XXIV
The Last Hurrah
As the Syrian shuttle went on and on, we sustained ourselves by visions of the return home, which took on the quality of an oasis for a wanderer in the desert. The longer the working days, the tauter the nerves, the more idyllic the end of the shuttle appeared to us. We would not have believed that the vision would turn into a mirage.
The Syrian-Israeli disengagement proved to be the last major achievement of the Nixon Administration. To a great extent, the heart of our foreign policy had seemed to be insulated from the most corrosive domestic effects of Watergate, as if by a tacit national recognition of the needs of survival. It could not continue. When the fabric of a society is sufficiently rent, all restraints give way sooner or later. Shortly after the Syrian agreement was completed, foreign policy was subjected to a direct assault. The cocoon that seemed to protect me from personal attack was abruptly torn asunder.
I arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at 1:50 A.M. on May 31 at the conclusion of the thirty-four-day shuttle to what may have been the high point of public acclaim ever accorded to a Secretary of State. News-week’s cover showed me in a Superman suit. Time’s cover was less heady but its praise nearly as excessive. Commentators described the shuttle as one of the greatest diplomatic achievements in history; there is no record indicating that I resisted the hyperbole. The (apocryphal?) story made the rounds that I responded to someone at a dinner party who thanked me for saving the world with the smug reply, “You are welcome.”
In fact, my mood was more complex. I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. I was experiencing the letdown that always followed great exertions. And better than most, I knew how narrow had been the dividing line between success and failure. Had Asad not called me back a few days earlier — on my birthday — as I was walking out of his room, the whole agreement would have aborted. Many now applauding would have been castigating the investment of so much prestige in a prolonged personal negotiation. A foretaste of these ashes had been provided when the talks seemed to stalemate three days before the signing, as in this report filed by the fair-minded CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb on May 28:
This is the 31st day of the Kissinger journey to a disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel. There have been 16 visits to Israel, 12 to Damascus, 18,200 miles from Washington and back and forth between Jerusalem and Damascus — an extraordinary expenditure of energy and personal influence on the Secretary’s part. He wanted an agreement. That he failed to achieve it, it seems, [was] no failure of effort or commitment. . . .
Mistakes and misjudgments have been made. Perhaps Kissinger should not have come here at all. Perhaps he should have sent Sisco to do the basic diplomatic spade work and come here only when the differences had narrowed sufficiently for him to use his influence and crack the deadlock. Perhaps after two weeks he should have gone home and not wait[ed here] for the chance to conclude a final agreement. . . .
He invested so much and he did not get his deal. It is unlikely that he will ever invest so much again on a single negotiation. He will return to Washington probably tomorrow and then he will have to answer the many questions that will be raised about the negotiation, about his judgment, about the future of the Middle East. Kissinger has always been fatalistic about negotiations — there are things that can be done, there are things that cannot be done. The worst thing for him is not to have tried. He will not be guilty of that.
But if I had succeeded in the shuttle, I knew also it was only a beginning, in the manner of an Alpine climber who pauses for a brief respite at the top of a hilly meadow and sees the distant peaks as far away as ever. We had gained maneuvering room but I had learned the price of it. The period for apparent miracles was over. To build upon the two agreements a durable peace in the Middle East, which was our firm resolve, would dwarf in complexity the disengagements that had required such massive labors; and it would in its course evoke passions far more elemental than those that had already driven all of us, as Abba Eban said on my departure, more than once beyond the point of despair.
In these first days back in Washington, I wondered how we could begin such an odyssey while poised over the widening fissure of Watergate. By now I considered Nixon’s impeachment inevitable. The release of even his version of the taped conversations in the Oval Office had removed the last inhibitions. Almost no major figure was prepared to speak out on his behalf. His public support had dwindled to a hard core of about 25 percent. The disintegration of the Presidency was painful to observe. Nixon’s self-discipline was extraordinary, but it only masked his vulnerability and he was drained now of a sense of proportion. One could not work with a man for over five years as I had without being touched by the sinking of a spirit that had so often borne us up.
It was in this mood, suspended between awe and dread, and seeking to regain my balance amidst adulation and disintegration, that with stunning unexpectedness I found myself drawn into the pit.
By now the lust for revelation had developed its own logic. What had started out as a means to break through official obfuscation of wrongdoing had become an insatiable demand for a “truth” that often was itself a distortion. Each inquiry was treated as if it stood entirely by itself; any official document was handled as if it were the revealed truth and as if no one had ever heard of the self-serving papering of files, of memoranda written to cover the author’s tracks. There is no question that the Watergate investigations dramatized the indispensable principle that not even the highest in the land are above the law. By the summer of 1974, however, Watergate turned into a kind of national masochism that threatened to consume our substance in an obsession with our failings. Suddenly it was my turn.
The occasion was yet another regurgitation of the twin issues of wiretapping and the “Plumbers.” The first rumblings had been apparent during the Syrian shuttle. John Ehrlichman was due to go on trial later in the summer for offenses related to the activities of the “Plumbers,” including the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Seeking to justify his actions on grounds of national security, Ehrlichman filed a court affidavit on May 1 asserting that the “Plumbers” unit had been formed at three meetings in 1971, one of which I had attended. Charles Colson, indicted for other offenses, on April 29 had filed an affidavit for the Ehrlichman trial making the same point.I Both these events made headlines. The implication was that I had known about the “Plumbers” and their illegal activities all along and that my denials had been untrue. It was a replay of issues that had surfaced in my confirmation hearings in September 1973 and that had then been rehashed in the January 1974 investigation of the Navy yeoman who had rifled my briefcase (see Chapters X and XVIII). Repetition did not make the accusations any more valid.
In July 1971, while I was on my secret trip to China, Ehrlichman had asked David Young, then an aide of mine, to join his staff. On my return on July 13, I protested to Ehrlichman that he should not have done this in my absence. Two days later, Nixon invited a number of his senior staff, including Ehrlichman and me, to dine with him in Los Angeles to celebrate his television appearance in which he announced my secret trip. After a convivial evening with Nixon basking in one of the rare moments of general public approbation, Ehrlichman and I shared a forty-minute helicopter ride back to San Clemente and fell into another bicker about David Young. Ehrlichman boasted that he was better able to use talent than I was, as demonstrated by his ability to attract Young; I put it down to jealousy over the attention paid to my China exploit. If Ehrlichman mentioned “Plumbers” or that Young was intended for such a group, it passed me by. My perception was that Young had been assigned to a project involving declassification of documents. As I have said earlier, I would not have seen anything wrong with a small unit in Ehrlichman’s office charged with investigating security leaks. And nobody ever claimed that I knew of the “Plumbers’ ” later illegal activities.
No matter; in May 1974 following Ehrlichman’s and Colson’s affidavits, we were back to the nightmarish speculation on whether I should have deduced Young’s other duties from the interview of an Admiral who reported a security violation in December 1971 or on how I recalled a July 1971 helicopter ride at the end of an emotion-filled day entirely devoted to the China breakthrough. On May 11, Morton Halperin, a former NSC staff aide whose telephone had been wiretapped and who was making a career out of pursuing me in the courts and in the media, told a conference of journalists in Boston that I was guilty of perjury. The Boston Globe reported this on May 12, while I was in the Middle East.
A week later, newspapers of the Knight newspaper chain published revelations about a White House tape recording leaked by the House Judiciary Committee. On a garbled tape of an Oval Office conversation with John Dean on February 28, 1973, Nixon said something that sounded as if he was recalling a request by me for a wiretap on my former aide Anthony Lake after he had gone to work for Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie.1 Such a request by me would have contradicted my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that I had only followed security criteria established by Nixon in submitting names for the investigation. Joining the staff of a Presidential candidate was obviously not one of those criteria. It was also untrue. The President’s taped recollections three years after the event were clearly erroneous. (The tapping of Lake had begun in May 1970, while he was still in the government, long before he went to work for Muskie — and around the time that, at Nixon’s orders, wiretap reports from the FBI ceased being sent to me.) What Nixon’s comment quoted out of context might have meant was never cleared up. The key words were practically inaudible. Nixon’s meaning — and what he might have been trying to accomplish by telling such a story to Dean — would depend largely on the context, however. Nobody familiar with Nixon would treat an isolated sentence as being anything other than part of a design.
But the media, riding high on the Watergate wave, were more interested in publishing secret documents than in subjecting them to any critical scrutiny. On May 21 — still on the shuttle — I was sent an article appearing in the left-wing magazine New Times, which was rather revealing of the mood developing among some journalists:
The honeymoon is over for Henry Kissinger. There are signs that the media is [sic] going after him for the first time. . . . And a Washington editor told me: “There’s a strong feeling that Kissinger may get indicted for perjury for telling the Senate he didn’t know about those wiretaps. We’re going to look dumb if we don’t get off our asses before a grand jury does.”
The rumblings turned into an avalanche just as I returned from the shuttle. In early June, as part of the impeachment proceedings, the House Judiciary Committee began reviewing the FBI records on the wiretaps. This material, too, was leaked.
Whoever on the Judiciary Committee (or committee staff) was leaking these documents to the press was unaware that the same material had been examined in September 1973 by Senators John Sparkman and Clifford Case, who had been charged by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to review that aspect of my record in executive session during my confirmation hearings. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, my recollection of events contradicted some of the memoranda in the internal files of the FBI; J. Edgar Hoover had invariably listed some official outside the FBI hierarchy as “requesting” each wiretap even in cases where I had heard Hoover himself specifically recommend them to Nixon. As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk later testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when it looked into the subject, Hoover was a very experienced and astute bureaucrat who understood the importance of protecting his flanks and his rear.2
In 1973 I had reviewed each wiretap and the FBI documents with Senators Sparkman and Case and explained my recollection. Elliot Richardson, then Attorney General, and William Ruckelshaus, then Deputy Attorney General and Acting Director of the FBI, supported my testimony. Afterward, in executive session with the Senate Committee, I had gone over each case of which I had personal knowledge. None of this was known to the House Judiciary Committee when it started reviewing the records. Eager staffers, sensing a fresh victim, leaked what they considered “new evidence” that my earlier public testimony was untrue. The air was heavy with hints of perjury. The Washington Post, loath to fall behind in the pursuit of evildoers, rehashed the earlier stories in its edition of June 6.
That day — barely six days after my Mideast shuttle — I held my first press conference since my return. For nearly five weeks I had been far away, geographically and mentally, from the fevered atmosphere of Washington. I had been preoccupied every waking moment with matters very distant from the semantic hairsplitting over who had “initiated” or “requested” wiretaps five years earlier. Nothing was further from my mind than the possibility that I was about to be cross-examined about Watergate. I was soon brought to earth.
Bizarrely, none of the first six questions touched upon the Golan disengagement. The first question concerned the imminence of the signing of the Atlantic Declaration; the second inquired whether we still sought to “expel” the Soviets from the Middle East, as I had hinted some four years earlier in San Clemente. After that, it was open season. A journalist inquired about the “Plumbers” and the Ehrlichman and Colson affidavits. Then a question was asked about “evidence” before the House Judiciary Committee that I had been one of those who had “initiated” the wiretaps. After a few more perfunctory questions on the Middle East, the press returned to the charge. I was asked once again to reconcile my claimed ignorance of the “Plumbers” with awareness of Young’s investigation of the Navy yeoman. The next question transformed requests for elucidation into thinly veiled accusation: Had I retained counsel for a possible perjury indictment? That prospect had never occurred to me. By now I was rattled and I replied querulously:
I have not retained counsel, and I am not conducting my office as if it were a conspiracy. I stand on the statements that I have made and I will answer no further questions on this topic.
There is no more provocative posture in a press conference than a flat refusal to answer questions on a particular subject. And it showed how much I had lost control. My insecurity had the same effect on the reporters present as the thrashing of a wounded fish has on a shark. Up jumped Clark Mollenhoff, long known as the scourge of evasive officials, shouting in a stentorian voice:
Mr. Secretary, on that question — what you have engaged in here, it’s been a matter of evasion and failure to recollect and some other patterns that we’ve seen over a period of weeks through the Watergate period. I wonder why you cannot answer the direct question if you had any role in initiating the wiretaps on your subordinates.
When I referred to my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he shouted me down with four follow-up questions each of which got me deeper into the morass of how one defined “initiate,” until I said rather plaintively: “I think this is a press conference, not a cross-examination.”
I was learning that in the Watergate atmosphere, an official was suspect if he did not have at his fingertips all the data required to respond on matters that might have occupied him for only a few minutes four or five years previously. And the slightest hesitation — even if caused by consternation — attracted to the story other journalists who were afraid that failure to pursue the wounded quarry would reflect on their professional reputations.
The June 6 press conference opened the floodgates. There was next to no coverage of the foreign policy questions and answers. The New York Times over the next three days devoted four news stories to the wiretap issue under such headlines as: “Kissinger Again Denies Initiating Taps” (June 7); “Data on Politicians Traced to Wiretaps on ‘Security’ ” (June 7); “Kissinger Rebuts Nixon on Wiretap” (June 8); “Kissinger Linked to Order to F.B.I. Ending Wiretaps” (June 9).
The Washington Post and other leading newspapers followed more or less the same pattern — picking up stories from one another, so that (though there was essentially no new material) a sense of momentum was maintained. The Washington Post took up the charge: “What about Kissinger?” read its lead editorial on June 7, recommending a new investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Dissembling Intelligence,” read the New York Times editorial of June 11, hinting at the need for prosecution:
We regretfully observe that Secretary Kissinger seems to be vulnerable to the charge of dissembling about his role in this distasteful affair. If there are to be more serious charges, that is up to the Congress and the courts to decide.
The weekly news magazines followed suit. Time headed its story: “A Kissinger Connection?” Newsweek’s lead was: “An Ugly Blot on Mr. Clean?”
I was shattered. I had tumbled in one week from the exaltation of the Mideast breakthrough into the squalor of Watergate. What had sustained me through the bitter years of Vietnam and the pain of Watergate was the belief that I was repaying the country that had rescued my family from tyranny by upholding its honor and values in a time of crisis. I had been involved in many difficult decisions leading to strong and often forceful actions. But I persevered, convinced — perhaps arrogantly — that when the final balance sheet was drawn, to have helped sustain the world position and creative engagement of the United States of America during an era of turbulence was a contribution to freedom everywhere. Statesmen, after all, are not entitled to insist on serving only in simple periods. If the moral basis of my service were lost, public life would have no meaning for me. I am aware that high officials often find it hard to distinguish between the general welfare and their own role, but my concern was not totally a matter of personal vanity. Almost miraculously, our country was surviving the trauma of a disintegrating Presidency without a mortal foreign challenge. Our risks would multiply if a President in danger of impeachment were saddled with a tainted Secretary of State.
By Tuesday, June 11, the leading news media of the United States — the New York Times, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek, the Washington Star-News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and many others — had taken the position that serious new evidence had raised suspicion of perjury requiring a new investigation. Given the symbiotic relationship between Congress and the press, and the usual workings of the news cycle, I reasoned that if I did nothing, the next stage would see members of Congress take up the same theme. In the normal course — particularly since no one except me was in a position to rebut it — Congressmen and Senators would feel obliged to appear on television seconding the call for a new investigation. The legislators’ charges would be the subject of further news coverage and news commentary, creating the impression of a torrent of revelations. The tide would be against me; I would have to stay on the defensive while touring the Middle East with Nixon and in no position to offer a sustained defense.
It was essential to bring matters to a head quickly and either clear my name or turn my office over to some less controversial figure. No doubt I was deeply distressed. But I also made a cold analysis of the situation. I knew the FBI material that was before the House Judiciary Committee, having gone through it with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the previous September. I judged that if the documents were leaked out one at a time, there would be an endless series of questions and denials all about essentially the same body of fact. By the time Nixon and I returned from the Middle East, my reputation would be so tarnished that it might be irrelevant whether I stayed or left. Against the advice of all my close associates (Larry Eagleburger excepted), I decided to hold a press conference staking everything on one throw of the dice. I would lump all the arguments against me into one coherent account; I would then refute the charges. I would insist on complete exoneration or I would resign. It was strong medicine. But it would force a rapid showdown and end the slow hemorrhaging of the past few weeks. My colleagues — including Al Haig — thought that holding a press conference would attract attention to a story we should prefer to let peter out. I was convinced that the story would not peter out unless we went on the attack.
That was the background to the extraordinary news conference I held in Salzburg on Tuesday, June 11, 1974. Nixon was on the way to the Middle East and had stopped in Salzburg for two nights and a full day to get used to the change in time zones before going on to Cairo. It was also an exercise in nostalgia. He had stopped there in May 1972 before his triumphal visit to Moscow following the mining and bombing of North Vietnam. He wanted to recapture the moment when he had defied his critics and some of his advisers and risked his career defending his conception of the national honor in the face of a cynical North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. Now, in June 1974, he was besieged and in great pain from phlebitis. Disconcertingly, a journey that he hoped would demonstrate his foreign policy achievements seemed about to be swallowed up by a scandal involving me. The last thing he wanted was headlines that deflected attention from the substance of his Middle East trip. On the plane I did not discuss my travail with him. He did not raise it — in itself an interesting commentary on our relationship. But Haig made clear enough either what the President’s preferences were or what his chief of staff would recommend to him: that I endure the assault, just as he had, until the story had spent itself.
I did not believe such a course of action possible. Passivity would see the destruction of our foreign policy, together with me, in daily sensations. Nixon would not be permitted a triumphal Middle East tour focusing only on substance. Once the assault on me had started, it would not stop by itself; indeed, the media would feel obliged to continue it to justify having begun it in the first place. Our choice, I thought, was either to force a showdown or to be gradually worn down by techniques refined over a year and a half of aggressive journalism.
Haig, Eagleburger, Scowcroft, and I discussed the matter at anguishing length on the plane to Salzburg. I had tried to regain the initiative by writing on June 10 to Senator Fulbright, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asking his committee to review the allegations:
You will remember that my testimony concerning the national security wiretaps ordered by the President and carried out by the FBI under the authority of the Attorney General was in three parts: public testimony, an extensive executive session, and a session with Senators Sparkman and Case in which we went over relevant FBI files. The meeting with Senators Sparkman and Case was conducted in the presence of the then Attorney General Richardson and the then Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus.
I emphasize this because no new material has appeared since my testimony except a brief excerpt from a Presidential tape, a large part of which is described as unintelligible. The documents now being leaked were, to the best of my knowledge, available to me before my testimony; they were given to Senators Sparkman and Case prior to my meeting with them. In a few cases my recollection differed in emphasis from the documents; in those cases I pointed out apparent discrepancies and explained them at the time. The innuendos which now imply that new evidence contradicting my testimony has come to light are without foundation. All the available evidence is to the best of my knowledge contained in the public and closed hearings which preceded my confirmation.
What tipped the scale in favor of a full-dress press conference was the New York Times editorial on June 11, quoted above, implying that legal proceedings against me might be indicated. By the time the plane reached Austria, I had decided to reject my colleagues’ advice; Haig remained reluctant but acquiesced. It was unclear to me whether he had consulted Nixon. I had not.
And so it was that I stepped before the hastily assembled White House press corps on June 11 at the Kavalier Haus on the grounds of the state guest house, Schloss Klessheim, in picturesque Salzburg, the home of Mozart. The Kavalier Haus was a “training hotel,” used for the staffs of guests staying at Klessheim and in general for schooling hotel personnel to high Austrian standards. The large room where the press conference was set up had enormous, beautiful tapestries on the walls. The television lights were hot, the atmosphere highly charged.
I led off by reading aloud my letter to Senator Fulbright calling for a reopening of the investigation to lay the innuendos to rest once and for all. I reviewed the circumstances of the origins of the wiretapping, my role, the FBI memoranda, the Foreign Relations Committee’s awareness of all the above, and various specific issues that had come up in the press. I then addressed the matter of the “Plumbers” and my relationship to David Young. I defended my public honor, and pledged to repeat the same explanations under oath before the appropriate Congressional committee:
[O]ur national debate has now reached a point where it is possible for documents that have already been submitted to one committee to be selectively leaked by another committee without the benefit of any explanation, where public officials are required to submit their most secret documents to public scrutiny, but unnamed sources can attack the credibility and the honor of senior officials of the Government without even being asked to identify themselves.
At the end of my opening presentation, I hinted — and in response to questions I stated flatly — that I could not continue to perform my duties unless I was exonerated:
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you seem to imply here that if this campaign is not stopped, you are going to resign. Is that a fair assumption from what you said?
KISSINGER: I am not concerned with the campaign. I am concerned with the truth. I do not believe that it is possible to conduct the foreign policy of the United States under these circumstances when the character and credibility of the Secretary of State is at issue. And if it is not cleared up, I will resign.
The White House reaction was churlish. Nixon would not speak to me. Even Ron Ziegler would not speak to me. Haig in background comments to the press implied that I had been overwrought and cranky from the prolonged Mideast negotiations. At the end of the day, Ziegler issued an artful statement in Nixon’s name recognizing my “desire” to defend my honor, but asserting that “those in the United States and in the world who seek peace and are familiar with Secretary Kissinger’s contributions to international trust and understanding share his [the President’s] view that the Secretary’s honor needs no defense.” (In other words, my press conference had been gratuitous.)
In Washington, the Salzburg press conference was a bombshell. Congressional comment was overwhelmingly favorable, and on a bipartisan basis. Senators Muskie, Mansfield, Fulbright, Humphrey, Cranston, Javits, and Percy made strong statements of support. Representative Robert Drinan, a virulent Administration critic serving on the Judiciary Committee, stated that he would be happy to be able to report that I was directly responsible for the wiretap program but he could not do so. By the end of the day on Thursday, June 13, a resolution introduced into the Senate by conservative Senator James B. Allen of Alabama, expressing support for me, had picked up fifty-one cosponsors. It did not deal with the wiretap issue directly; its main thrust was praise for my diplomatic achievements coupled with an expression of the Senate’s “complete confidence” and conviction that my “integrity and veracity” were above reproach. The sponsors ran the gamut from conservative Senators Barry Goldwater and Henry Jackson — and Sam Ervin — to liberals John Tunney and Thomas Eagleton. William Ruckelshaus, Acting FBI Director during the previous investigation — and now one of the heroes of the “Saturday night massacre” — stated on “Face the Nation” on June 16, 1974: “I think his role, as best I’ve been able to determine, is pretty much as he’s described it.”
Under that counterassault, the media soon began to retreat. The dominant theme was that I had overreacted; I was tired from overwork, oversensitive, and too thin-skinned for the rough and tumble of politics. My old friend Hubert Humphrey struck that chord:
We obviously do not want Dr. Kissinger to resign. I want to say to him as a friend “stay with it — cool it.” I think he’s tired. He’s working too hard. He’s not an elected official. He’s not accustomed to some of the body blows that some of us in politics are used to. Just cool it.
Other secretaries of state had taken their lumps, so another argument ran, without threatening to resign. The main criticism soon shifted from allegations of perjury to my proneness to temper tantrums.
Nothing could have proved more convincingly that I was right to force a showdown and that there was no alternative to the press conference. For the four days before Salzburg, the air had been full of ominous insinuations of new malfeasances; afterward, the implicit charge was that I had been oversensitive to accusations that were all good clean political fun, hence not all that serious. Being the butt of various jokes about being thin-skinned was far preferable to being inundated by a mounting tide of charges of having lied to a Senate Committee under oath. It may have been true, as some critics argued, that Secretary of State Dean Acheson had endured serious calumny without threatening to resign. But it is one thing to be attacked on questions of policy and judgment, quite another — in the middle of a constitutional crisis — to be accused of perjury. It was my view that I had to bring matters to a head. I could do so only by threatening to resign; any other course would have appeared too plaintive. I did not see how a country whose Vice President had resigned in disgrace and whose President was near to being impeached could afford a Secretary of State under a moral cloud. I meant it when I said at the press conference:
I have believed that I should do what I could to heal division in this country. I believed that I should do what I could to maintain the dignity of American values and to give Americans some pride in the conduct of their affairs.
I can do this only if my honor is not at issue and the public deserves to have confidence. If that cannot be maintained, I cannot perform the duties that I have exercised, and in that case, I shall turn them over immediately to individuals less subject to public attack.
Had the reaction been otherwise, I would have carried out that intention.
As it was, I paid a heavy price for the press conference. No one gets away with an attack on the media. And I had concentrated my criticism on its use of unnamed sources. I continue to believe that anonymous accusers give journalists a power no branch of government possesses and expose public officials to much scurrilous abuse by individuals whose motives — and veracity — escape examination. But a news conference was not the ideal place to make these points, even if necessity gave me no other choice. My relations with the media never fully recovered. While there was no systematic assault, I was thereafter exposed to much more criticism than before. And my threat of resignation made it legitimate to speculate on my decline thereafter.
The impact on my relationship with Nixon was more serious still, if of necessity short-lived. Though he never said anything to me directly, it was clear from his aloof manner that he was extremely displeased. Why he should have been quite so upset is difficult to fathom. To be sure, I stole — if that is the right word — the limelight for one day. But this should have been weighed, and would have been by a calmer President, against the steady seepage that would have occurred otherwise. Or was it that I succeeded in lancing the boil by the full disclosure which in retrospect he knew he too should have made and for which it was now too late? Had Watergate not soon overwhelmed him, I doubt whether I could have maintained my position in his Administration.
The Salzburg press conference achieved its immediate objective; it broke the wave of anonymous accusations. It forced a consideration of the documentary evidence. No doubt some of the Nixon-haters eased up on me because they concluded that opening a new line of inquiry might complicate or delay the pursuit of their principal quarry. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee started another set of hearings on July 10. On July 12, President Nixon sent a letter to Senator Fulbright, reciting his version of events. Fulbright had asked Nixon particularly about his public statement of May 22, 1973, in which the President had taken responsibility for the wiretapping: “I authorized this entire program. Each individual tap was undertaken in accordance with procedures legal at the time and in accord with longstanding precedent.” Nixon’s letter of July 12, 1974, reaffirmed his earlier statement and also his judgment that the wiretapping was justified and legal. He said that my account of his role was “entirely correct,” and he (Nixon) took full responsibility.II Attorney General William Saxbe, FBI Director Clarence Kelley, and other FBI officials gave evidence that sustained my version of events and made the interesting point that the average number of national security wiretaps had not varied significantly among the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. Dean Rusk appeared, as noted earlier, and described J. Edgar Hoover’s bureaucratic methods and imperious style: Giving orders to Hoover would be like giving orders to General de Gaulle, he observed. I testified on July 23, going over the same ground as before and reviewing each tap with which I was familiar. All the hearings were in executive session, but the transcripts were later released with only minor deletions.4
On August 6 the committee published its report. Unanimously it held that the record “should lay to rest the major questions raised about Secretary Kissinger’s role.” The dispute was in a large sense semantic; “there are no significant discrepancies between the new information developed and Dr. Kissinger’s testimony before the Committee during the confirmation hearings last year.” The committee therefore reaffirmed its conclusion as stated the year before: that my role in the wiretapping “did not constitute grounds to bar his confirmation as Secretary of State.” The August 6 report effectively ended the controversy over my role in wiretapping for the remainder of my term of office. It was quickly engulfed by the cataclysm of Nixon’s resignation three days later.
NIXON’S journey through the Middle East was both a triumph and a nightmare, a climax and an augury of the end. For several months, Nixon had indicated a growing eagerness to undertake the trip, and in May he had intensified the pressure on me to arrange it. I believe that by then he was beyond hoping that it might deflect his critics from Watergate. Deep down, he must have realized that matters were out of control, that his political fate would be settled by accidents or the actions of others. I was on the Syrian shuttle while the Nixon trip was being planned and was therefore not privy to his inner thoughts. My own view was that a Presidential visit was important to symbolize America’s new role in the Middle East and our commitment to the peace process — provided we succeeded with disengagement on the Golan.
Visits of a head of state serve many purposes. Not the least significant is to give tangible expression to a new departure. In that sense the drama of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 was even more important than the talks he held there, useful as they were. Nixon in Peking conveyed to the world that the period of Sino-American hostility was over — indeed, that the two great nations were moving toward cooperation on fundamentals of foreign policy. The same was true of Nixon’s journey through the Middle East in 1974. In all the capitals Nixon’s would be the first visit ever by an American President, except for Cairo, where Franklin Roosevelt had gone for a wartime conference in 1943.
Anyone would have been considered mad who predicted a year earlier that an American President would be greeted by millions of delirious Egyptians in Cairo, Alexandria, and every village in between. Or that radical Syria would extend an invitation and warmly welcome an American President to Damascus. Or that in nations as bitterly opposed as Israel and Saudi Arabia, leaders would extol the central role of the American President, however wounded he might be. And that all this would be happening eight months after a Mideast war that saw America as the armorer of Israel, the Arabs imposing an oil embargo on us, the Soviets threatening to intervene, and the Europeans desperate to put as much distance between themselves and the United States as possible.
These pages recounting my own personal experiences may well leave an impression that the reins of this diplomacy were in my hands alone. This was not the case. I certainly managed the tactics. But no Secretary of State, however influential, can make strategy by himself. Only a President could have imposed the complex and tough policy that got us this far and sustained it against a hesitant bureaucracy, vacillating allies, a nervous Soviet Union, and the passionate combatants of the Middle East. The applause Nixon was harvesting reflected the faith of the peoples of the Middle East in an America that had shown firmness, strength, and the vision of a more hopeful future; it was also a personal tribute.
Even in the midst of Watergate, the media seemed to recognize this. Editorial writers, while noting the public relations benefits of the trip, were on the whole sympathetic. Some now worried in fact that, far from proving irrelevant, the President’s tour might succeed so well as to exacerbate US–Soviet relations. (This was the editorial line of the New York Times on June 10, the Baltimore Sun on June 11, and columnist Joseph Kraft the same day.) But other papers — the Los Angeles Times (May 31), the Christian Science Monitor (June 5), the Wall Street Journal (June 10), and the Chicago Tribune (June 11) — all published editorials supportive of the trip.
What even the most understanding editorialist could not penetrate was the personal tragedy of the journey. Nixon was being feted but the noisy celebrations, the elaborate machinery of State visits, alternately buoyed and depressed him. As the various leaders unburdened themselves about their hopes for the future, one could sense the relief with which Nixon engaged in the discussions. This was the subject that interested him and about which he had thought a great deal. Yet within moments the relief and elation gave way to despondency. The conversations illuminated what Nixon’s policy had accomplished; they also faced him with the stark truth that he would not be part of the future he had made possible. His visit was celebrating an achievement that was as yet only a longed-for opportunity. More and more often as the trip progressed, his face took on the waxen appearance and his eyes the glazed distant look of a man parting from his true — perhaps his only — vocation; it was excruciatingly painful to watch. In Washington he had been inundated by the sordid details and desperate struggles of Watergate, yet ironically it was on his triumphant Middle East travels that the true dimension of his personal disaster was being brought home to him: He was being vouchsafed a glimpse of the Promised Land that he would never be able to enter. Afterward, Golda Meir made the penetrating comment to me: “We still have never had a visit from an American President. Nixon was here but his thoughts were far away.”
And all this time he suffered from phlebitis. He was often in great pain — a fact none of his close associates was at first aware of. In truth, when he overruled his doctors by going, he risked serious danger to his life if the blood clot in the veins of his leg broke loose and traveled toward the heart.
For a few days the anguish was submerged in the exuberant joy of our reception in Cairo. We arrived on Wednesday, June 12. From the moment Nixon stepped on Egyptian soil, it was apparent that all had been designed to hail his role as the key factor in the peace process. Having been spoiled as the recipient of abundant flattery and attention on previous trips, I found it — not to my credit — somewhat disconcerting, even painful, to be relegated to what in the context of a Presidential trip was quite properly a subsidiary role. The press, freed from previous restraints by my Salzburg press conference, gleefully reported both the fact that I received “little attention” and that I seemed “glum.” As for Nixon, he was uplifted by Sadat’s welcoming remarks, which paid tribute to America’s central contribution “under the leadership of President Nixon” in promoting peace.
The words were cordial enough but they paled before Nixon’s triumphal progress from Cairo Airport to his residence at Qubbah Palace. Perhaps a million cheering Egyptians lined the street as Nixon and Sadat rode by in an open-top limousine (to the chagrin of the Secret Service, which, since the Kennedy assassination, has preferred the President to ride in a closed vehicle). Obviously the demonstrations had been carefully organized; it was unlikely that tens of thousands of Egyptians would have kept pictures of Nixon in their drawers during all the years that Egypt and the United States had had no diplomatic relations. A sound truck blaring “Long live Nixon; long live Sadat” in English hardly appeared by happenstance any more than did the signs: “Peace for the land of peace,” “We trust Nixon.” Several White House staffers at the tail end of the motorcade also claimed that they had seen trucks picking up crowds after the Presidents had passed by to move them further up the parade route, thus generating a double dose of delirium.
Still, whether the crowds all appeared spontaneously or were in part organized, there was no mistaking the enthusiasm and friendliness that could not have been organized. At a minimum, it meant that Sadat was using Nixon’s trip to underline the irreversibility of the policy on which he was embarked — in itself a significant event. But one reason he chose so demonstrative a method must have been the happiness of the mass of the Egyptian people with a new course that meant an end to war and the beginning of peace. The crowds were in a holiday mood. Many had red flowers in their hands; others waved banners. The Presidents seemed to be propelled to Qubbah Palace by the noise from frenzied multitudes threatening to break through police cordons and jamming balconies to the point that they seemed about to hurtle from bursting buildings.
Qubbah Palace is a vast, ornate edifice erected by one of the nineteenth-century kings of Egypt as a bow to British royal tradition. It has innumerable rooms, though its overall impact inside is rather that of a slightly rundown luxury hotel in some Eastern European Communist country. Amid splendid gardens, its spectacular facade made an imposing backdrop for the formal arrival ceremony, which was held on its veranda. Sadat celebrated Nixon as a “man of peace.” Nixon saw in his visit an opportunity to “cement the foundations of a new relationship between two great peoples who will dedicate themselves in the future to working together for great causes.” For once on a State visit, the arrival statements reflected a reality: The leaders of both countries were determined to make peace and the people of Egypt seemed rapturous at the thought of it.
Nixon and Sadat met later that day for talks in Tahra Palace, where I had had my first encounter with the Egyptian President. Sadat used the opportunity to present directly to Nixon his analysis of the Middle East situation, his view of the superpower relationship, and his ideas on the next steps. Much of it was familiar to me, though it was important for the President to hear Sadat’s own passionate presentation — or it would have been had Nixon been in a position to advance the policy he had begun so conspicuously. Sadat put forward the standard Arab program: total Israeli return to the 1967 borders and satisfaction of Palestinian rights. He placed special emphasis on the demand for Egypt’s 1967 borders. As for assembling the Geneva Conference, Sadat favored delay; he was not eager to bring the Soviets back into the act. His device for procrastination was launching prior bilateral talks between the parties — a procedure that we had learned in the Year of Europe is marvelously designed to produce activity without movement.
Nixon’s response followed his standard pattern. He was acute in his own analysis of the international situation. He was thoughtful about the Middle East. Sadat’s approach to the Geneva Conference was complex enough to appeal to Nixon’s convoluted sense of tactics and there was easy agreement on that. But no more in Cairo than in Washington was Nixon prepared to debate a concrete proposal with which he disagreed. On the question of Israeli withdrawal my briefing papers had given him advice that was as opaque as it was necessary: Since this was an issue for negotiation, he should avoid either endorsing or refusing to endorse the 1967 borders. The deliberate nebulousness of our position would have tested the mettle of even a healthy Nixon not preoccupied with Watergate. Nixon handled it as well as its ambiguity permitted. He resorted to his all-purpose approach of implying that he agreed with his interlocutor’s goals and that tactical problems should be handled by others. He hinted that he was heading in the direction desired by Sadat if by a slower, perhaps more indirect route; the final destination would emerge from the process. Sadat behind his affable exterior was not that easily put off. He persisted tactfully but firmly. Nixon gradually gave ground, making a series of elliptical statements that Sadat could well have construed as fully agreeing with the Egyptian point of view. Nixon cognoscenti would have recognized Nixon’s statements as a means to evade pressure that was becoming uncomfortably specific, as a way to end a difficult subject, not as a national commitment. What Sadat may have thought has gone unrecorded; he seemed happy enough. In all probability, he was not looking for an affirmation that would give him a legal claim on Nixon; his purpose was served by studying Nixon’s reactions to pressure for the 1967 borders.
That evening Sadat gave a splendid dinner in the garden of Qubbah Palace that, for the edification of Americans who had heard their colleagues’ tales of high life in Cairo, included a spectacular performance by Nagwa Fuad. Sadat delivered an eloquent toast, paying his dues to the Palestinians:
Mr. President, let me be candid with you lest in the future there would be a misunderstanding or false reading of the turn of events in our region. The political solution and the respect of the national aspirations of the Palestinians are the crux of the whole problem. . . . [T]here is no other solution and no other road for a durable peace without a political solution to the Palestinian problem.
He offered no concrete proposal to achieve it.
The next day Sadat took Nixon through the villages of the Nile Delta to Alexandria on a train trip amidst a delirium that dwarfed even the Cairo spectacular. The two leaders rode in an opulent Victorian car with open sides. When they passed through a village, they would show themselves to the crowds, holding on to an overhead rail. A sudden lurch might well have deprived one or both of the countries of its leadership. Signs in English extolling peace were everywhere; the fact that the crowds almost certainly could not read the signs they were carrying in no way dampened their frenzy. They knew that they wanted peace; no governmental directive could produce such universal and wild enthusiasm unless there was deep longing for it and genuine affection for Sadat. The two leaders held a brief press conference on the train, raising again the danger that the jostling press might propel both leaders through the open side of the car, thereby solving the problem of what would be the lead story on the evening news. Nixon reaffirmed the step-by-step approach “not because we want to go slow but because we want to get there.” While he was at it, Nixon suggested that we would proceed country by country — “first with Egypt” — which, given the distrust among Arab brethren, could hardly have been music to the ears of the rulers of Syria and Jordan. Sadat looked on with avuncular approval, calling attention to the banners that proclaimed: “We trust Nixon.” Nixon must have been musing about how unfortunate it was that Egyptians were not represented on the House Judiciary Committee when Sadat declared:
Since October 6 and since the change that took place in American policy, peace is now available in the area and President Nixon never gave a word and didn’t fulfill it. . . . He has fulfilled every word he gave. So, if this momentum continues, I think we can achieve peace.
And Sadat added two pregnant words that were perhaps the most significant uttered by either leader during the day. A reporter asked, in reference to the bilateral talks planned prior to reassembling the Geneva Conference, whether Egypt would talk with Israel. “Not yet,” said Sadat, puffing on his pipe.
Each reception in Egypt seemed to exceed the one preceding. Alexandria was wild with jubilation. More than a million cheering Egyptians lined the motorcade route from the train station along the coast to the fairy-tale Ras el-Tin Palace — a monumental conceit of Farouk’s father thrown onto a peninsula in the harbor of Alexandria in imitation of Versailles. I calculated that it took ten minutes to walk, even at a brisk pace, from the front portal to my assigned room — if I did not get lost on the way.
At Ras el-Tin the two leaders reviewed documents that had been prepared for their signature the next day in Cairo. One, grandiloquently entitled “Principles of Relations and Cooperation between Egypt and the United States,” called for sweeping cooperation in scientific, technical, economic, and cultural areas, following a pattern we had already established with Saudi Arabia. We were creating new institutions of bilateral cooperation with Arab countries in many fields for the purpose of cementing political ties. It would take some time for all of these projects to go into high gear. But they represented a network giving various Arab nations a stake in our well-being and creating an obstacle to the political misuse of the oil weapon. (They also gave us a hedge against European bilateralism.)
Included in this document was a statement on the Middle East whose reference to the Palestinians was virtually identical to that in the 1973 Nixon-Brezhnev summit communiqué. A just settlement, it affirmed, “should take into due account the legitimate interest of all the peoples in the Mideast including the Palestinian people, and the right to existence of all states in the area.” Jerusalem would be unenthusiastic about the first part, pleased with the second. For some reason lost in the mists of time, we also promised to reconstruct the Cairo Opera House burned down some decades earlier. It was the first time a Western nation sought to woo a Middle East state by promising to support an art form having no roots in the area at all. Someday Aïida may be heard there once again, perhaps in honor of a State visit by a President of Ethiopia.
The most controversial item was an accord not destined for rapid implementation. The two nations pledged to negotiate on cooperation in the field of nuclear energy under agreed safeguards. Our motive was to preempt European maneuvers to use nuclear power as an entering wedge, as France had done in Iraq. We also thought that we could achieve better safeguards against diversion to military uses and had a higher incentive to do so than any other potential supplier. All this was reasonable enough; but the nuclear issue turned out to be too explosive, politically if not literally. Israel protested, its deeper fears masked under the complaint of lack of consultation (we offered Israel a similar accord, but there was disagreement over the inspection provisions). Congress proved leery, the ubiquitous Henry Jackson leading the charge. Not until seven years later was an implementing agreement with Egypt signed.5
The Nixons hosted a return dinner in Ras el-Tin Palace in a convivial atmosphere inhibited only by the curse inflicted by protocol on State visits that forces one to sit next to the same people at every meal. Inevitably, by the end of the second day one has exhausted all reasonable subjects of conversation and is reduced to the surrealistic or the banal.
A helicopter trip to Sadat’s rest house overlooking the Pyramids and another ecstatic entry into Cairo, this time from the direction of Giza, concluded the journey. Altogether it was estimated that at least seven million Egyptians had turned out to greet Nixon. By this time the camaraderie between the two leaders had developed to the point that when Sadat expressed admiration for the Presidential helicopter, Nixon made him a gift of it on the spot.
From ebullient, cosmopolitan Cairo we went to puritanical, aloof, secretive Jiddah, the administrative center of Saudi Arabia, on Friday evening, June 14. Saudi Arabia does not prize abandon in any of its manifestations; it does not believe in making policy in fits of enthusiasm. His Majesty King Faisal, dour of countenance, regal in bearing, was at the airport to escort Nixon to the huge state guest house. The motorcade reflected the Saudi sense of the fitness of things. It might have seemed impolite to have no crowds in the street; it would have been indecorous and totally against Saudi tradition to encourage demonstrative emotions. So we passed what the media would call “respectable” crowds clapping in unison as the closed cars of the leaders rolled by.
In the large reception hall of the guest house, King Faisal, Nixon, and some aides chatted inconclusively while no doubt Faisal reflected on how the usually impeccable Saudi protocol department had slipped up to permit Mrs. Nixon into his presence. Normally in Saudi Arabia, women are strictly segregated. (On my visits, Nancy had usually disappeared at the airport, not to be seen again until departure, when she rejoined me at the plane with marvelous tales of extraordinary hospitality by the ladies of the Kingdom, whom in turn I never met.) Or maybe the subtle King had arranged the whole thing so that he could pay his respects to the mores of our country and the personality of the First Lady. Whatever the reason, Faisal’s grave mien seemed a shade more doleful on this occasion. Afterward, Saudi custom prevailed. No male member of the American party, except the President, saw Mrs. Nixon until she rejoined us at the airport.
The Kingdom followed its accustomed pattern. The King at an all-male dinner offered an eloquent toast applauding our role in the Middle East negotiations and adding the obligatory moralism of the need for a Palestinian solution. Nixon in reply reviewed his foreign policy achievements, and in the exuberance of the moment dwelt heavily on his breakthroughs with China and the Soviet Union — on whose dastardly and evil designs, especially of the latter, Faisal discoursed at length during the next day.
Saudi Arabia, not being a direct party to the Middle East negotiations, was mainly concerned with the direction of American policy rather than the tactical ramifications. Faisal remained true to his method of not exposing himself by needlessly explicit statements. He was receptive to Nixon’s argument that there should be no rush to Geneva; he welcomed the advance notice of our intention to announce resumption of diplomatic relations with Syria during our visit there; he seemed pleased when Nixon described a strong Saudi Arabia as important to the security of the Gulf. The King did not respond to Nixon’s theme that the West Bank negotiations would advance more rapidly if Jordan were Israel’s interlocutor, rather than the PLO. On oil, Faisal indicated a general propensity to lower oil prices, provided the other oil-producing countries heeded his counsel (an unlikely contingency).
Two impressions emerged from the conversation: Nixon had at last met his match in indirection; I knew by now that the King was more likely to act than to affirm. Still, there was no mistaking the fact that Faisal genuinely admired Nixon. And the King’s farewell statement marked a sharp departure from custom. In addition to a commitment to joint policies in the Middle East, it also contained an explicit reference to American domestic politics:
What is very important is that our friends in the United States of America be themselves wise enough to stand behind you, to rally around you, Mr. President, in your noble efforts, almost unprecedented in the history of mankind, the efforts aiming at securing peace and justice in the world. . . .
And anybody who stands against you, Mr. President, in the United States of America, or outside the United States of America, or stands against us, your friends, in this part of the world, obviously has one aim in mind: namely, that of causing the splintering of the world, the wrong polarization of the world, the bringing about of mischief, which would not be conducive to tranquility and peace in the world.
As a general rule, chiefs of state do not visit capitals with which no diplomatic relations exist, for the simple reason that the absence of embassies is usually a good indication of the state of political relations. The rule did not seem to apply to Nixon. He broke it twice by scheduling State visits designed not to celebrate friendly relations but to inaugurate them. He had visited Peking in 1972 even though Taipei was still recognized by us as the legitimate government of all of China. And the incongruity of his visit to Damascus was only slightly less. It had been barely six months since we had established communications. But during the May shuttle, Asad had made clear that he wanted Nixon to visit; Asad wanted no second-class status with the country he accepted as the key to peace. But he had surely had major domestic obstacles to overcome. Around the Arab world I had been reliably told that there had been powerful opposition within Syria to the disengagement agreement. I was confident that Nixon would get a good reception; there was no sense for Asad to extend an invitation just to humiliate him. One does not gratuitously make an enemy of the strongest nation in the world.
The Syrians seemed about to do just that or worse, despite their best intentions, as we approached Damascus on June 15. Syrian protocol prescribes that heads of state be escorted over Syrian air space by a kind of honor guard of Syrian military airplanes. American protocol accepts no such provision; our security people are too afraid of a collision between pilots using different languages. Our preferences had been communicated to the Syrians; they either had been overruled or had not filtered down to lower levels.
The splendid Presidential pilot, Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, had just let down Air Force One to 15,000 feet when he saw four Soviet-built MiGs approaching, two on each side of the aircraft. One does not become pilot of Air Force One without a healthy dose of self-confidence in one’s flying ability. He decided not to find out whether they were an honor guard or some rogue radical air force unit. Putting his heavy plane into a steep bank, he maneuvered to throw off the escort — an improbability for a Boeing 707 to execute against modern fighter planes. Unfortunately, it also threw the passengers on Air Force One about a bit. So imbued were the civilians on the plane with the notion that Air Force One was invulnerable, however, that no excessive attention was paid. But one look at Brent Scowcroft — a Lieutenant General of the US Air Force — taught me otherwise. He was clearly shaken; hence we were obviously in danger. Larry Eagleburger showed the impenetrable sangfroid of the Foreign Service. He had been writing me a note about protocol details when Scowcroft’s pallor caused him to add a word of caution. He had got as far as to write: “You will get off the plane right behind Mrs. Nixon.” He simply added the two words “I hope” and silently handed me the note.
In the event, the Syrian pilots must have decided that the stunt-flying of Air Force One was some demented American reciprocal honor. They doggedly kept up with us. Never was an American delegation happier to reach Damascus than on this occasion.
Asad had arranged an all-military arrival ceremony of dignified aloofness. There were no crowds at the airport, whose distance from the city does not in any event lend itself to mass demonstrations. But there were large and friendly crowds as Nixon and Asad rode through the streets of Damascus at a speed designed to discourage both assassins and demonstrations. As an added security measure, the route of the motorcade had not been published, though I suspect the population knew that the available options were severely limited. Given these inhibitions, the public response in Syria was remarkably warm. The long period of estrangement between the two countries seemed to be over. Foreign Minister Khaddam and I rode together chatting about our adventures during the shuttle. Although he would have resented the comparison, he made almost the same joke as Eban had when I left Israel two weeks earlier: “After you left, it was like a vacuum in our lives, because it seemed like there was nothing to do!”
Asad had set the stage well. In the previous issue of Newsweek, Asad had given an interview to Arnaud de Borchgrave.6 By Syrian standards it was conciliatory. It paid tribute to my contribution to the disengagement negotiations (“It could not have been done without him”). It affirmed Syria’s desire for a “real peace in the Middle East,” in the interest of “every country” of the area, in the context of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which Syria had only recently recognized. While implying that there were still differences with the United States about what the resolutions meant, Asad seemed to give us the central role in achieving peace; significantly, he did not mention either Gromyko or the Soviet Union. He refused to commit himself to the idea of a Palestinian state, leaving the decision up to the PLO. De Borchgrave saw the opportunity to put Asad on the spot: “Even if the decision is to dismantle the state of Israel?” Asad’s response was significant: “I would imagine that what the PLO decides will not exceed the spirit of UN resolutions. And these do not call for the dismantling of Israel.” It was a deft way for Syria to declare its acceptance of the State of Israel and to inform the PLO that its demand for the destruction of Israel was incompatible with the negotiating process as well as with UN resolutions that Syria recently accepted.
This took no little courage. Syria’s government seemed to have decided to explore the peace process even though its public had been fed for decades on a rhetoric of intransigence and many political groups within Syria, from the left wing of the Baath party to radical Palestinians, were violently opposed to negotiation with Israel and rapprochement with the United States. My experience during the shuttle had convinced me that Asad’s relatively conciliatory course would have to be wrung, day after day, from a reluctant leadership — especially on the civilian side. There seemed to be a pervasive fear that in the end Syria would be betrayed by Arab allies making separate arrangements or by superpowers getting tired of their exertions.
For these reasons, Asad in talking with Nixon on Sunday morning, June 16, was not content with a general philosophical framework as Sadat had been, or with an atmosphere of personal goodwill as had been the case with Faisal. He needed both reinsurance against his radical critics and reassurance about his Arab allies. He was far too Syrian to accept bromides and far too intelligent not to understand evasions. So his meeting with Nixon turned into a cross-examination of our interpretation of appropriate UN resolutions and a probing for the precise goals of our policy — a policy that sustained itself precisely by avoiding precision as to ultimate goals.
During the May shuttle, Asad had repeatedly asked me for a written assurance that we would support Syrian demands to regain all the Golan Heights. I had evaded it. Asad now returned to the charge with Nixon, who was emotionally never comfortable with a style that sought to close off intellectual escape routes.
Nixon started in his usual elliptical way, implying that he agreed with Asad’s objectives but that it would be self-defeating to avow them. At the same time he affirmed his commitment to the survival of Israel. He chose an unfortunate metaphor:
It would be pleasing if I engaged in rhetoric about what will be achieved. But this would start an international debate about the ultimate steps, and no more important steps would be possible. Let me give an example. If you want to push a man off a cliff, you say to him take just one step backward, then another and another. If he knew where he was going, he would take no steps. . . .
If I say what is in the back of my mind, this will destroy the chances and the result will be a return to a military approach which has not worked in 25 years. This is the only reason we want to keep the language of our statements general.
Normally these generalities, delivered with the air of a man imparting a profound confidence, worked. Either Nixon’s interlocutor would be embarrassed to admit that he did not fully understand what the President was talking about, especially as he was being invited to share a deep mystery, or he would think it inappropriate to press the American Chief Executive. Some statesmen probably understood the game that was being played very well and decided on discretion as the better part of valor. Asad did not fit into any of these categories. His domestic position was too precarious to enable him to be polite and his rapprochement with the United States was too recent to serve as a restraint.
At first, things went well enough. Asad fell in with the polite and philosophical chitchat; it turned out to be largely a device to maintain a cordial atmosphere for the appearance of the two Presidents at 12:45 P.M., before a pool of journalists assembled on the steps of the Presidential Palace to announce the resumption of relations between Syria and the United States.
But after they had made the announcement, the two Presidents returned to Asad’s study where Asad made an all-out effort to put meat on the bones of Nixon’s generalities. Before the meeting with the press he had professed himself satisfied with our approach to détente, revealing at the same time that the subject inspired contradictory feelings in the nonaligned whatever their protestations to the contrary: While détente lessened the risk of confrontation, Asad said, it should not be pursued at the expense of small countries. He also did not dispute that the step-by-step approach should be continued. What he wanted to know with some precision was at what stage and how it would include Syria. This led him to raise a whole series of penetrating questions about our future negotiating strategy: Even if a compromise move was difficult all at once, was the United States nevertheless prepared to see Resolution 338 carried out in full? Did the United States object to Syria’s pursuing all the elements of Resolution 338? Did our step-by-step approach mean pursuing only one subject at a time? Would we focus on all borders at once, or one at a time? Did we envisage that Israel would vacate the Golan Heights when it vacated the Sinai? And finally — permitting no evasion — how did the United States see the future, final borders of Israel?
There was nothing Nixon hated more than this type of cross-examination. I tried to gain him some time — fortunately, we had to leave by 2:30 to make our scheduled arrival in Israel — by explaining what was bothering Asad: “President Asad believes we have already reached agreement with Egypt [on final borders]. That is not true. . . . We have had only general talks with Sadat on this question.” But fundamentally, Nixon was on his own in the sort of direct confrontation that he abhorred. Nixon equivocated as much as possible; he put his refusal to be explicit as much on tactical grounds as he could. But in the end he edged ever closer to endorsing Asad’s position on frontiers. Asad, unfamiliar with my chief’s method of operation, would not have been far off the mark if he distilled from the conversation the idea that Nixon, in his own elliptical way, was agreeing to total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan.
I did not think it was in anybody’s interest to leave illusions about what had been agreed. On the way to the airport Khaddam allowed that the negotiations had been, if anything, too easy. I warned:
You are sophisticated. You will not draw too sweeping conclusions. Seriously, Mr. Foreign Minister. Today we can promise anything. I don’t want to promise anything we can’t deliver. In the final stage, when the difference is very small, then we can talk realistically about what final borders are possible.
And on the rest of our journey to the airport, the prickly nationalist Khaddam and I mused about the personal ties that had been established between us and the confidence that was developing between our leaderships.
Much has happened since to throw our two countries into opposition to each other, and to some Syria appears once again as a Soviet satellite. I have my doubts. It was not my impression then when I dealt with the Syrians almost daily. Whether there is a solution to their conflict with Israel can be tested only in the crucible of an actual negotiation. This seems unlikely as I write. But no one would have thought a negotiation possible at the beginning of the disengagement process in 1973. I hope that the lines of communication may open up again between America and that proud, difficult, fiercely nationalistic people.
The welcome in Israel on the afternoon of June 16 had a different texture from those at all other stops. Israel was our friend and ally; we had stood together through grave crises; yet it was the first visit of an American President to that country, so anguished by its ostracism, so reluctant to admit it. It was an emotional experience for both sides. For there was a noticeable undercurrent of uneasiness in the rather too strident insistence on our historic and permanent friendship. Everywhere else the leaders wanted to commit America to maintain, and if possible to accelerate, the peace process. In Israel, a new government sought a respite above all. It was anxious about where the current course would lead, how peace would be defined, and perhaps even more about the domestic controversies it would encounter on the way. Israel’s leaders were insecure about the diplomatic revolution that had lured Nixon into the area in the first place. If truth serum had been administered and the distinguished Israeli assemblage had bared their subconscious, they would probably have preferred to forgo the Presidential visit if it had been possible to undo the sequence of events that brought it about. Nixon in turn was determined that negotiations must continue, and he found himself in the only country of his journey where the peace process seemed to require justification. The atmosphere of potential strain — which neither side was willing to admit, much less to face up to — translated itself into a reception that Nixon correctly described in his autobiography: “Our reception in Israel, although warm by ordinary standards, was the most restrained of the trip.”7
That is why, too, the official toasts had more hidden meanings and the meetings more substance than those on any other part of the trip. On State occasions the President, Ephraim Katzir — speaking on behalf of the cabinet — consistently affirmed the indissoluble bond between Israel and the United States and our hosts’ deep gratitude for Nixon’s role in arranging for aid to Israel. The implication was that the traditional pattern was its own justification, needing no modification. Nixon took precisely the opposite line. He stressed his willingness to continue long-term economic and military aid. But he added a muted warning that in return he expected Israeli flexibility at the conference table. At the arrival ceremony, he expressed his appreciation for the understanding shown by the people of Israel for the purpose of his visit to their traditional adversaries — which came close to rubbing it in. At the State dinner — also extemporaneously — he expanded on the theme of the need for Israeli diplomatic flexibility.
Yitzhak Rabin had just taken over as head of government. Nixon had known him as Ambassador to Washington and thought very highly of him. He now dilated on the new Prime Minister’s qualities, praising his background as a military leader and then offering the advice that there were two roads open to him: that of the politician taking no chances or that of the statesman prepared to run risks for peace. Nixon left no doubt that he was urging the latter approach, which he defined as follows:
It is a way that recognizes that continuous war in this area is not a solution for Israel’s survival and, above all, it is not right — that every possible avenue be explored to avoid it in the interest of the future of those children we saw by the hundreds and thousands on the streets of Jerusalem today.
And Nixon made the same point even more emphatically in his meeting with Rabin and his principal colleagues, Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, Defense Minister Shimon Peres, and Ambassador Simcha Dinitz:
We really feel that the days when Israel felt very comfortable with a relationship with the United States, where we supported Israel, we were going to be Israel’s best friend and where your immediate, more warlike neighbors, Syria and Egypt, were considered to be the enemies of the United States; those days — some might say in this country and many of our very good friends in the Jewish community in the United States say it now: Let’s go back to the old days. Just give us the arms and we can lick all of our enemies and all of the rest.
I don’t think that’s a policy. I don’t think it is viable for the future . . . time will run out.
Fundamentally, there was no dispute about the desirability of peace. But so soon after the two disengagement accords, we emphasized momentum, while Israel feared losing control to a negotiating process that threatened to become its own purpose. Rabin outlined Israel’s approach: Peace had to be related to security; the peace process would take time because to be meaningful it must involve a change in attitudes; it could not consist simply of a series of Israeli withdrawals; there had to be reciprocity; Israel would not tolerate terrorist attacks; it was essential that Israel’s strength be maintained; he hoped the United States would improve its ties to the Arabs at a “moderate” pace and emphasize economic, not military, assistance.
These points were unexceptionable, but in fact laid bare the diplomatic bedrock, which was that we lacked an agreed US–Israeli answer to the kind of questions Asad had posed to us in Damascus: What concrete steps should be taken? How were they going to be accomplished?
Four broad strategic options presented themselves. We could stay with the status quo that had emerged from the two disengagement agreements; we could return to Geneva for a comprehensive solution; we could make another move with Egypt; or we could take an initial step with Jordan on the West Bank.
The option of staying put did not really exist. It would undermine the American position in all Arab countries and lead in time to another blowup. The comprehensive approach was in our view still premature. It would bring the Soviets back into the area; it would raise a whole host of issues where no solution was even vaguely perceived; it would risk an explosion while Nixon was heading for impeachment and a new government with only a single-vote margin had come into office in Israel; moreover, Egypt was reluctant to go to Geneva. In any event, it would lead to an early impasse and a braking if not a reversal of the diplomatic process.
The real choice was between taking another step in the Sinai and pursuing a disengagement agreement with Jordan. Sadat had urged us to give priority to the Egyptian front. He was eager to press on toward the peace treaty that he alone of the participants in the process thought attainable.
My own view was that we should make the next move with Jordan. In many ways, the decision in the summer of 1974 to delay Jordan and the West Bank issue until after our domestic crisis was resolved turned out to be crucial; it affected profoundly the evolution of the entire area. It was an amalgam of American, Israeli, and Arab domestic politics and inhibitions in which each party for different reasons took the path of least resistance and brought about the worst possible outcome.
I had thought that everybody’s interest would be served best by establishing as rapidly as possible a Jordanian presence on the West Bank. This would make moderate Jordan the negotiator for the Palestinian phase of the peace process. More and more bystanders — European governments, American intellectuals — were putting forward the PLO as the fashionable key to unlock the West Bank. I was sure that it would bolt the door to a settlement. Simply to get Israel into a conference room with a group that had sworn its destruction and conducted a decade-long terrorist campaign against it would be a monumental assignment, consuming energy, emotion, and enormous amounts of time during which all future progress would be frozen. I did not think it was achievable without demonstrating to Israel brutally and irrevocably its total dependence on American support. In my view, this would break Israel’s back psychologically and destroy the essence of the state. It would also be against America’s interest — not least of all because a demoralized Israel would be simultaneously more in need of American protection and less receptive to our advice. We would be involved as guarantor in every border skirmish, in the long run mortgaging our relations with every state in the area. And even if my judgment was wrong and a psychologically undamaged Israel could be brought into the conference room with the PLO, it would be the beginning of a negotiating nightmare, not the end of it.
No, if there was to be immediate progress on the West Bank, it had to be through Jordan. If the PLO were indeed becoming more moderate — which was far from clear — it could prove this in its subsequent dealings with Jordan as well as other Arab countries that had a stake in the Palestinian question. In this manner, the PLO would become an Arab, not an American problem.
I repeated this theme on many occasions during the fateful summer of 1974. On May 31 I had told an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
The sensible next step, speaking frankly to this committee, would be Jordan, for two reasons: one, because it is the most moderate of the Arab governments. It has been the one that is friendly to the United States.
And secondly, because the best way to deal with the Palestinian question would be to draw the Jordanians [into] the West Bank and thereby turn the debate of the Palestinians into one between the Jordanians and the Palestinians rather than between the Palestinians and Israelis.
On the other hand, Israeli domestic politics does not permit a disengagement on the Jordan River right now because they need the National Religious Party in order to support the government.
On June 5 I told a group of American Jewish leaders: “I’ve said to them [the Israeli leadership] they should next take up Jordan, but the Israeli domestic situation makes this impossible.” On June 8 I said to Moshe Day an, who was visisting the United States after leaving the government a few days earlier: “There are two possible strategies — to bring the Jordanians into the West Bank, or to stonewall with Jordan and sooner or later all hell will break loose with the Palestinians.” On June 17, during Nixon’s visit in Israel, I made the same point to Prime Minister Rabin and repeated it at a press conference that day:
Of course, the most efficient way for the Palestinians to be brought into the process is through a Jordanian negotiation, in which there is the historical background and for which Israel has always declared its readiness in principle.
But the conditions did not exist for such a step. The Israeli cabinet faced two insuperable difficulties. Its one-vote majority in the Parliament was too narrow a base to sustain a negotiation as divisive as disengagement on the West Bank. A large body of Israeli opinion was opposed to the reestablishment of any autonomous Arab political authority on the West Bank; others resisted relinquishing the smallest slice of land they believed had been given to the Jews in the Old Testament. The National Religious Party would surely bring down the government at the first sign of a West Bank negotiation. All this had caused Golda Meir — and this was the second obstacle — to promise that there would be a new election before any agreement concerning the disposition of the West Bank was concluded. Rabin and his colleagues were understandably reluctant to call for new elections within weeks of having achieved office.
Our inhibitions were equally great. If we insisted on a Jordan negotiation, we had to calculate on new elections in Israel, which from starting day usually took a minimum of six months to produce a new government. We would be stalemated at the precise moment that as a result of the Golan disengagement our influence was at its highest. Moreover, a President facing impeachment was not in a brilliant position to insist on a negotiation that — if Israel resisted, as was nearly certain — would multiply his domestic opponents.
Then there was the problem of Egypt. We admired Sadat; we saw him as the indispensable driving force toward Middle East peace. With-out his cooperation the Middle East was certain to slide again into impotent frustration. And Sadat was opposed to what was later called the Jordanian option; at any rate, he did not want to defer his own claim to another slice of the Sinai for the better part of a year through the Israeli election process and the uncertain number of months it would take to negotiate. Sadat’s visceral distrust of Hussein reinforced his cool calculation that the process of Jordanian disengagement involved too many pitfalls to stake on it the Middle East peace process he had so painfully nursed along to this point. He must have reasoned that a Jordanian disengagement could never be an isolated act. It would open the Palestinian drama, reverberating throughout the area by a logic not amenable to the timetables of others.
Nor was Syria eager for a Jordanian move. During the shuttle I had talked to Asad about the desirability of assigning to Hussein the principal responsibility for West Bank negotiations. He had not rejected it; he had replied noncommittally that a great deal of thinking would be needed to find a proper approach to the Palestinian problem. But at a minimum it meant that Syria’s attitude toward the PLO had also been aloof. Syria staunchly supported what it called the rights of the Palestinian people; at the same time it sought to control the PLO in fulfillment of an age-old dream that sees Palestine as part of Greater Syria. A few years later it resisted a PLO takeover of Lebanon, temporarily allying itself with the hated Christians to prevent Palestinian domination of a neighboring country. In 1974 Syria advanced no concrete plan in behalf of the Palestinian cause; it appeared reserved about the PLO; it was more aware of the complexities of the Jordanian option than its possibilities. No senior Syrian official ever mentioned West Bank disengagement, with whatever partner, as a serious prospect.
Torn between our analysis and objective conditions, I played for time, keeping both the Egyptian and Jordanian options open — finally committing to neither — hoping that circumstance might resolve our perplexities. It is a course I have rarely adopted and usually resist intellectually. Circumstance is neutral; by itself it imprisons more frequently than it helps. A statesman who cannot shape events will soon be engulfed by them; he will be thrown on the defensive, wrestling with tactics instead of advancing his purpose.
And that is exactly what happened on the Palestinian question. When on October 28, 1974, an Arab summit in Rabat designated the PLO as the sole Arab representative and spokesman for the West Bank and removed Jordan from the diplomacy, the Israeli dilemma and the Palestinian negotiating stalemate that I predicted — and did not head off — both became inevitable. They have not been resolved to this day.
During Nixon’s visit to Israel, all this was still in the future. Rabin and Nixon discussed the next steps in a general, almost random way. Rabin was eager to link further diplomacy to an arms package for Israel, Nixon to a general commitment to negotiate. Each got what he wanted. The result did little to resolve the choice before us. But it suited the necessities of both sides at that moment to submerge the strategic questions in a process of consultation. It was agreed that Yigal Allon, the new Foreign Minister, would visit Washington later in the summer and Rabin soon after. In the meantime we would also invite the foreign ministers of Egypt and Syria as well as the King and Prime Minister of Jordan. Out of these exchanges we hoped to crystallize a strategy by the early fall.
On the face of it, this was a sensible course. With the Syrian disengagement agreement barely two weeks old and a new government in office in Jerusalem, a period for consultation and reflection was in everybody’s interest. It was what we had told all the Arab countries we would seek. What we had not counted on was the Rabat decision, though even without it the trend was probably against the Jordanian option.
Jordan’s thankless situation was symbolized by two facts: that it was the last stop on Nixon’s journey, and that I was unable to accompany him there. The reason for the former was the same as what had placed our Hashemite friends close to the end of every shuttle: No decisions were required in Amman; we knew what needed doing; to get it done depended on events elsewhere. Amman was a good place for summing up and seeking perspective in a friendly environment. The cause of my absence was the semiannual meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Ottawa, of which I had already missed the first day. Since the meeting was to agree at last to the Atlantic Declaration that I had personally proposed fourteen months earlier, it would have been a callous affront to my Atlantic colleagues not to be present at the consummation of our own enterprise. And since the Mideast trip had to be squeezed in before the Moscow summit and one could not arrive in Israel on the Sabbath, there was no flexibility there, either.
But this was little consolation to the Jordanians, who must have felt that the absence of Nixon’s principal negotiator symbolized their relegation to a secondary role. Nixon’s visit on June 17 and 18, as I could gather from Scowcroft’s reports to me, went as well as circumstances permitted. Nixon repeated his by-now standard theme that the methods that had opened relations with China and pacified the Soviet Union would also work in the Middle East. In a toast he used a rather effective line that he had tried out at every occasion on the trip: “I do not tell you where this journey will end. I cannot tell you when it will end. The important thing is that it has begun.” The trouble with Jordan was unfortunately that its journey had not even begun. Nevertheless, Hussein sent off his distinguished guest warmly with the spectacular parade ceremony of “beating the retreat” I had witnessed earlier, performed by four British-trained Bedouin bands marching in perfect precision.
So ended Nixon’s foray into the Middle East. For his associates it was an anguishing experience. We sensed in the exaggerated solicitude of our hosts the pity that is the one sentiment a head of state can never afford to evoke. The pretense that they were dealing with a functioning President was possible for some leaders only because they were not familiar enough with American domestic affairs, for others because they knew no other mode of treating a visiting head of state, and for still others because their whole policy had been based on belief in American mastery of events. But the members of the Nixon party were beyond illusion and we knew too much. We were torn up inwardly by the difference between what might have been and what deep down we all realized there now must be. Of course, we could not yet predict the precise modality that would spell the end of the Presidency, one of whose major achievements was being celebrated daily in the motorcades and banquets of the Middle East.
Despair manifested itself in much petty bickering. Ron Ziegler protected his notion of Presidential preeminence in news stories with the ferocity of a police dog. There were disputes about the assignment of quarters and seats on the Cairo-Alexandria train. But these were the symptoms of the frustration all of us felt over what was the grim, unspoken backdrop of the journey.
We witnessed with some wonder the tumultuous receptions in capitals with which relations had been established only in recent months. We were proud that our country was playing a central role in making peace not just for itself but between nations that without us would have found neither the language nor the method of reconciliation. All heads of state were seeking from us a road map for the future. Nixon acquitted himself well while suffering excruciating physical and emotional pain. He provided sensible comments; he responded to the needs of his interlocutors with firmness and perception. The only thing he could not provide was what was most needed: a reliable guide to the long-term thrust of American foreign policy. For it would not be long now before he would become an observer of the forces he had helped shape.
BY now our domestic struggle was malarial. The fever chart would rise and the patient would approach delirium for a few days. Suddenly the fever would break, leaving no trace save the increased weakness of the victim. The only difference was that normally a malaria patient recovers.
I had returned from the Syrian shuttle to the assault over wiretaps; we came back from Nixon’s Mideast journey to another charge so absurd and technical that it was hard to know where to begin to refute it: Senator Henry Jackson’s accusation that Nixon and I had made a secret deal with the Soviets enabling them to exceed the limits of the first SALT agreement by up to 124 missiles. Where the uproar over the wiretaps had reflected some hypocritical confusions, the charges of secret deals were pure domestic political warfare.
By the summer of 1974, Nixon seemed so close to the end of the line that whatever tenuous restraints had until then inhibited wholesale domestic attacks on our international position fell away. Indeed, the incipient collapse of the Presidency encouraged rather than stifled dissent; a school of opinion developed that handcuffing the mortally wounded Nixon was in the national interest lest the President at the imminent summit with Brezhnev make improvident concessions.
Nixon was scheduled to arrive in Moscow on June 27, 1974, for his third summit with the Soviet leaders. How little deference he paid to Soviet sensibilities even at this late stage of his Presidency was shown by the fact that he had postponed his Moscow visit by three days to give him an opportunity to journey to the Middle East and to stop over in Brussels on the way to Moscow to sign the just-completed Atlantic Declaration — neither action calculated to endear him to the Kremlin. Nevertheless, Jackson considered that he was performing a national service if he constricted the Administration’s freedom to negotiate by undermining its credibility. For all I know, he may have actually believed what his staff told him about the fantasy of a secret deal.
Jackson, whatever the accuracy of his charges, was redoubtable. He knew a great deal about defense, which enabled him to speak with technical knowledge. As the second-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had many friends in the Pentagon supplying him with their version of inside information. When I testified before Jackson, I often found myself in the anomalous position of being confronted with secret documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that had never been seen in the White House. And Jackson had as allies many groups who were supporting his other causes, such as Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. While they had no special animosity toward me, they also did not want Jackson’s credibility eroded — thus in effect giving him moral support.
In a normal period, the absurdity of his charges would have made them fall of their own weight. What could possibly induce a President and his chief aide to concede gratuitously and secretly to the Soviets 124 more missiles than those provided in an agreement? It was implausible even in the absence of detailed knowledge. But in the final weeks of the Nixon Administration, no accusation was too preposterous to receive a hearing; and in fairness, many seemingly incredible allegations had turned out to be true. What made Jackson’s accusations more effective than they deserved to be was that they concerned highly technical provisions of the SALT agreement nearly incomprehensible to the layman. Indeed, the effort to rebut them involved so many complexities that the uninitiated were likely to believe that, where that much explanation was needed, something was bound to be wrong. Conceivably, my account in these pages will contribute to this impression.
Under the 1972 Interim Agreement on limitations of strategic offensive weapons, the Soviet Union was permitted 950 modern ballistic missiles on sixty-two nuclear submarines. To reach that figure and stay within the agreed overall ceiling, the Soviets were obliged to dismantle 210 older ICBMs. The debate between American and Soviet negotiators at the 1972 summit in Moscow concerned what older missiles the Soviets should replace.8 It was in the Soviets’ interest to “trade in” their oldest, most obsolete weapons, preferably missiles of less than intercontinental range that they would have retired anyway. Our aim was precisely the opposite: to bring about a dismantling of missiles most dangerous to us. In the course of the final negotiations in Moscow, my staff and I, on the basis of consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had worked out the following priorities among the Soviet missiles available for retirement. The missile we were most eager to get rid of was the land-based ICBM designated as the SS-7. This had a range of over 6,000 miles and a warhead of six megatons; seventy of these heavy throwweight weapons were in hardened underground silos and thus were reasonably invulnerable. Next in priority were 134 SS-7 and SS-8 intercontinental missiles on vulnerable above-ground launching pads (the SS-8 was a variation of the SS-7); they were useful for a first strike or for retaliation against an American nuclear attack that had spared Soviet strategic forces. Our third priority was thirty missiles on an older Soviet nuclear submarine that we designated as the H-class. Each of these missiles had a range of only 900 miles and a relatively small warhead, but the submarine was capable of sustained operation. The lowest priority was assigned to sixty or seventy missiles on even older submarines we designated as the G-class. These vessels were diesel-powered, noisy, and of limited endurance. The range of their missiles was 300 to 700 miles; nine of these submarines (carrying twenty-seven of the shorter-range missiles) had to surface before they could fire.
We did not consider the G-class submarines a strategic threat. None had been operating off our Atlantic coast since 1966 or off our Pacific coast since 1969. In truth, it made no sense to imagine that the Soviet Union would cart seventy relatively low-yield weapons to within a few hundred miles of our shores on obsolescent submarines while it already had over 1,000 intercontinental missiles and was building to 1,500 ICBMs and 950 submarine-based missiles with a range of 1,500 miles and over. We therefore did not want the Soviets to use these obsolete weapons for a “trade-in.”
As it turned out, the SALT agreement reflected our priorities precisely: The H-class submarines were defined as “modern”; if the Soviets wanted to build 950 of the newest sea-based missiles, the H-class submarines would have to be retired; otherwise their thirty missiles would count in the total. The 210 SS-7S and SS-8s would have to be dismantled. We had achieved our objective, we thought, of preventing the Soviet Union from trading in a weapon that would in any case have to be retired, for a modern weapon. To close every loophole, we insisted that if for some unfathomable reason the Soviets placed modern missiles on the obsolescent G-class submarine, they too would count against the total of 950. We were rather proud of the negotiating accomplishment.
The night the agreement was signed, on May 26, 1972, I briefed the press after midnight in a Moscow nightclub converted into a press center. When asked about the G-class submarine, I replied:
If they are modernized, they are counted against the 950. . . . They don’t have to retire them. They do have to retire the H-class submarines if they want to go up to 950. They do not have to retire the G-class submarines, but if they modernize them, they are counted against the 950.
The replacement provisions were therefore hardly secret. On June 5, on our return home, we briefed the relevant departments and agencies in the same sense and sent guidance instructing them to use this interpretation “in preparing testimony and in responding to questions.”
On June 14 the Soviet Union sent us an oral note containing a typical Soviet ploy reflecting its second thoughts, neatly reversing the position it had taken in Moscow. We had initially insisted that the missiles on G-class boats be counted in the permitted total of 950. The Soviets had strenuously resisted with the argument that neither the missiles nor the submarines were “modern” by any rational definition of the term. We had settled on the replacement provision, which actually turned out to be more favorable to us than our original proposal. The Soviet note of June 14 in effect welshed on the “compromise”; it accepted our first proposal. The practical consequence would have been that the Soviets could trade in the seventy missiles on G-class boats; when the replacement process was completed, the Soviets could be left with the seventy SS-7 intercontinental missiles in hardened silos — precisely the weapon we were most eager to get rid of.
Not surprisingly, our reply of mid-June insisted on what we knew the negotiating record unambiguously sustained. The Soviets, having failed to put one over on us, took the attitude that there had been no harm in trying. They accepted our interpretation. I briefed a bipartisan leadership meeting in that sense. In July Gerard Smith, the principal SALT negotiator, testified before Congress as to our interpretation with no objection from the Soviet Union.
There the matter would have rested had I not decided to tidy up all loose ends. Even in the heady glow of detente I was not prepared to rely on oral understandings with the Soviets; I asked them to sign a document incorporating the agreed interpretation. Uncharacteristically conciliatory, the Soviets agreed. On July 24, 1972, Dobrynin and I signed a one-page document pedantically entitled “Clarification of Interpretation of the Protocol to the Interim Agreement.” It repeated once again our understanding of the replacement provisions together with some other odds and ends. In an excess of meticulousness we defined a “modern” missile as “a missile of the type which is deployed on nuclear-powered submarines commissioned in the USSR since 1965.” Exchanges in the Presidential Channel were generally not distributed to the bureaucracy. The paper was handled in the normal way and kept in the White House. It was a triumph of routine over substance. It made no difference, we thought, since nothing had changed. The relevant departments had already been notified in writing more than five weeks earlier of the official interpretation precisely along the lines of the signed document.
It turned out to be a mistake, however innocent. The Soviets, having no reason to believe that there was anything confidential about the document, referred to it in the Geneva SALT session in June 1973. Queried, the White House thereupon circulated the text to the appropriate agencies. The wrath of officials who feel themselves bypassed can be wondrous; their method of combat is to argue that they would have done much better had they been consulted and to find retroactively some flaw that would never have passed their eagle eyes. In this case, some jail-house lawyer pounced on our definition of modern missiles with the hairsplitting argument that the phrase “a missile of the type which is deployed on nuclear-powered submarines commissioned in the USSR since 1965” enabled the Soviets to deploy an entirely new missile just for the diesel-powered G-class so long as it did not appear on any nuclear-powered submarine.
The genius who came up with this interpretation did not explain what could possibly induce the Soviets to develop an entirely new missile for an obsolete submarine that had not been off our coast for five years and use it nowhere else. He was not deflected by the fact that such an outrageous gimmick would have augmented the Soviet total by exactly seventy missiles. The Soviets — never ones to give up a slight benefit — made no such claim. Nor would we have permitted such a distortion of the negotiating record. As I said in a press conference on June 24, 1974:
[W]hile perhaps this hair-splitting interpretation is possible, it is totally inconsistent with the negotiating record — it is totally inconsistent with all the exchanges that took place previously. It would be absolutely rejected by the United States.
Of course the Soviets were not developing any such new missile, and never did.
Whatever my judgment of the motive that had produced the bureaucracy’s complaints, I thought it prudent to make sure that the imaginary loophole was closed off. On October 15, 1973, I instructed the American representative to the US–Soviet Standing Consultative Commission monitoring the SALT agreement to put forward another clarification. The astonished Soviets, finding us discovering loopholes for them that they had never claimed, agreed to the new clarification after some back-and-forthing. The text had already been agreed when Jackson went public; it was to be signed together with a host of subsidiary agreements when Nixon visited Moscow. Jackson must have known this — or with his sources of information would have had no difficulty in finding out.
When he surfaced what he called “rather startling” new information that the Soviets had been permitted to exceed the ceilings established by SALT I, Jackson had quite literally no subject matter. But he confused the issue further by raising yet another charge of even less merit than the first, if that was possible. This had to do with the replacement of older ICBMs by sea-launched missiles. When the Soviets were given the right to trade in their older ICBMs, we insisted on a comparable right. The only older missiles we had available to trade in were fifty-four Titan II ICBMs. That they still existed was due largely to the fact that the White House, at my urging, had overruled several attempts by the Pentagon to cut costs by dismantling them unilaterally (as it finally decided to do in 1981). The only difficulty was that we would have nothing to trade them in for until after the expiration of the Interim Agreement; the new Trident submarine and missile were not planned to go into operation until 1978 (they have since slipped even further). At the end of the 1972 summit, Nixon engaged in the sort of prestidigitation by which negotiations are often concluded: He gave Brezhnev a letter affirming what he intended to do anyway: that we would not exercise the right to trade in Titans before the expiration of the Interim Agreement in 1977. Indeed, we could not, since the new boats would not exist. While the letter itself was secret, the intention was not. In my briefing of the bipartisan Congressional leadership on June 15, 1972, I said:
[T]he Interim Agreement . . . will not prohibit the United States from continuing current and planned strategic offensive programs, since neither the multiple-warhead conversion nor the B-I is within the purview of the freeze and since the ULMS [that is, what is now called the Trident] submarine system is not, or never was planned for deployment until after 1977.
And the Defense Department’s posture statement published a five-year projection with the same figures as Nixon’s letter to Brezhnev. In other words, there was nothing “secret” about this understanding, either.
Jackson’s charge that our “secret” agreement had given the Soviets an advantage of 124 additional missiles was therefore made up, preposterously, by adding our own fifty-four older Titan missiles (which we had “promised” not to trade in for more advanced Trident submarine missiles before 1977) and the seventy Soviet SLBMs on their obsolete G-class submarines (which counted against their total allowance only if they were ever modernized).
The Soviets never attempted to “modernize” the missiles on the G-class submarines, which at this writing (1981) have not been seen off our shores for over twelve years. They could have done so in any event only by violating the negotiating record and risking the entire East-West relationship; if they were willing to run that risk, they would have surely broken the agreement in much more significant ways. As for the replacement provision, it has since become moot. But even in June 1974, when Jackson raised the issue, the fact was that not a single missile beyond the SALT limits had been conceded to the Soviets. There was no secret deal, the Soviets were given no new rights, and there was no Soviet advantage.
But at this point in June 1974, the Watergate atmosphere ensured a headstart to any charges, however ill-founded. So, within forty-eight hours of my return from Nixon’s Middle East trip, the domestic nightmare began all over again. All television networks reported matter-of-factly the accusation that there had been secret agreements and that these had given the Soviets an edge. Leading newspapers had banner headlines on the subject. It was an interesting case history of the morphology of politics as permanent scandal. When the first news stories appeared on Thursday, June 20, I quite literally did not know what Jackson was talking about. I spent the next two days determining what the charge was while Henry Jackson appeared on every evening television news program skillfully playing the role of the honest country boy trying to shed light on arcane secrecy. He made no specific charges but implied strongly that something dangerous was afoot. The ubiquitous unnamed sources kept the accusations going and Jackson gave them credibility by speaking darkly about what his investigation might reveal. There was no brief statement I could make that could possibly explain the issue and in any event I needed to study the record, much of which was vague in my mind. So I announced a news conference for Monday, after the weekend, which in turn left the impression that where there was so much smoke that there had to be fire.III
Over the weekend, speculation raged whether another “scandal” had been unearthed. On Monday, June 24 — the day before I was to leave for Brussels and Moscow with Nixon — I summed up the facts at my news conference:
[T]he totals for the Soviet side which were submitted to the Congress, and which were publicly stated, have not been changed by any agreement, understanding, or clarification — public or private. The totals for the United States that were submitted to the Congress and stated publicly have not been altered by any agreement or understanding — public or private. The figures are exactly those that have been represented — exactly those that have been agreed to — and all of the disputes arise over esoteric aspects of replacement provisions, and not about the substance of the agreement.
Jackson, sticking to the letter of his charge, claimed he had proof of the secret agreements — which was true, if one took a novelist’s license with the terms “agreement” and “secret.” And the subject was so complicated, the rebuttal so complex, while the charges were so simple that the media had a terrible time establishing a balance (though they were on the whole sympathetic, especially those journalists who had studied the subject).
That afternoon I testified before Jackson’s subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Jackson made me swear to tell the truth — implying that only the threat of perjury charges could elicit honesty from the Secretary of State. It was technically an executive session, which meant that the media were barred. Jackson got around this inconvenience by leaving the hearing at frequent intervals to brief the waiting press about the “revelations” he had extracted from me, at one point getting into a heated exchange with my Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations, former Virginia Governor Lin wood Holton, who rightly complained about the procedures.
The stakes were high. On June 25 the Washington Post, giving me a clean bill, commented editorially: “Secretary Kissinger, whose credibility is also under challenge in the matter of wiretaps, could scarcely have gone on if his word on missiles had been shown to be untrue.”
But I was only an incidental target; my personal career was hardly the issue. The victim of the assault was any negotiating flexibility on SALT II at the forthcoming Moscow summit. All members of the bureaucracy were put on notice of the grilling that would await them before the Armed Services Committee; their safest course was to stick rigidly to the least controversial options. The Soviets knew that any proposal put forward by the already gravely damaged President would be submitted to the most brutal scrutiny upon his return. Whatever limited incentive the Soviets might have had to attempt a serious negotiation of outstanding issues, especially of SALT, was reduced even further.
The absurd charges against me soon petered out. I had to respond at one more press conference while we were already enroute, in Brussels on June 26, on the esoteric point of what was meant by “missiles of the type” — in any case, superseded by the new clarification. After that, the issue was dropped; it did not resurface after our return from Moscow. Once I had put the facts on the record, they were fairly covered and the media soon turned to other, juicier subjects. But the episode was another nail in the coffin of East-West relations. Probably never has a President left for a negotiation with the Soviet Union in more difficult and hard-pressed circumstances or with as little scope for diplomatic initiative. I hope none ever does again.
SALT was not the only subject on the Moscow agenda embroiled in our domestic turmoil. The impression having been fostered that Nixon was planning to save himself by pulling some rabbit out of a hat at the Moscow summit, opponents sought systematically to close off all avenues of negotiation. I have already described in Chapter XXII how Jackson on June 24, the day before Nixon’s departure for Moscow, announced that he planned to put forward new unspecified conditions on the issue of trade and emigration, effectively removing the subject from the summit agenda. Concurrently, restrictions on credit had been added to limitations on trade in the trade bill before the Senate. While we had assured the Soviets that we would resist these, similar promises with respect to the Jackson-Vanik amendment had proved unfulfillable. Nor did the Soviets see any great prospect elsewhere for joint action for the sake of which they might have made concessions on subjects of interest to us. There was certainly precious little joint effort in the Middle East. And SALT options were being systematically foreclosed as well.
Liberal and conservative opponents of Nixon could unite on the proposition that he must not be permitted to save his Presidency by deals in Moscow. What “concessions” Nixon was supposed to be planning were never clear. This made the innuendo all the more ominous. Our internal preparations for the summit thus labored under the mutual suspicion of some of the agencies (especially the Pentagon) and the White House, inflamed by the bureaucracy’s fear of Congressional retribution if they offended the broad coalition closing in on the President.
On June 14, innuendo was given concreteness when Paul Nitze resigned as Defense Department representative on the SALT delegation. (He had apparently attempted to do so as early as May 28 but had been dissuaded by Schlesinger.) Nitze was one of our nation’s most distinguished public servants and ablest theorists on national defense. He had served as Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Truman and Acheson; as Secretary of the Navy under Kennedy; as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Johnson. He had studied issues of national strategy all of his adult life; he had been one of the small group of dedicated and thoughtful men and women whose bipartisan support and occasional criticism had enabled American foreign policy to steer a steady course in the postwar period. He and I had had occasional disagreements, as is inevitable among serious men, but I had, and continue to have, the highest regard for him. In 1969, on my recommendation, Nixon nearly appointed him as ambassador to Bonn. He thought better of it when his Congressional experts told him that Nitze’s nomination would run into conservative opposition in the Senate.
The reason for the conservative distrust of Nitze has never been clear to me; he must have done something to offend in the late Forties or early Fifties, for he was vetoed by Republican Senator Robert A. Taft for the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower Administration. Whatever it was, it testifies to the liturgical implacability of the conservatives. For Nitze’s record over the subsequent twenty years was staunchly firm on almost every issue. Melvin Laird appointed him, with strong White House approval, as Defense Department representative on the SALT negotiating team in 1970. In March 1974, James Schlesinger once again proposed him for a position requiring Senate confirmation: it was the same slot of Assistant Secretary that had aborted twenty years earlier. It was a tribute to Nitze’s patriotism that he was willing to serve in the Nixon Administration and at a lower rank than he had held under Johnson. I supported the nomination and urged it upon an unenthusiastic Senator John S tennis, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Once again conservative opposition, this time led by Senator Barry Goldwater, aborted the project; the nomination was never forwarded by the White House. Nitze remained on the SALT delegation until he abruptly resigned on June 14 with a blistering public attack on Nixon:
In my view it would be illusory to attempt to ignore or wish away the depressing reality of the traumatic events now unfolding in our nation’s capital and of the implications of those events in the international arena.
Until the office of the presidency has been restored to its principal function of upholding the Constitution and taking care of the fair execution of the laws, and thus be able to function effectively at home and abroad, I see no real prospect for reversing certain unfortunate trends in the evolving situation.
In other words, Nitze was saying that he could no longer serve a President — from whom he had been willing to accept a senior appointment three months earlier — because he thought Nixon’s Watergate-related infirmities precluded the effective conduct of foreign policy. He also had substantive disagreements. It was an amazing attack so short a time before Nixon’s trip to Moscow. But it made dramatically clear that Nixon had no domestic base for any significant agreement in Moscow regardless of its content.
That is almost certainly how the Soviets read it. It had been noticeable for months that in their encounters even with Nixon the allusions to Watergate multiplied. On April 11, on a visit to Washington, Gromyko had said to Nixon:
We in the Soviet leadership are most satisfied that you hold true to the line you have taken despite certain known difficulties — which I don’t want to go into — and we admire you for it on the human plane.
That same day, by coincidence, our Ambassador in Moscow, Walter Stoessel, had been received by Brezhnev. The General Secretary wondered whether and to what extent American “domestic problems” could hinder the course of events. Brezhnev answered his own question by saying this would become clearer in the near future — showing that he was following Watergate closely. But the finer points of constitutional government still eluded him. He expressed, in Stoessel’s words, “amazement that the United States had reached the point that the President would be bothered about his taxes. . . . He respected the President for fighting back.” On April 28 in Geneva, Gromyko had asked me in detail about the impeachment process. Since Dobrynin was no doubt reporting at length about events in Washington, one reason for the extraordinary query may have been to bring home to us the growing Soviet doubts about our bargaining position.
Whether it was Watergate that caused Moscow to put East-West negotiations into low gear in the spring of 1974; whether it was the general trend of our domestic debate; or whether both of these were used as a cover for decisions that Moscow made for its own reasons cannot be established from American documents alone. The fact is that during April 1974, Soviet conduct changed. Usually preparations for a summit as well as the SALT talks followed a familiar pattern: An outrageous Soviet opening position would be followed by a period of prolonged haggling. After the Soviets had decided that they had squeezed all they could from intransigence, there would be a breakthrough. Although its initial formulation would still be unacceptable it would give the congenital haggling some concrete basis. If then we stuck to our basic concept, the gaps would gradually narrow until some outside event — usually a summit — would supply the incentive for the final push.
This seemed to be true of the SALT negotiations in the spring of 1974. For well over a year both sides had been making proposals for the record. Then in March, all agencies in our government had converged on a scheme of “counterbalancing asymmetries”: a Soviet edge in total delivery vehicles (reflecting the existing program of both sides) counterbalanced — in our view, more than counterbalanced — by an American advantage in numbers of MIRVed missiles. When I visited Moscow in March, Brezhnev seemed to accept this principle. He proposed an extension of the 1972 Interim Agreement, which would continue the Soviets’ existing advantage in delivery vehicles, but he conceded us an advantage of 100 MIRVed missiles over the extended term of the agreement. For reasons I have explained in Chapter XXII, we considered the 100-missile gap in our favor inadequate, even derisory. But if past practice were any guide, the negotiations that Gromyko and I would pursue would soon see more realistic figures.
It did not happen that way. Instead, negotiations stalemated. The Soviets rejected various schemes to lower their MIRV ceiling; they refused to set separate limits for the land-based ICBMs that were our gravest concern. The curious aspect of our domestic debate was that nobody in our government favored accepting what the Soviets had put forward. There was no basis whatever for the often expressed fear that Nixon might make a disadvantageous deal to preserve his Presidency. What the White House sought was a realistic elaboration of our March proposals, which all agencies had approved: some consensus on what counterbalancing asymmetries might be in the American interest should the door to a breakthrough open. And it followed extremely careful procedures — much less freewheeling than in earlier periods — to elaborate this consensus.
But suddenly battle lines were drawn, for reasons that I still find difficult to explain in retrospect. The leader of the revolt within the Administration was Nixon’s own Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger. I have already described my high regard for Schlesinger’s analytic skill and overall ability. He had done a remarkable job in strengthening our military capabilities despite a largely hostile Congress; in the process he had revised our defense doctrine in important and healthy directions with respect to both strategic and tactical forces. In this, one of Schlesinger’s staunchest allies had been Senator Jackson. What may have started as a marriage of convenience soon turned into a symbiotic relationship. The two men became fast friends, sharing similar assessments. This gradually edged Schlesinger into open opposition to his President.
Undoubtedly, there was an element of personal rivalry as well. As I have already pointed out, Schlesinger saw no intellectual reason for conceding my preeminence as Presidential counselor. He resented the not always tactful methods — to put it mildly — by which I operated. For example, until late in my term of office I handled the SALT negotiations using my own staff and excluding representatives from the Department of Defense. This was both tactless and unwise; participation would have been educational for the Defense Department representative; he would have learned to calibrate Pentagon rhetoric against negotiating realities (as indeed occurred when SALT expert James P. Wade joined my team in the Ford Administration); it would have made it easier to gain Defense Department support in NSC deliberations. On the other hand, Schlesinger was no shrinking violet, either; he gave as good as he received. After a while, Schlesinger missed few opportunities to score points against me, even though our strategic assessments were substantially similar. He found it convenient to cast himself in the role of being more vigilant and wary on SALT matters than I was — as one would expect from a Secretary of Defense. On the other hand, I was usually more ready to resist what I considered geopolitical encroachments. At any rate, the differences between Schlesinger and me, though partly rooted in the different perceptions and missions of the departments we headed, were more personal than intellectual. It was a pity; for he was one of our ablest public servants and the country needed our cooperation. In more normal times we probably would have had much less difficulty working in tandem. (Of course, in normal circumstances neither of us would have been in the cabinet in the first place.)
Be that as it may, Schlesinger, by early June, seems to have come to much the same conclusions as Nitze. He no longer wanted progress on SALT; he thought there was not enough moral capital left in the Administration to sustain a debate on a controversial agreement. He therefore began to block the diplomacy openly. And if he was at least my equal in intelligence, I conceded him pride of place in arrogance. In any normal administration this would have led to his immediate dismissal — a course that a Watergate-haunted Nixon could not even consider.
The previous December, Jackson had made a public proposal of a SALT agreement calling for reductions and equal aggregates, and describing the concern with MIRV limits — the heart of our SALT position — as “exaggerated.” In April, Jackson wrote Schlesinger asking for his comment. On June 3, 1974, by what must have been prearrangement, Schlesinger sent a reply praising Jackson’s proposal — in other words, dissociating himself from the American negotiating position now before the Soviets (see Chapter XXII). The practical consequence was to undercut the various schemes that were still on the table, all of which were attempts to balance asymmetries, that is to say, to offset one set of unequal aggregates against another. Schlesinger’s letter enabled Jackson to claim that the Defense Department supported his position, in effect that it opposed its Commander-in-Chief.
Schlesinger’s June 3 letter paralleled one by Paul Nitze to the President. Nitze, whose resignation was still some ten days away, argued that any agreement that permitted the Soviets more than 200–300 MIRVed ICBMs was strategically intolerable because a larger number would put America’s land-based strategic forces at risk. It was the fallacy of many SALT opponents to ask arms control negotiations not simply to stabilize the arms race but to solve all our strategic dilemmas as well. The absence of a SALT agreement would not keep MIRVed Soviet missiles to below 300, nor would it ease the potential vulnerability of our land-based force; in fact, by all projections it would lead to larger Soviet MIRVed forces and an increased or at least earlier threat to our land-based ICBMs. A useful debate would have been whether these projections were reasonable; whether the absence of an agreement eased the Soviet threat; and whether a SALT agreement could alleviate our vulnerability. After all, it was not as if the Congress in the era of Vietnam and Watergate was eager to undertake a really large-scale building program, or even the relatively paltry $2 billion a year Schlesinger was talking about.
All this, it must be reiterated, occurred in the absence of any particular bureaucratic provocation. I was only just back from the Syrian shuttle. When Schlesinger dropped his bombshell, there had been no new move on SALT toward the Soviets. It was a maneuver to preempt a non-maneuver, for Nixon was not planning any fancy footwork in Moscow.
Nixon reacted to Schlesinger’s letter to Jackson by calling the Defense Secretary to the Oval Office on June 6; he obviously suspected that there had been collusion with Jackson. And in truth in a normal Administration no Cabinet member who valued his position would publicly dissociate from a Presidential policy. It was a symbol of how far his Presidency had disintegrated that Nixon found himself obliged to deal with his Secretary of Defense as if the latter were a sovereign equal; it was a tribute to his tenacity that, overcoming his fear of personal confrontations, he managed to analyze the basic problem very well:
Let me tell you how I see the players. It is amusing that Defense, State, and everyone now see Communism is bad and you can’t trust the Soviet Union, I knew both of those things all along. Nitze’s view is that we should stonewall the Soviet Union on everything — SALT, MIRV, TTB,IV ABM. I understand. There are differences in objectives within the bureaucracy. State would like it to blow up because they didn’t dream it up — the same with CIA. In the DOD — not you — they would like to stonewall so we get a bigger budget — more ships, etc. That is not totally selfish. They honestly believe no agreement is to our advantage. It’s like in SALT I — although we didn’t give anything up. Frankly, as Secretary you have to lead the Department. You must express your views. It has been the practice of recent secretaries to send over letters to get on record — with something that can’t be accepted or refused, so it can go either way. I am disappointed to see you go this route.
Schlesinger was opaque but firm. He insisted that he was in favor of MIRV limits but agreed that above the figure of 360–450 Soviet MIRVed ICBMs the limitations were meaningless; no more than Nitze did he explain how the absence of an agreement would keep the Soviets to that limit. He implied that he favored a ceiling of equal total aggregates at around 2,500 delivery vehicles — which happened to be at least 350 above any planned American program and about 100 below Soviet totals. The difficulty was that Nixon had no alternative scheme. What he wanted from Schlesinger was general flexibility and moral support, not endorsement of any particular new proposal since none existed. In that situation, Nixon’s almost plaintive plea was uttered in a vacuum:
We need your help. Help Kissinger to devise a way around this. I will take on Brezhnev. I made the speech about the U.S. being second to none. The American people in their simplistic way are not on a peace-at-any-price kick, but they want peace. Many of my friends are horrified at our even talking to the Soviet Union. But are we going to leave the world running away with an arms race, or will we get a handle on it?
In this weird situation, stonewalled by the Soviets, assailed by subordinates, Nixon assembled the National Security Council on June 20, five days before leaving for Moscow. There was no decision to make; it was a deliberation to examine the contingency that the Soviets might make an offer while we were in Moscow. At Nixon’s request, I outlined where we stood:
With no added U.S. forces, the Soviet Union will pass the U.S. in number of MIRVed missiles by the 1980’s, perhaps by 1980, maybe by 1982. This depends on the rate of building. At the maximum rate they have gone in the past, the gap would become quite dramatic. Our real choice is either to achieve constraints on their programs, or have a build-up of our own. The worst case is to have no constraints on their program and no build-up of our own.
Nixon intervened to indicate that this was exactly what might occur: “If there were no constraints, we could raise hell to try to drum up Congressional support and that might happen. But I am mainly concerned that it might not happen either.”
I then summed up the strategic issue:
[T]he status of the negotiations is as follows. The current scheme we were talking about would be an extension of the Interim Agreement numbers to perhaps 1979 or ’80 — the date is important here because Trident comes in in the 1977–78 period. In return for this, we would expect to achieve limits on the total number of MIRVed missiles. They have offered us 1100 versus a thousand for them. We have told them that this is not adequate. It would stop us essentially in the next year or so, and allow the Soviet build-up to continue. I know of no one in the government that recommends accepting this approach. But they may offer a better differential. . . . Right now, Mr. President, you have no decisions to make. We have an offer, but only an unsatisfactory offer. But suppose they should increase the gap — would we then be prepared to extend the Interim Agreement to 1979 or 1980, and bring some larger missiles into our deployments? . . . You may face such decisions. I have no indication that you will, and in fact my prediction is that you will not have to face it, because they won’t offer an increase in the differential.
It must be noted that what I put forward was a request to explore the margins of our own proposal. We were seeking contingency guidance should the Soviets respond more flexibly than we anticipated to what we had put before them in March with the approval of all agencies represented at this meeting. Schlesinger responded with an elaboration of what he had said to Nixon on June 6, an entirely new scheme that, a week before a scheduled summit meeting, simply wiped out the negotiating record of the previous six months, dismissing as irrelevant the only proposal currently under discussion. He proposed equal total aggregates of 2,500; a limit on MIRVed ICBMs of 660 Minutemen for us and 360 for the Soviet Union; no limitation on submarine-based MIRVs; and extension of the Interim Agreement to 1979.
The trouble was that this proposal had essentially been rejected by the Soviets in March and for understandable reasons: It constrained no American program; it would reduce the only major Soviet MIRV program. The ceiling for the Minutemen was above what had been published as our plan in the Defense Secretary’s annual posture statement projecting our forces five years into the future. The Soviets, on the other hand, had — according to our own estimates — the capability to deploy at least 500 more MIRVed ICBMs than the Pentagon plan would concede them over the life of the agreement. Our only proposed counter was to build 150 Minuteman IIIs with three warheads each as against six on the best Soviet missile. Thus we were trying to stop a possible 3,000 Soviet warheads by threatening to build 450 of our own. Nobody, regardless of how strident his anti-Communist rhetoric, could have made this sound menacing enough to induce Soviet agreement. Brezhnev had told me in March, when I presented it the first time, that he would not be in office long if he accepted it.
Schlesinger would hear none of it. The fact that the Soviets had already turned his proposal down was not conclusive; they had so far only dealt with me; at the summit they would confront the master:
Mr. Brezhnev has a very high respect for you, Mr. President. You can be very persuasive — you have great forensic skills. I believe if you can persuade them to slow down to 85 per year versus 200 per year, you will have achieved a major breakthrough.
“Major breakthrough” was an understatement. Forensic skill could not achieve it; the task would have defeated Demosthenes or Daniel Webster.V It would require a downright miracle.
Only a conviction that Nixon was finished could have produced so condescending a presentation by a cabinet officer to his President. Nixon recorded in his diary that it was “really an insult to everybody’s intelligence and particularly to mine.”9 And in a calmer period, it would have been seen that there was no possible justification for the self-righteous dogmatism with which our domestic opponents conducted the assault on East-West policy. For the issue was perfectly susceptible to rational analysis. Both Schlesinger and I agreed that a ceiling of 1,000 on Soviet MIRVs was too high; in fact, it was no ceiling at all. We agreed that a limit of 360 for Soviet missiles was desirable; we differed only about its attainability. Assuming my judgment was right and the Soviets rejected the scheme despite Nixon’s forensic skill, the issue came down quite simply to this question: Was there any limit on Soviet MIRVs higher than 360 and lower than 1,000 that would constitute an improvement in our position? Common sense would suggest that there had to be.
Schlesinger had indicated that his counterproposal, if we failed to agree that summer, would be to recommend augmenting our Minuteman III program by 150 (or 450 warheads). Holding the Soviets to 800–850 MIRVed missiles, a level that I considered (perhaps wrongly) as attainable, would have deprived the Soviets of an additional 900–1,200 warheads compared with Brezhnev’s proposal and 3,000 warheads compared with current levels. If that was considered insignificant, it is hard to know what the shouting over a Soviet edge of 300 single-warhead missiles in SALT I was about.
As it turned out, we never built the additional Minuteman IIIs, largely because the Pentagon never put such a program forward. The absence of an agreement soon turned the ceiling of 360 proposed for Soviet MIRVed ICBMs into fantasy. The Soviets have since exceeded the limit of 1,000 we thought intolerable in 1974. The current SALT II ceiling is 1,200, two hundred above Brezhnev’s offer. Three administrations later, the total aggregate of our strategic forces is slightly lower than was foreseen in the five-year plan of 1974. None of the successor administrations to Nixon’s put forward the aggregates the Pentagon asked SALT to produce in 1974. They were content to stick with our existing programs even in the absence of an agreement. So much for the argument that SALT is responsible for the strategic dilemmas we face today.
In any other period a campaign to paint the “warmongers” of 1972 as the “peace-at-any-price appeasers” of 1974 would have been ludicrous. In the fevered atmosphere of Nixon’s last weeks, it was treated as the most natural accusation in the world. And the NSC meeting was followed the next day by the charges of a secret missile deal described earlier.
What made the whole argument even more futile was that there was probably no chance of getting an agreement on terms compatible with our national honor, and Nixon would make no other. It was not our SALT divisions that prevented an agreement; this was foreclosed by a Soviet policy decision not to proceed — for whatever reason — during the summer of the visible disintegration of the Nixon Administration. But the squabbling did deprive the President of dignity on his last foreign journey as Chief Executive.
If the summit took place under unfortunate circumstances within the United States, its international context was no more favorable. In 1972, the Soviets maintained the summit invitation despite the blockade and bombing of North Vietnam; this was the clearest indication that the Soviets expected to do important business; it was indeed their commitment to it. The Soviets did not want to fall behind the pace of the rapidly evolving Chinese-American relationship. In 1973, the Soviets wanted to conclude the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War and Brezhnev was most eager to discuss the Middle East. But by late June 1974 none of these factors, except the desire to isolate China, could overcome the reality that Nixon’s authority was disappearing almost by the week.
The Soviet position was not particularly brilliant. In the abstract, the years of detente had been kinder to us than to our adversaries — the strident claims of our critics to the contrary notwithstanding. As I wrote in a briefing memorandum to Nixon for the summit:
Sensitive as they are to shifts in the power balance, the Soviets leaders cannot fail to recognize that America’s diplomatic position has not, in fact, been weakened since you last saw Brezhnev, while the Soviet position in some respects has undergone a decline: in the Middle East, to some extent in Europe, and in the Far East. Indeed, Soviet setbacks and disappointment have probably raised some question in Moscow about the validity of pursuing a detente with the West and with the United States. Brezhnev’s commitment to this general line, however, is such that he cannot easily abandon it, without jeopardizing his own personal power position.
The assessment turned out to be right. Brezhnev proved most reluctant to give up his attempt to ease East-West relations. What he abandoned — as the full extent of our domestic debacle sank in — was any major commitment to expand the existing framework. For that he needed what the French call an interlocuteur valable — an opposite number who could deliver. And that is exactly what Nixon more and more had lost the power to do. A second-term President is under a serious handicap in any event; every passing month brings him closer to retirement and political irrelevancy. In Nixon’s case Watergate multiplied this occupational hazard hugely. In the perception of almost all observers, he was approaching the end of his period in office in the second year of his second term.
A statesman’s tools are insight and authority. Nothing can substitute for the intuition of what events are interrelated and basic, and which are surface manifestations, what factors are relevant and which are diversions. That quality of insight Nixon maintained, even honed, until the bitter end. But a statesman’s labor becomes an academic exercise if he cannot convince his opposite numbers that he is able to implement his perception. The stuff of diplomacy is to trade in promises of future performance; that capacity Nixon was losing with alarming rapidity. Inevitably, he became less and less interesting to the Soviets as a negotiating partner. They treated him politely, even respectfully, to the last. But by the summer of 1974 they were no longer prepared to make long-term commitments to Nixon or to pay a price for his goodwill. The trouble with the 1974 Moscow summit was not the danger of secret deals unfavorable to the American national interest; it was rather the opposite — an encounter doomed to irrelevance.
Nixon stopped first in Brussels, where the heads of government of the North Atlantic Alliance met to celebrate their signature of the Atlantic Declaration over a year late. It was NATO’s twenty-fifth anniversary, but the mood was not joyful. The principals in the major allied countries — Germany, France, Britain, Italy — and the participants in the passionate debate of the previous year had all changed. The words of the Declaration were substantially what we had sought for a new Atlantic Charter. But an affirmation of unity requiring no concrete action that nevertheless takes fourteen months to negotiate is hardly a sign of moral rededication.
Nixon’s reputation in Europe was high; most Europeans affected to regard Watergate more as a political coup by Nixon’s opponents than as a disregard of legality by the Administration. The Western leaders treated Nixon with the respect they felt for him and the solicitude shown to terminally ill patients. In a way, the reiteration of unity against potential Soviet aggression — among other things — while the President was on his way to what was turning into an annual summit with the Soviet leaders could be taken as an indication that the twin pillars of our East-West policy, containment and coexistence, were both in working order. Yet by the same token the symbolism lost dramatic impact because the meeting was taking on more the character of a farewell appearance than of a political event.
Given these limitations, our Soviet hosts were uncharacteristically sensitive to Nixon’s human predicament. Brezhnev greeted him at Moscow’s Vnukovo II airport on June 27 as he had not done during his last visit. Brezhnev’s only position then was General Secretary of the Communist Party and he rarely went to greet foreign visitors at the airport unless they were also high Communist Party functionaries. He escorted Nixon to the same luxurious Tsars’ Apartments in the Kremlin that the President had occupied in May 1972. Soon after, there was a private meeting between the two leaders attended only by the Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, which delayed the start of the welcoming dinner for half an hour and caused the usual anxiety among those excluded. Nixon did not tell me what was discussed; the Soviets never referred to it. Nixon resigned soon after, so it had no operational consequences. It was like a solitary cry on the North Pole, a noise without sound disappearing into the void.
But there were limits beyond which the Soviets would not permit personal goodwill to be pushed. When Nixon responded to Brezhnev’s toast, he extrapolated a mood into a general principle, as he often did when speaking extemporaneously. Praising the accomplishments of the past two years of US–Soviet relations, Nixon asserted:
They were possible because of a personal relationship that was established between the General Secretary and the President of the United States. And that personal relationship extends to the top officials in both of our governments.
It has been said that any agreement is only as good as the will of the parties to keep it. Because of our personal relationship, there is no question about our will to keep these agreements and to make more where they are in our mutual interests.
It would have been difficult in the best of times for Soviet leaders to accept the proposition that their policy was based on personalities. Communist philosophy, after all, is nothing if not materialist. Even in their private comments, Soviet leaders like to preen themselves on the belief that their policy is based on objective factors, not on accident or sentiment. But with Nixon all but doomed, Brezhnev had an interest beyond vindicating Marxist philosophy in unlinking his policy from Nixon’s fate. What TASS reported to the Soviet people, therefore, was a somewhat free translation of Nixon’s remarks. It dropped the word “personal” and edited Nixon’s remarks so that they would be taken as describing the relationship between two countries, rather than two men. Soviet solicitude toward Nixon clearly did not extend to associating the Kremlin with the proposition that détente depended on him alone.
Our press caught the discrepancy at once. Leonid M. Zamyatin, Director General of TASS, who participated with Ron Ziegler in daily joint briefings for the media, explained smoothly that the Soviet translation was accurate and that news reports to the contrary reflected the journalists’ ignorance of the Russian language. Sukhodrev told us the omission was inadvertent — a statement events soon proved to be more tactful than accurate. Ziegler, carried away with his assignment of emphasizing Nixon’s personal indispensability, ascribed the whole contretemps to the fact that Pravda, the party newspaper published in the mornings, went to press on a short deadline. “I expect to see ‘personal relationship’ in tonight’s Izvestia,” said Ziegler, referring to the government daily, published in the evening. He soon learned that the Soviets’ devotion to accurate journalism is so intense that nothing appears in the Soviet media under the pressure of deadlines. Izvestia repeated the version of Pravda. TASS also made another modification of the toast. Nixon had referred to Brezhnev’s return visit to the United States as being scheduled for “next year” — following the pattern of annual summit meetings. The Soviets refused to commit themselves to a definite schedule: TASS reported the reference to a return visit but omitted a target date. No explanation was offered. None was necessary. The Soviets were cutting their losses.
The Moscow summit of 1974 thus suffered from the same incongruity as the Mideast journey. Nixon’s paladins, now reduced in effect to Ziegler, stressed his personal role. But the Soviets had an interest in not tying a major policy to the fate of an individual. That, in fact, was also the American national interest and the only way we could rescue our international position from Watergate: to demonstrate that well-founded policies could survive our domestic debacles because they reflected long-term national objectives.
In this mood of tension, anguish, and premonition, the petty squabbles among staff that had blighted the Mideast journey reappeared even more sharply and in sometimes absurd form. There was an unworthy dispute between Al Haig and me about whose suite in the Kremlin palace would be closest to Nixon’s — a status symbol of somewhat debatable value in the circumstances. Haig won the battle. It was like fighting over seats at the captain’s table on the Titanic after it had struck the iceberg.
My personal relations with Nixon were unusually distant at this point. I could not tell whether he continued to resent my Salzburg press conference, or whether, as suggested by the columnist William Safire — considered close to several of Nixon’s associates — Nixon used my own difficulties to reestablish his authority.10 If the latter, it was a vain effort; Nixon retained enough power to diminish my standing; there was nothing he could do to restore his own. The most logical explanation is that he counted the thirty-four votes he needed in the Senate to defeat impeachment and found most of them on the conservative side. On this thesis, since I was under fire for détente, the Safire column was one of Nixon’s attempts to dissociate from me and an effort to reestablish his credentials with his erstwhile constituency.
Whatever, contacts between the President and me were stiffer than before. The media had not forgiven me for the Salzburg press conference. They never let me forget the threat of resignation. They looked for every shred of evidence of seeming estrangement from Nixon, diminution of my authority, or tenseness on my part. The fact that Gromyko and I walked ten feet behind Brezhnev and Nixon on a stroll in the gardens at Brezhnev’s seaside resort in the Crimea was headline news: I was either sulking, or being relegated to a secondary role, or both.
The truth was simpler. To be sure, I was exhausted from over two months of uninterrupted travel. But the President, in acute pain from phlebitis, was going through a much more traumatic experience than shuffling the members of his entourage. Nixon was much too serious a student of foreign policy and government not to understand that the biggest obstacle to serious negotiation was the Soviet conviction that if he survived politically he would lack authority but that in all likelihood he would not survive. Nixon must have found it hard to bear that I — with all the difficulties I faced — was certain to survive the debacle he could not bring himself to accept and yet which he now must have sensed was inevitable. And this on top of a long history in which the media had emphasized my role as peace negotiator and his almost as the “mad bomber.”
No wonder that the physical effort required to keep functioning seemed to consume more and more of Nixon’s energy. Doubtless he was preoccupied and withdrawn — only incidentally from displeasure with me, above all because he was in the process of parting from what heretofore had given his life meaning, the obsession that had made possible the almost inhuman self-discipline and the public persona at odds with his basically shyer and gentler nature. And while surrounded by the appurtenances of the Presidency he had to steel himself for the days of exile when the bands would stop playing and his lifelong dream had evaporated.
The procedures this time followed those of the Moscow summit of 1972.11 There was a welcoming dinner in the marvelous fifteenth-century Granovit Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace with its vaulted ceilings covered with religious paintings. There were generally two plenary sessions a day in St. Catherine’s Hall, a gilded, ornate salon. Gromyko and I met in the lacunae of the formal sessions to negotiate outstanding issues in the various documents slated for signature. Brezhnev took our whole party to the Crimea from Saturday afternoon, June 29, to Monday morning, July 1.
On the Soviet side, the troika of Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny was still much in evidence though Brezhnev seemed to have less of a need to defer to the forms of collective leadership than he had two years earlier. He now dominated the discussions and was well briefed and acute, especially on military matters. One of the poignant features of the summit was in fact the disproportion between the protocol pomp and circumstance and what Nixon’s plight permitted to be realized. For as it had become apparent that no major breakthrough was in the cards, tension eased and indeed the appearance of harmony became its own objective. The atmosphere was congenial. Miraculously, meetings started on time. There was none of the attempted browbeating that characterized the first two summits, in 1972 on Vietnam and in 1973 on the Middle East. The reason was not all that flattering to us. Precisely because they did not want to risk too much on Nixon’s continuation in office, the Soviet leaders had scaled down their expectations. They recited their objectives but in what was for them a low-key manner. There was a discussion of the European Security Conference; by now so many West European leaders had agreed to culminate the conference at a summit gathering that there was no longer any purpose in America’s holding out on this point. (This was to be the Helsinki conference of 1975, which Gerald Ford was attacked at home for attending.) And the remaining issues in what later became the Helsinki Final Act were too abstruse — they were mostly pedantic drafting problems in a collective document — to lend themselves to top-level solutions, though they were discussed inconclusively at considerable length.
There was some sparring on the Middle East. Brezhnev inquired as to the goal of our policy and stressed the need for joint US–Soviet action, though without the fire of his March meeting with me. The Soviets had learned from recent experience. Since it never hurts for a diplomat to give the impression that the inevitable has been affected by his policy decisions, Brezhnev made a point of noting the propriety of unilateral efforts where these were most efficient. Gromyko in a separate meeting with me allowed that our policy in the Middle East was more complicated than at first glance. It was said without rancor. The Soviets seemed at last to have drawn the correct conclusion from their embarrassments in the spring. Importuning for a formal role only highlighted their impotence; they would have to wait for a mistake on our part or a collapse of our current strategy.
The Soviets finessed controversial items by scheduling many meetings between the leaders on subjects that normally would have been left to the foreign ministers: arcane technical discussions on agreements that had been prepared for signature at the summit. Of these, three were of some importance: an agreement to explore the possibilities of banning environmental warfare; an agreement to forgo the option of the second ABM site allowed by the 1972 treaty limiting defensive weapons; and a draft treaty to prohibit underground nuclear tests over a certain “threshold” of explosive power.
The agreement to negotiate a ban on environmental warfare — for example, weather modification for military purposes — was the sort of marginally useful accord that ingenious bureaucrats devise under the pressure of the necessity to make their leaders look good. It was a bow to humane sentiments; it was not controversial because it was not easy to know what its subject matter would be and because few were bold enough to advocate environmental warfare publicly. A completed international convention on the subject was later signed by the United States, the USSR, and thirty other countries in Geneva in May 1977.
The protocol on ABM systems had its origin in the treaty signed in 1972 limiting antiballistic missile defense sites to two in each country separated by no less than 1,300 kilometers. Each side was given the right to defend its national capital and one field of ICBMs. As it turned out, neither country had taken full advantage of its rights under the treaty. The Soviet Union already had an ABM system around Moscow; we had built one defense site protecting a missile field near Grand Forks, North Dakota. Neither country had proceeded with a second site. At the summit in 1974 it was agreed to formalize practice and to confine each country to one antimissile defense site. The agreement was slightly more advantageous to us than to the Soviet Union since there was no possibility that the Congress would ever appropriate money for the second permitted site, while the Soviets labored under no such inhibitions.
This amendment pushed to its logical conclusion the reasoning underlying the original ABM agreement. If deterrence was enhanced by leaving each side’s population vulnerable to attack, it was better that there be one site than two; in fact, it made little sense to have any. What all this left unexamined was the validity of the reasoning that led to the treaty in the first place, and this silence is an interesting reflection of the impact of conventional wisdom. After 1972, the numbers of offensive weapons permitted in the first SALT agreement became controversial though in fact they did little more than ratify what both sides were planning anyway. What went nearly unremarked was the extraordinary doctrine that based a nation’s security on the vulnerability of its population and of its missile fields. In retrospect it is less clear to me than it seemed then, as I went along with the consensus, why protection of the missile fields would not have added to strategic stability especially after the MIRV threat emerged. Leaving fixed ICBM silos totally undefended reduces an attack on them into a mere engineering problem; as accuracy improves and the number of attacking warheads expands, it is not irrational to consider ABM defense of missile fields as a possible protection if the requisite technology is available. Be that as it may, the ABM agreement of 1974 was another modest step forward on a route to which there was literally no opposition.
The most interesting agreement was the “threshold” nuclear test ban. A staple of Soviet disarmament schemes had been the proposal for a complete ban on nuclear testing. (The 1963 test ban, negotiated by the United States, Britain, and the USSR, prohibited nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, or under water, but permitted underground testing to continue.) In the usual Soviet version, all testing would be banned and other nations would be asked to accede. If they did not, the signatories would have the right to renounce the treaty. The Soviet proposal had been consistently rejected by American administrations of both parties. The Defense Department and its scientific advisers argued persuasively that our weapons arsenal could not be improved without testing and that it was difficult to detect clandestine underground tests. The State Department objected to the pressure against other nuclear powers — for example, China or France — implicit in the withdrawal clause. In early February 1974, Dobrynin, true to the Soviet maxim that you can never know whether a door has been unlocked until you try it, trotted out the by-now venerable Soviet scheme for a comprehensive test ban. We turned it down. On February 4, Gromyko tried to find out whether our cold-shouldering Dobrynin’s overture might be a question of rank; so he, a member of the Politburo, repeated it to the President. The answer was again in the negative. The Soviets retreated to the idea of a quota ban — that is, limiting both sides to an agreed number of tests per year. That was less dangerous than the comprehensive ban but presented significant verification problems.
During my visit to Moscow in March, I raised the verification problems and refused any agreement involving — even tacitly — pressure on third countries. Brezhnev countered with a proposal of a “threshold” test ban — that is, banning underground tests of nuclear weapons above a certain yield. This I was prepared to discuss. Soviet strategy was more dependent on high-yield weapons than ours; limiting tests to the lower ranges should therefore on balance favor us. The major verification problems, moreover, were in the lower-yield explosions. And such an agreement would cause less offense to allies like France and friendly countries like China; it involved no implied pressure on them because it was independent of their actions. In the months prior to the 1974 summit, we refined the concept of a threshold ban both within our government and in talks with the Soviets. The original concept of defining the threshold by the seismic shock of the explosion was replaced by the simpler idea of setting the ceiling at 150 kilotons.
Though the arms control utility of a threshold test ban was marginal, it opened up discussions on verification that represented a major advance. If we were to verify that nuclear tests were below the 150-kiloton threshold, the Soviet Union would have to reveal its test sites, agree to test at no other site, and supply information about the geological formations at each site to permit us to calibrate our equipment. This — surprisingly — the Soviet Union agreed to do. The question of “peaceful nuclear explosions” then arose — that is, the theoretical use of nuclear devices to build canals or divert waterways. Neither side wanted to close off this possibility, but the United States especially did not want to permit the loophole of masking a military device as a peaceful explosive. Since the locale of peaceful explosions would be impossible to specify by international agreement in advance, we asked for on-site inspection. After prolonged wrangling, the Soviet Union agreed, for the first time in its history, to the principle. The details were to be worked out, according to a protocol attached to the agreement, before the threshold test ban would go into effect in 1976.
All concerned with the verification problem — as must be all serious students of arms control — should have welcomed the threshold test ban as a potentially important pilot project. Never before had the Soviets agreed to on-site inspection; never had they been willing to give so much information about a military testing program. And since not even those most rabidly suspicious of Soviet motives thought the threshold test ban worked to our military disadvantage, the Soviet conciliatoriness with respect to it must have been to maintain some momentum in the flagging détente.
But by then détente had been engulfed in controversy in America and growing doubt in Moscow. As a result, the threshold test ban did little to enliven the summit or to raise its level of discourse. Its subject matter was too technical to attract the undivided attention of the leaders, or for that matter to concentrate their minds on just what was being talked about. When it came up, on Friday, June 28, Kosygin must have forgotten his script or was so used to the old dispensation that he returned constantly to the familiar litany, in effect attacking the threshold test ban as inferior to a comprehensive one. Gromyko and I were supposed to report on the progress of the negotiations. But Kosygin had other ideas. As soon as he heard what the subject was, he launched himself into a passionate advocacy of a complete end of nuclear testing. He shrugged off any counterargument, including that of Nixon, who also seemed oblivious to the fact that we were assembled to laud a completed agreement, not to pursue one laid aside. Nixon resorted to his standard rebuttal to the effect that he really agreed with Kosygin but was reaching the same goal by a different route, which was news to me. Kosygin was arguing against an agreement his own government was about to sign and Nixon accepted as an objective what he had turned down four months earlier. After creating total confusion for about an hour, the principals subsided and the subject was remanded to the foreign ministers.
At home, the threshold test ban failed not by attracting bitter animosity, as was the case with the SALT agreement, but by indifference. It simply had no constituency, except possibly for a small group of professional arms controllers interested in the principle of on-site inspection. Most liberals preferred a comprehensive test ban; thus they mocked the 150-kiloton ceiling, fought against the agreement, and thereby killed the first breakthrough toward on-site inspection. It was a classic case of the best being the enemy of the good. Conservatives did not oppose the threshold test ban. But they surely would not fight for causes abandoned by the liberals who had generated them. A coalition formed between those who wanted to do more and others who were not willing to press for it. The Carter Administration abandoned it. The treaty still awaits Senate ratification nearly eight years after its signature. And once it became apparent that the treaty was going nowhere in America, the Soviets lost interest in it and returned to their campaign for a complete test ban. Nothing could better symbolize the fact that the policy of détente and arms control was losing its domestic base in the United States.
SALT remained the most difficult issue. The problems were partly self-inflicted. It was, after all, only the second year of the 1972 five-year Interim Agreement, which would not run out until 1977. The hurry toward a new agreement was internal. The Nixon Administration had come up with a surprise at each previous summit: in 1972, the fact that it took place at all, coupled with the rapid conclusion of SALT and the principles of international conduct; in 1973, the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War. Regardless of Watergate, it would have been in our interest in 1974 to make clear that if summits were becoming annual events they could not possibly produce a major announcement each time. Relations between two nations cannot be geared to a schedule of spectaculars; even less, relations between ideological and geopolitical adversaries. There simply were not that many controversies susceptible to yearly solution. Indeed, once East-West summits became institutionalized, their utility lay in the opportunity they afforded each leader to explore the other’s mind and to understand the limits of pressure as well as the possibilities of agreement. In that sense, the 1974 summit was a “normal” summit and the others unusual.
But in the tumultuous summer of 1974, that insight was not widespread. The public, the media, and, to some extent, the Administration had become hooked on the dramatic like a dope addict on his fix. Any meeting with the Soviets at the Presidential or Secretary of State level that did not lead to a breakthrough was dismissed by the media as a failure even if its other accomplishments were not negligible. The imminence of any meeting at a high level triggered a bitter bureaucratic debate in the United States. Even when all agencies should have known that no major breakthrough was possible, they were not sure that something might not be going on in backchannels and they sought to block an outcome with which they disagreed.
By the summer of 1974, SALT had become too politicized; as I have said, it was a whipping boy in a deeper struggle over the entire nature of US–Soviet relations and even over Nixon’s fitness to govern. In retrospect, it would have been wiser to announce ahead of time — surely after the disastrous NSC meeting of June 20 — that no basis for a breakthrough existed and that the leaders would defer their consideration of SALT until more progress had been made at a lower level. Such a sensible course was never considered, partly because of my preoccupation with the Middle East; partly because it would have been blamed on Watergate and would have fueled pressures to remove Nixon from office; partly because it would have been used by opponents of SALT to show that the basic thrust of Nixon’s East-West policies was failing.
So we wound up with the worst of all worlds. A bitter domestic controversy prevented us from pursuing the coherent, persistent strategy without which no negotiation with the Soviets can succeed. After the Soviets had conceded the principle of inequality in MIRVs in March, Dobrynin had told me privately that it would be possible to widen the MIRV differential as we favored. But the United States never managed to put forward and stick to a consistent scheme; Nixon and I constantly had to protect our flanks against sniping from those who specialized in showing the weakness of any position by comparing it with some ideal world, but who felt no similar compulsion to analyze what would happen in the absence of an agreement.
What had emerged as the Defense Department position at the NSC meeting of June 20 guaranteed a deadlock. No forensic skill could produce an agreement that simultaneously raised our total aggregates and lowered the Soviet MIRV program in return for absolutely nothing.
And it did not. Even the setting symbolized our difficulties. The main town near where we met in the Crimea on June 30 was Yalta. Nixon was not eager to revive memories of the controversy over Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 conference there with Stalin, long a target of conservative criticism. Therefore, the White House insisted on referring to the site of Nixon’s meetings as the suburb of Oreanda, where the Politburo villas in fact were located and the meetings took place. Unfortunately, the press center was set up in a hotel in downtown Yalta and all news reports to America went out under the dreaded dateline “Yalta” after all.
We were meeting in the garden of Brezhnev’s residence, an elaborate beach complex set into the steep hills that dropped down to the Black Sea. Brezhnev took Nixon into what was aptly called the grotto, a cave-like structure cut into the limestone at the foot of a cliff — a romantic, nineteenth-century conceit somewhat incongruous for the leader of a country avowing a materialistic interpretation of history. While they talked alone, Gromyko and I sat with our aides near the huge Olympic-size swimming pool surrounded by glass walls that could be opened or closed electrically. This time the pool area was open to the surrounding breezes on a beautiful, clear, sunny day. Nixon and Brezhnev were secluded for over three hours. As in Moscow, I did not learn right away what they discussed — nor did the Soviets ever refer to it or claim that Nixon made any commitment. Eventually we were invited to join the principals.
The subject clearly had not been SALT. The two leaders had apparently waited for the arrival of Gromyko and me to get into the topic. Nixon, who had not mastered all the statistics, asked me to lead the SALT discussions for our side. He was seconded by Brezhnev:
I was telling the President that we appreciate him sending Dr. Kissinger to Moscow. He took a tough line with us in March, and we candidly told him our view. We told him our limits. The truth is there somewhere, so he should tell us where we should start to reach agreement.
It was an invitation to propose a compromise, put forward in a manner that was by Soviet standards conciliatory, suggesting that he would not insist on the original Soviet position. I presented a variant of the Defense Department’s plan; this found no favor and in fact got us off into a futile and acrimonious debate. Brezhnev would not consider any of its aspects. He pointed out that our proposal would give us 4,000 more warheads than the Soviet Union, which was roughly true. He had discovered, almost surely from published accounts, that the limits we proposed for ourselves substantially coincided with our planned program: “It is important to reach an agreement but it should be one that restrains the race, slows it down. Under the proposal Dr. Kissinger is making, the US does not do far less than they would do without an agreement.” I replied that in fact under our scheme our MIRV buildup would move at a slower rate than the Soviet Union’s. But Brezhnev understood that this was because we were close to completing our program. He said he did not regard it as much of a concession; we were far ahead and we should not pretend otherwise.
Despite these exchanges, the mood in the Crimea was mellow. The Soviets were not eager to embarrass Nixon. Indeed, all the American participants were convinced that the Soviets did not relish a deadlock. Brezhnev and his colleagues kept inviting new proposals within the context of counterbalancing asymmetries. But our domestic situation gave us no flexibility and it provided the Soviets with no incentive to be generous — never their forte in the best of circumstances. Brezhnev, backed up by two generals, produced maps that showed how the Soviets calculated our own first-strike potential, taking into account our overseas bases — the same presentation I had been given in March. To be sure, Brezhnev did not give himself the worst of the analysis; at the same time, the argument was not preposterous; it was the classic worst-case scenario of military planning, the nightmare of the strategist in which everything goes wrong simultaneously. It is as unlikely to occur as it is necessary to prepare for it. The difficulty is how to negotiate restraints when two worst-case scenarios confront each other.
The grotto meeting ended inconclusively. But neither side was eager to admit failure. It was decided that I would not accompany Nixon on the ceremonial visit to Minsk the next day but would return with Brezhnev to Moscow to see whether some progress could be made. But Brezhnev was not eager, either, to give the impression that he could be persuaded in a face-to-face encounter with the American Secretary of State. We talked little about SALT on the plane. At the airport we were greeted by Dmitri Ustinov, at this writing Soviet Minister of Defense and then a Politburo member with responsibility for defense industries. In the VIP lounge of the airport, Brezhnev made me repeat my basic proposition on counterbalancing asymmetries, together with the numbers I had put forward in the Crimea. In my presence he ordered a Politburo meeting for that afternoon. Afterward, Gromyko and I should meet for one more review.
Gromyko and I discussed SALT again later that evening. The American numbers provided no basis for a solution, Gromyko stated; the constraints were too heavy and the time period (to 1979) too short. I suggested that the problem was to relate time to quality and quantity. We had been talking about extremes: either a permanent agreement that sounded forbidding and caused everyone to protect against every conceivable contingency, or a two- to three-year extension that led to an endless debate about equities for too short a period of time. Perhaps we should aim for a new agreement that would supersede the Interim Agreement and run for a longer period, say ten years, from 1975 to 1985. I put forward the idea to give ourselves the choice of either pursuing “equal aggregates” or “counterbalancing asymmetries” within a time frame relevant to military planning. It would enable the Soviets to change the numbers in the Interim Agreement without loss of face; it gave us another opportunity to review the MIRV problem. Gromyko accepted this, and the negotiations were placed in a different framework. Nixon and Brezhnev agreed to meet during the winter to implement the new approach. That gave the Soviets a chance to assess the prospects of Nixon’s survival without breaking off the SALT process.
The new framework for SALT was no minor achievement and might have been regarded in its true light except by media and a bureaucracy geared toward spectaculars. It opened the way to the Vladivostok accord and a serious negotiation on SALT II. Nevertheless, its reception at home was another clear sign that SALT had lost its conceptual grounding. Instead of a thoughtful analysis of different strategies, our domestic debate continued to be consumed in symbolism. Some opponents of détente came to see in the defeat of SALT the key to their preferred policy — as if (in the absence of other measures) the defeat of a treaty would improve America’s strategic position. Some of the defenders of a policy of relaxation of tensions began to treat SALT almost as an end in itself — as if the US–Soviet relationship did not also depend on a military balance and on responsible Soviet geopolitical conduct. The concept of equal aggregates dominated the SALT debate just when multiple warheads made the number of delivery vehicles a less and less reliable criterion of strategic equivalence. It was difficult to imagine any scheme that could survive the relentless ideological and sophisticated technical assault to which it would surely be subjected. We were edging ourselves into the worst possible position: with no SALT agreement to limit Soviet weapons and no support yet in the Congress for the necessary expansion of our own strategic programs.
That we were within reach of agreement in the Crimea was proved not quite five months later, in late November, when another President signed an accord in Vladivostok that fulfilled both the framework established at the summit of 1974 and the schedule set by the summit of 1973. The Vladivostok agreement enshrined the principle of equal aggregates. The counterbalancing asymmetries approach, which I had favored, by then had been shown to have no bureaucratic or domestic support. In the process it was barely recognized that to achieve a paper equality in overall totals we let the Soviets have an additional 2,400 or more warheads they would not otherwise have had.VI It was a triumph of theology over analysis.
Brezhnev may not have wanted to risk a SALT agreement with a mortally wounded President. But no occasion was too unpromising for him to pursue his obsession with China. My former associate, William G. Hyland, has since suggested that a fundamental motive of Brezhnev’s détente policy was to isolate China: thus the many overtures to us attempting to lure us into arrangements whereby we would acquiesce in China’s destruction. When it became clear that we would not go along with this, Hyland suggests, Brezhnev’s interest in détente may have flagged as well.12 How much cooperation Brezhnev genuinely expected from us, or could have expected from us, in his designs on China is not clear, nor was it clear to either Hyland or me then. But there were surely enough signs that it was never far from Brezhnev’s mind. In 1970, before détente really got under way, there had been an approach to one of our SALT negotiators seeking American acquiescence in a Soviet preemptive move against China.13 In 1972, there were broad hints during my April trip and at the Moscow summit, though no explicit proposals. In 1973, Moscow did not conceal that its version of the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War was designed to prohibit an American nuclear response to a Soviet attack on China. Also in 1973, Brezhnev had sounded me out in Zavidovo and had warned Nixon in San Clemente that our arming of China would mean war. In April 1974, Podgorny, meeting with Nixon in Paris on the occasion of Pompidou’s funeral, had suggested that China should be forced into the disarmament process if it did not join voluntarily. We had rebuffed or ignored all these overtures.
Now the Soviets returned to the charge. Brezhnev’s tête-à-tête discussion with Nixon in the grotto turned out to be on the subject of an unconditional treaty of nonaggression between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nixon told me about it cryptically in Oreanda and suggested that we explore the proposition. Perhaps, he said, it could be put on the agenda of the mini-summit together with SALT later in the year. Gromyko apparently warned Nixon that China was a threat to peace when they chatted during the reciprocal dinner that the President offered to the Soviet leadership on the evening of July 2.14 Nixon called me over and, in the hearing of Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter, summarized Brezhnev’s proposition and instructed me to pursue the nonaggression idea in the Channel for inclusion on the mini-summit agenda — much as he had told me privately in the Crimea.
A year earlier I would not have given the exchange a second thought. I would have assumed that Nixon was engaged in one of his complex maneuvers to gain time and was using the prospect of the nonaggression treaty as an inducement for Brezhnev to concede on more immediate matters. Based on the unhappy experience with the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, I would probably have judged the strategy too risky, but I would have been confident that I could convince Nixon that it was too dangerous to flirt thus with condominium: It had the clear implication that the United States was giving the Soviet Union a free hand to attack China.
Now as I watched the tormented, physically suffering President discipline every ounce of his strength to get through the week, I was not so sure that Nixon would be able to handle the forces he was unleashing. He seemed to me to be risking either our Soviet or our Chinese anchor or both for a marginal tactical success. I told Scowcroft that I would not carry out this order and I would resign if Nixon insisted on it. Nixon never returned to the subject and the Soviets never raised it again because I told Dobrynin that it was not a useful line to pursue.
I do not mean to suggest that Nixon meant to go through with the scheme; given his record, his acuity, and his convictions, he would surely have stopped well short even if he had toyed with it briefly. But it was symptomatic of the disintegration of the Nixon Administration that this degree of suspicion could arise between two men who, whatever our difference in personality, had worked together for five and a half turbulent years to elaborate and to a great extent implement a new design for our foreign policy — a key element of which was, after all, the Chinese connection.
This was the atmosphere in which I met with the press in Moscow on July 3. Much had changed since those innocent days of two years earlier when I had briefed the media on SALT I and genuinely thought that the chessboard of diplomacy revealed unusual, even historic prospects. Now the atmosphere was redolent with skepticism and suspicion. I had been abroad, with but two brief interruptions, for more than two months: first the Syrian shuttle, then Nixon’s Middle Eastern trip, finally the Soviet summit. The two interludes in Washington (for ten days and six days respectively) had been more taxing than the journeys. The first was consumed defending myself on the wiretap issue, the second on the charge of “secret deals” on SALT, and both with frenetic preparations for the Presidential trips. Before and during the Soviet trip we had been subjected to broad innuendos — in public statements and hints by Senator Jackson, by Paul Nitze, by retiring Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt, and in press commentary — warning against excessive concessions. It seemed to me also that the delicate structure of East-West relations was being undermined at the very moment of upheaval in our institutions, risking international crises we might not be able to surmount. It led to two utterances at the press conference that could be read as gaffes but were cris de coeur, expressions of despair over trends that risked a structure so painfully built up and especially over the nihilism of our domestic dialogue. In response to a question about why the arms limits were not broader, I replied:
[B]oth sides have to convince their military establishments of the benefits of restraint and that is not a thought that comes naturally to military people on either side.
Later in the press conference I was asked what would happen by 1985 if we failed to conclude a new SALT agreement before 1977. I responded with passion:
If we have not reached an agreement well before 1977, then I believe you will see an explosion of technology and an explosion of numbers at the end of which we will be lucky if we have the present stability, in which it will be impossible to describe what strategic superiority means. And one of the questions which we have to ask ourselves as a country is: What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?
The first comment was a statement of fact, perhaps not too tactful but based on much experience. Military men cannot be expected to think creatively about restraining the arms race; nor is it desirable that they do so. Their duty is to keep the nation strong; their assignment must be to prevail should all else fail. Military men who become arms controllers are likely to neglect their primary mission. It is the political leadership that must strike the balance on which restraint may be based. Truisms as my remarks were, they were less than prudent when uttered in the Soviet capital.
As for my observations on superiority, they fairly accurately predicted what has in fact happened. But they lent themselves to the oversimplification that strategic superiority had lost all significance, which was not really my view.15 I had been haunted by the loss of our strategic superiority for nearly twenty years. I had been preaching, both as an academic and as a policymaker, that we were entering a new era in which greater attention had to be paid to regional defenses, especially of the conventional kind. I had been a strong advocate of programs necessary to maintain the strategic balance, from ABMs and MIRVs to new SLBMs and cruise missiles. But I was beginning to despair of the rote tendency to measure the strategic balance by numbers of delivery vehicles in a period when the numbers of warheads on both sides were much more worrisome and when any analysis showed that no building program could avoid casualties likely to paralyze statesmen and frighten peoples toward pacifism. Whatever we did, it would be impossible to recapture the overwhelming superiority that we had enjoyed until the early 1960s and it was sheer escapism to yearn for a past that technology proscribed.
The issue of the significance of superiority was much more complicated than our domestic debate allowed. We had gone through several phases: Until the early Fifties we had an atomic monopoly enabling us to substitute strategic power for conventional inferiority without fear of retaliation. Until the Sixties we were in a position of such superiority that in a first strike we could probably have destroyed the Soviet retaliatory force, and the Soviets had no comparable capability. In any event the Soviets, calculating the worst-case scenario, would not risk it. Until the early Seventies, in fact, the worst-case scenario analysis of the Soviets was bound to be a significant restraint on adventurism. Thereafter, our loss of strategic superiority was a strategic revolution even if the Soviets did not achieve a superiority of their own. For that, to some extent, freed the Soviet capacity for regional intervention. The Soviets would still not lightly tempt a war with the United States because they feared our mobilization potential and they could never be totally certain that we might not use strategic nuclear weapons against all calculation. But by the time of the 1974 summit we could no longer avoid, as I pointed out earlier, a fundamental strategic reassessment.
And that was precisely what our domestic debate was inhibiting. Two simpleminded schools of thought seemed to me to be drowning out all rational discussion. One sought to base strategy on the horrors of nuclear war and calculated the minimum number of nuclear weapons required to inflict some horrendous civilian slaughter. The other side of the debate was counting every numerical advantage as strategically significant unrelated to circumstance or risk. I always favored maintaining a substantial counterforce capacity as insurance and to absorb Soviet calculations in worst-case assessments. But in my mind it was a palliative; there was no way to escape the necessity of greater efforts in regional and conventional defense. My nightmare was that our internal squabbles were focusing on symbolic issues. My call for an analysis of what constituted strategic superiority did deal with the heart of our security problem, even if my formulation of it turned out to be too epigrammatic to explain the range of my meaning and yet sufficiently aphoristic to lend itself to being exploited in our domestic debate. My real fear was made clear in the sentences immediately following my comments on superiority:
[W]e will be living in a world which will be extraordinarily complex, in which opportunities for nuclear warfare exist that were unimaginable 15 years ago at the beginning of the nuclear age, and that is what is driving our concern, not the disputes that one reads in the day-to-day [debate].
But Washington in July 1974 was not hospitable to such reflections. While we were still in Moscow, Defense Secretary Schlesinger held a press conference at the Pentagon expressing his confidence in the military devotion to arms control and challenging my views on strategic superiority without exactly explaining what they were. To a disintegrating Presidency was now added a public disagreement between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense.
The strange thing was that by all normal criteria, the summit had been a success. Significant agreements had been signed — not so earthshaking as on previous occasions but the sort of accords that showed that the two superpowers took progress in their relationship seriously. Even in SALT we had come much closer to an understanding of each other’s position than was generally realized; otherwise it would not have been possible for a new President to conclude the negotiations within four months of entering office as Ford did at Vladivostok. Furthermore, it remains desirable, as I have said, to shift summits away from the obsession with spectacular signing ceremonies to an emphasis on a serious review of the international situation. And that was what Nixon and his opposite numbers accomplished in June 1974 with less strain than at any previous meetings. In that sort of tour d’horizon, Nixon was at his best; he managed to overcome the agony more and more devouring him for one last exhibition of his conceptual prowess.
The gentle Soviet treatment of the mortally wounded President was indeed one of the best testimonials to the impact of his policies. The Soviet system has no categories for those who lose political power for whatever reason. It must have been tempting to make Nixon — the old Communist-baiter — feel his decline. He could have been harassed in the manner at which the Politburo are masters. Instead, he was treated with respect and courtesy, a tribute to his predictability, which Soviet leaders prize more than sentimentality, and to his firmness and sober calculation, to which the Kremlin pays more attention than to professions of goodwill.
That is not the way it appeared to our media. The New York Times lamented the “fragility of détente.” The Washington Post referred to the summit as a “great disappointment.” Newsweek spoke of a “summit that never peaked.” All in all, the end of the 1974 summit brought home to me that we had reached the end of the line. If authority was not soon restored, a debacle was certain — not because the summit had failed but because preparing for it had made clear that the President was losing control of his Administration.
By the middle of July, I had become convinced that Watergate had to be brought to an end and that this almost certainly required Nixon’s resignation. Until then I had sought to banish the hitherto unthinkable idea. I understood that Nixon’s power was draining away. At the latest in May, after the publication of the tapes, his fate was sealed. But I had seen it as my duty to ward off crises by prolonging the illusion of authority and continuity for as long as possible, to the point that I did not permit myself to speculate on how the end might come. And I was arrogant enough to believe that I would be able to keep foreign policy going no matter how badly damaged the President was.
The events surrounding Nixon’s journeys destroyed that illusion. They proved that no Secretary of State can by himself manage the foreign policy of our nation. The ebbing of Presidential authority encouraged a creeping irresponsibility within the government, in the Congress, and in the media that would ultimately undermine our security. It did not matter who was right in the various controversies raging within the Washington bureaucracy. The impossibility of resolving them would sooner or later deprive our policy of strength and direction and our strategy of credibility. What had been a nightmare began to appear a necessity: that it might in fact be better for the nation if Nixon’s Presidency came to an end. I remained convinced that he had been judged with extraordinary severity; that hypocrisy as well as justice animated his tormentors. I admired his endurance and self-control; despite all our disagreements I felt more warmly toward my doomed chief than at any previous time. Nor did I do anything to give effect to my views. Whatever happened and whoever else deserted, I had determined to stick by the President, who had appointed me to high office, to vindicate the continuity of government. But in the recesses of my soul, I began to feel what I am told is sometimes the attitude of survivors toward the terminally ill. I hoped that since the end was unavoidable, it would — for the sake of our country — be quick, and that if it had to happen it would — for the sake of the President — be merciful.
I. Colson’s assertions were flatly contradicted by an unsolicited letter he had sent me on June 11, 1973, in which he said:
At no time in the interview [with the US Attorney] did I suggest that you caused the Plumbers to be formed, although I did say that the concerns of all at that period of time were very grave.
I specifically told the prosecutors that I was not privy to the formulation of the Plumbers, that I was not present at meetings when it was decided the Plumbers be formed.
II. The full text of the Nixon letter is in the backnotes.3
III. These excerpts from the CBS evening news on Saturday, June 22, give the flavor. (I want to stress that correspondent Dan Rather was fair; he was a victim of what the newscycle produced for him):
RATHER: Washington sources say that the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement that Congress approved provides that the Soviets are to have 950 of the missiles, but that a later agreement, apparently a secret one, raised the Soviet total to 1020. And these sources say, the original figure of 710 US sea-based missiles was cut to 656. . . .
JACKSON: I can answer that better after he’s testified on Monday. I don’t know whether these agreements, understandings, interpretations involve Dr. Kissinger and the Russians, or whether it involves just the President and the Russians. This we’ll have to find out. . . .
RATHER: But in Washington, the State Department denied that there are any secret agreements of any kind with the Soviets on missile totals. A spokesman said Kissinger will go into the matter at a news conference on Monday, the same day Kissinger appears before Jackson’s committee.
IV. This was the threshold test ban, discussed below in this chapter.
V. Even though Daniel Webster was a Secretary of State — twice.
VI. The Soviets in the summer of 1974 offered us a ceiling of 1,000 MIRVed missiles, which I believe hard bargaining could have reduced to the 800 range. The SALT II treaty of 1979 granted both sides 1,200 MIRVed ICBMs and SLBMs. If one assumes six warheads per Soviet missile, one reaches the figure of 2,400 additional Soviet warheads.