One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  * * *

  Nixon arrived in Moscow at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, May 22. He was escorted to an exquisite fifteenth-century apartment in the Kremlin, a suite where czars had lived. The president’s security team determined that the place was bugged; thereafter, Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman held meetings and dictated memos inside the president’s black limousine, hoping its lead-lined doors and bulletproof windows would ward off Soviet electronic surveillance.

  Shortly after Nixon was ensconced in his elegant rooms, an unexpected summons arrived: “P was whisked off to meet with Brezhnev,” Haldeman recorded.

  They met one on one in the Soviet leader’s palatial Kremlin office. Within minutes, any hope for a deal with Hanoi seemed dashed.

  “The war which the United States has for many years now been waging in Vietnam has left a deep imprint in the soul of our people and in the hearts of all Soviet people,” Brezhnev said. “To take in these circumstances serious steps to develop Soviet-American relations was for us not at all an easy thing.”

  He quickly turned to SALT. “I think we should emphasize the agreements relating to the limitation of strategic arms,” he said. “I have received a report to the effect that two or three specific points now remain unresolved.”

  Nixon replied, “This is something that you and I have to do, Mr. General Secretary. It is we who should settle the really difficult questions.… If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats we will never achieve any progress.”

  “We would simply perish,” Brezhnev said.

  Nixon agreed: “They would simply bury us in paper.”

  “Such agreements do not lessen the danger of the outbreak of nuclear war,” the Soviet leader said.

  Nixon conceded: “We still have enough arms to kill one another many times over.”

  “Exactly,” said Brezhnev. “I trust you will agree, Mr. President, that only a radical solution of the problem—the destruction of nuclear weapons—can really rid the peoples of the threat of nuclear war. This would be a tremendous achievement.”

  Banning the Bomb was not on Nixon’s agenda. The war remained uppermost. He strongly suggested “a confidential talk on the Vietnam problem.” He would have it. It would be harsh.

  * * *

  At 3:30 a.m. on May 23, 1972, after three hours of sleep, Nixon started scrawling notes for his next talk with Brezhnev. “We are great powers—We are rivals—We have different goals—philosophies,” he wrote on a yellow legal pad. “Historically this means war—We have never fought a war—Neither will win a war—. Our interests will not be served—Our people do not want war.”

  Nixon wrote that Moscow should put itself in the place of the United States: fifty thousand dead, two hundred fifty thousand wounded, fifteen hundred missing in Vietnam. He defined what peace with honor meant for him: a cease-fire and the return of American prisoners of war. He dangled promises of great economic and political rewards for the Soviet Union in exchange for its help in ending the war. Moscow had supplied most of the weaponry that had killed or injured three hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam. If the arms shipments stopped, the war would end, the wounds would heal, and a new era of cooperation under détente would begin—“a great victory” for Washington and Moscow. There would be lucrative trade agreements, joint space missions, somber statements signed by both leaders on the pursuit of peace. Together they could build “a new world.”

  Their first full day of negotiations in the glittering gold-and-ivory chambers of St. Catherine’s Hall was dismal, verging on disaster. Brezhnev insisted on spending a full session on SALT. But Nixon was bored to death by the details. Kissinger, the note taker at this session, sank into despair as Nixon and Brezhnev wandered into the dense brambles of nuclear weapons technology.

  Brezhnev became infuriated when Nixon would not focus on the arms control deal. “We are both civilized men,” he said. “We know these weapons must never be used. Perhaps we shall not be able to achieve agreement here.” In a controlled panic, Kissinger cabled Gerald Smith, the chief American SALT negotiator, still sequestered with his colleagues at their headquarters in Helsinki. As Smith wrote, it was immediately apparent that Nixon did not grasp the substance of the SALT proposals: “That the President of the United States would get into such technicalities, important though they were, struck me as peculiar, if not dangerous. These first discussions of SALT appeared based on unawareness by our boss of the Helsinki record.”

  “The President and Kissinger perhaps had been too busy to read these reports,” Smith wrote. “This fumbling start did not bode well for the summit.”

  * * *

  The next evening, May 24, brought “the single most emotional meeting” Kissinger had ever experienced, as he described it to Nixon.

  Brezhnev and Nixon signed their accord on cooperation in space, which would lead to an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz command module linking up above the earth three years later. It was late afternoon; dinner at eight was set at a government dacha, a country house on the banks of the Moscow River.

  Brezhnev took Nixon’s arm and said, “Why don’t we go see it right now?”

  Haldeman, trailing behind, watched in astonishment as “all of a sudden the P and Brezhnev disappeared down a corridor, zipped into an elevator, shot downstairs, came out into the driveway, popped into Brezhnev’s car and roared off.” Kissinger, waiting with two aides at his Kremlin residence, was aghast. He and the aides commandeered a Soviet limousine. “Followed by Nixon’s own car, full of Secret Service agents beside themselves that the president of the United States had been abducted in front of their very eyes by the Soviet Union’s Number One Communist,” the impromptu motorcade sped out into the countryside.

  Brezhnev treated Nixon to a sixty-mile-an-hour joyride on a hydrofoil, and all hands seemed in high spirits as they sat down together in the dacha at 7:50 p.m. The Russian side: Brezhnev, Prime Minister Kosygin, and Nikolai V. Podgorny, chief of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The American side: Nixon, Kissinger, Winston Lord, and the NSC aide John Negroponte, who in the twenty-first century served as President George W. Bush’s intelligence chief. The Americans assumed they were about to be served caviar and vodka.

  What they got was a three-hour harangue on Vietnam.

  “We certainly did not choose this particular time to have the Vietnam situation flare up,” Nixon said, immediately on the defensive. His bombing campaign had continued almost unabated during the Moscow summit, and he realized that “this posed a very difficult problem for the Soviet leadership.” He continued: “It is our intention to end the war by negotiations.” But if Hanoi would not bend, “then I will do whatever I must to bring the war to an end.”

  Brezhnev struck back hard. “Cruel bombing has been resumed,” he said. “Very cruel military actions have been taken against North Vietnam.… They can only amount to a deliberate effort to destroy a country and kill off thousands, millions of innocent people. For what sake is this, by what right is this being done?”

  “I don’t want to hurl more epithets on you. There have been quite enough epithets heaped on you as it is. But how can the methods you use now be called a method of ending the war in Vietnam?” Brezhnev said. “No bombing can ever resolve the war.”

  The Soviet leader kept lambasting Nixon:

  We want to sign important documents with you in which we say we want to solve all differences through negotiation, not war, and advise others to follow that path. At the same time you will be continuing the war in Vietnam, continuing to kill innocent people, killing women and children. How could that be understood?

  Then Prime Minister Kosygin took the whip hand. He reminded Nixon that he had gone to the United States to meet President Johnson in 1967. “He said he would strangle Vietnam,” Kosygin recounted. “To be very frank, you are acting even more cruelly than Johnson.”

  Kosygin was as blunt as he could be. He asked Nixon if preserving President Thieu’s power in South Vietnam was worth the blood spilled in America’s name.
“You want to send under the axe hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, maybe even a million, and your own soldiers, simply to save the skin of a mercenary President, so-called,” Kosygin said. “If instead of continuing to support the so-called President, you could formulate proposals which would really enable to bring the war to an end, would that not be a veritable triumph?”

  We proceed on the assumption that you have another four years ahead of you as President. We believe that you do have another four years. From the point of view of history this is a brief period, but if you could find a constructive solution you would go down in history as a man who succeeded in cutting through this knot which so many American Presidents have been unable to disentangle.… Isn’t it worth achieving this by sacrificing the rot that is the present government in Saigon?

  The clock ticked toward eleven. His hosts gave President Nixon the last word. “Our people want peace,” he said. “I want it too. I want the Soviet leaders to know how seriously I view this threat of new North Vietnamese escalation. One of our great Civil War generals, General Sherman, said ‘War is hell.’” All Nixon sought was a way out of hell in Vietnam.

  Then at last came the vodka and a five-course supper and cognac. And when they were done, after midnight, the indefatigable Gromyko was waiting for Kissinger in Moscow to go back to work on SALT.

  Kissinger was mortified. He was bone-weary “after the motorcade, the hydrofoil ride, the brutal Vietnam discussion, and the heavy meal.” Still worse, he had no bargaining room. He learned in a cable from Washington that the Joint Chiefs were backpedaling on points to which they’d previously agreed on SALT. Trapped between the Politburo and the Pentagon, Kissinger stalled until sunrise rather than strike a deal.

  The Americans and the Soviets wasted nearly two days haggling over an issue that their SALT experts, still sitting in Helsinki, could have solved in two hours. The major sticking point was what the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine force would look like after SALT. The Americans were far ahead on this issue: their Polaris submarine-launched nuclear missiles had fourteen MIRVs. The Soviets had nothing of the sort.

  So the Americans could give a little without affecting the balance of power. But they did not want to appear to give an inch, lest they incur the wrath of the hawks back home. “The real problem,” Haig astutely wrote in a back-channel message to Kissinger from the White House on May 25, “is not the strategic implication of the compromise but rather the problem of the President’s public image and credibility.”*

  After midnight on Friday, May 26, immediately following a performance of Swan Lake by the Bolshoi Ballet, Kissinger and Foreign Minister Gromyko reconvened in St. Catherine’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Nixon retired to his elegant residence, to await the results of what might be a last chance to settle SALT.

  The question of Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missiles remained unresolved. So did a proposal limiting the increase of the dimensions of intercontinental ballistic missile silos to 15 percent. Kissinger misunderstood the 15 percent limit. The Soviets’ chief nuclear weapons expert, Leonid V. Smirnov, had subtly changed a word of this clause: the diameter of the silo could grow by 15 percent. This let the volume of the silo, and the nuclear missile launcher it held, increase by 32 percent. And that gave the Soviets a chance to build far bigger missiles. Kissinger had not grasped the nuance.

  It was a short meeting.

  “There is no room for additional compromise,” Gromyko said.

  “Then this makes it impossible to reach agreement,” Kissinger replied.

  Smirnov turned to Kissinger and bade him good night. “After the ballet, have nice dreams,” he said. “Swans. Not evil forces.”

  * * *

  Everything changed overnight. At 10:00 a.m., Ambassador Dobrynin knocked on the door to Kissinger’s room in the Kremlin. He said the Politburo had convened at breakfast to vote on the SALT text. At 11:15 a.m., Kissinger and Dobrynin met Gromyko and Smirnov in St. Catherine’s Hall.

  “There are two questions left open from yesterday,” Gromyko said. “First is your formula [for] submarine-launched ballistic missiles permitted for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. That is accepted. Hooray!”

  “Hooray!” Dobrynin said.

  “Second,” Gromyko continued: “‘The size of land-based ICBM silo launchers will not be substantially increased.’ We accept your proposal”—the 15 percent solution. Gromyko said he was ready to sign that day. Kissinger was stunned by the suddenness of it all. “Today?” he said. “Let me talk to the President first.” He left the great hall, hurried to Nixon’s side, and returned seventeen minutes later. “The President agrees,” Kissinger said. The Soviets and the Americans would dine together that night at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence, and then sign together at the Kremlin.

  “This is a very important milestone in the relations between our two countries, and I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with you gentlemen on it,” Kissinger said.

  “They were really difficult and delicate matters,” Gromyko replied. “It is really a good end.”

  Then he switched to English: “We are substantially satisfied, even more than 15 percent!” The Soviets clearly were delighted by Smirnov’s sleight of hand.

  But Kissinger had snookered them all by keeping MIRVs out of the final agreement. “In his compulsive need to control events, Kissinger had deceived everybody”—including “the Secretary of State, Gerry Smith and his negotiating team in Helsinki, and even, at certain points, Nixon himself,” said George Jaeger, a senior State Department intelligence official and nuclear arms expert under Nixon.

  While the SALT treaty temporarily froze the number of missile launchers each nation could build, it stood silent on the number of warheads. Unleashed, unlimited, the American nuclear warhead stockpile grew sixfold over the next decade. “Not one U.S. program was stopped by SALT,” Kissinger himself told the Verification Panel in 1974. “Indeed, several U.S. programs were accelerated [and] the warhead advantage of the U.S. doubled.” Significant cuts in the nations’ nuclear arsenals came only after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved.

  “The MIRV explosion was especially devastating and discouraging,” wrote William Hyland, a CIA veteran and Kissinger’s nuclear weapons expert at the NSC. “The first strategic arms agreement actually produced a sizeable buildup in strategic weaponry.” In a rare confession of error, Kissinger later said, “I wish I had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world.”

  In short, the talks had spurred the arms race they were supposed to control.

  * * *

  Nixon and Kissinger, elated and expansive, spoke with Brezhnev at his Kremlin office before dinner, seeking common ground on the question of the ever-growing conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis. They had gone to war in 1967 and the threat was “an explosive one,” the Soviet leader had said earlier in an aside to Nixon. “If we let events run their course war may start anew.”

  Now Brezhnev renewed that warning. “There are in the world today many who are eager to depict the confrontation as not between Israel and Arabs but between the Soviet Union and the U.S.,” he said. “If we gloss over this … there will be a cold war and confrontation between our two nations.”

  Nixon replied that if Moscow kept arming the Arabs and America kept arming Israel without working for a settlement, “there will be a war” and “it will involve us.” He said that Kissinger and Dobrynin, the masters of secret diplomacy, had to find a way to avoid that war. By September, Nixon said, “We can try to get to the nut-cutting part of the problem. I don’t know if that will translate!”

  The Russian interpreter did his best. Nut cutting is turning a bull into a steer.

  “The question,” said Kissinger, “is whose are being cut.”

  The banter continued at dinner. Nixon invited Brezhnev to the United States. Would June 1973 be convenient? Brezhnev said he would be delighted. Nixon said Vietnam surely would be settled by then; Washington and Moscow c
ould be closer once the war was over. Nixon harked back to the World War II alliances of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin; the president said that he and Brezhnev should always have a private channel open between them.

  The grand finale at Spaso House was a flaming Baked Alaska. “The Americans really are miracle workers!” Brezhnev exclaimed. “They have found a way to set ice cream on fire!”

  Richard Nixon rose at 3:00 a.m. in the Kremlin on May 29, took out a yellow legal pad, and began writing notes for a speech to a joint session of Congress that he planned to deliver in three days. What he had accomplished in his mission to Moscow was the work “not for a summit of one summer—but of many years.” He had reached out across oceans and nations to America’s enemies so that the world might “turn away from war to peace.” He wrote that “all Americans want more than anything else a world of peace.” And he asked them to trust in him to create that world.

  A few hours later, Nixon and Brezhnev reviewed the communiqué that would close the summit. It was a bland statement when compared with a single minute of their conversation that morning.

  “How would you see it if we sent one of our highest leaders to talk to the Vietnamese?” Brezhnev asked. “We cannot absolutely guarantee complete success. But we would like to take this step to find the best solution.” He said he believed Nixon truly wanted to end the war.

  The president said, “It would be very constructive to stop all the killing right now.” Nixon later said it was the most startling moment of the summit. But it did not stop the killing.

  * * *

  Nixon took a strange detour on his way home from Moscow. Rather than heading west to Washington, he flew two thousand miles south to see the shah of Iran. His stay lasted twenty-two hours and left a long and lasting scar.

  The shah, installed on the Peacock Throne by a CIA coup under President Eisenhower in 1954, saw himself as the rightful inheritor of a 2,500-year-old line of Persian kings, and his nation as the only stable sovereignty between Europe and Japan. Nixon saw the shah as an ally with billions of dollars in oil revenues and an insatiable appetite for state-of-the-art American weapons.