Minneapolis–St. Paul, for example, a group calling itself the Minnesota Friends of Cyprus (MFC) actively engaged these issues in the Twin Cities, seeking funds, raising consciousness, lobbying the state’s congressmen and senators, and urging its members to write letters to federal officials. The MFC remained active until the end of the 1970s. Another example was the Save Cyprus Council of Southern California, chaired by Professor Theodore Saloutos (1910–1980) of UCLA, the noted historian of the Greek immigrant community.
Saloutos left a detailed diary of these early days of organization and protest, providing an intimate look at the inner workings of the Greek American lobbying effort. It covers his various activities on both coasts during the critical period from August 30 to September 17, 1974. He eagerly assumed his new role, helping to organize meetings and protests against the Turkish invasion. He corresponded regularly with the offices of Congressmen Edward Roybal (D-CA) and Thomas Rees (D-CA) and Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA). He also established contact with Mike Minashian, an Armenian activist; they shared an antipathy toward the Turks, and their respective organizations cooperated in the defense of Cyprus. Representatives of their two groups met with Congressman Roybal at his Los Angeles office on September 4. They had been advised beforehand that the congressman was particularly concerned about Turkey’s cultivation of the opium poppy, having traveled to Turkey with a group of his colleagues to study the problem. Thus, Saloutos and the others emphasized that issue in their meeting. Roybal, who served on the House Appropriations Committee, thought that opposition to poppy cultivation provided the best point of attack for curtailing aid to Turkey. A number of committee members already supported such a move, and others could be persuaded, he thought. Roybal urged them to publicize their activities. Saloutos came away with a view of Roybal as “a modern, unassuming man of integrity who speaks for the common people.”36
Of course, not everything went as planned. On September 3 Saloutos complained about an atrocity story, accompanied by a picture of slain Turkish Cypriots, that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. He viewed this as an unfair allocation of space and a form of “yellow journalism.” A rally on September 6, on the south lawn of city hall, turned into a fiasco. It was poorly organized; there was no spokesman to meet with the media, and prominent personalities had never been invited. It was a disaster, according to Saloutos. That evening, however, things began to look up. Saloutos participated in a meeting at St. Sophia Cathedral, where John Brademas was the principal speaker. The congressman was visiting California to raise money for his reelection campaign. The Cyprus committee also raised $600 at the event. Brademas impressed Saloutos with his sophisticated presentation.
Four days later, Saloutos arrived at AHEPA headquarters in Washington, DC. There, he met with Eugene Rossides, who was then in the process of creating the American Hellenic Institute “to serve as a round-the-clock office on all legislation present and future dealing with the Cyprus question.” Rossides planned to send information to AHEPA and church-based organizations, hoping to line up their public support. Saloutos read over the draft proposal and made a few suggestions. He recommended that, for academics at least, the AHI membership fee should be reduced from $500 to $100. He also met Rossides’s assistant, a Cypriot who told him that most Greek Cypriots opposed enosis. The Greeks, he said, could not govern themselves, so “why should they seek to govern Cyprus 500 miles away.” It seemed that no one knew for certain how many Greek Cypriots favored union with Athens and how many wanted to maintain independence.37
On September 11 Saloutos lunched with his good friend George C. Vournos, a Washington-based lawyer and former supreme president of AHEPA (1942–1945). Vournos asked Saloutos to read a draft article he had written for a scholarly journal in which he criticized the National Herald of New York, a leading Greek American paper; AHEPA leadership; and even Archbishop Iakovos and the Greek Orthodox Church for their earlier support of the junta, which, he argued, had contributed to the Cyprus tragedy. Vournos also suggested that academics