Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  The slate being clean, the Washington summit of 1973 provided an unusual opportunity for the two leaders to explore each other’s minds. It is the best use of summit diplomacy, but Nixon’s mind was troubled and distracted. He conducted the discussions ably enough but without the sense of direction and self-assurance of the previous year. As for Brezhnev, his boisterousness never quite managed to obscure his insecurity. A visit to the United States was obviously a big event for him. He desperately wanted to make a good impression. In his public appearances he sought to hide his vulnerability behind heavy-handed clowning. He clearly wanted to be perceived as being more human and outgoing than Khrushchev. In a normal environment it might have been appealing as it was in some respects touching. In the miasma of Watergate it fell flat. Indeed, the press tended to interpret it as a Brezhnev rescue operation for Nixon, which helped neither party. It was also unfair since at that point Brezhnev could not yet have fully grasped the extent of Nixon’s difficulties.

  Brezhnev arrived in Washington on June 16. Something of a hypochondriac, he turned the necessity of getting used to the time change into an obsession. He wore two watches, one set at Moscow time, the other for Washington time. He kept forgetting whether Moscow was ahead of or behind Washington. When we reached San Clemente and three more hours were added, he gave up keeping track of the time difference but never ceased his grumbling about it.

  Nixon made Camp David available to Brezhnev and his party to rest before the summit began. The cabins in capitalist America were considerably more rustic, smaller, and less elegant than the villas in Zavidovo. Since Nixon and I were in Key Biscayne that weekend, I called Brezhnev to inquire into his comfort. Even through the screen of interpretation, he was bubbling with enthusiasm and anticipation and at the same time worried lest everything not go smoothly. He made it clear that he would be reassured if he could go over the schedule before the official welcome set for the next day. I flew to Camp David on June 17 to greet a buoyant Brezhnev. He kissed me — the only time in our acquaintance — and immediately showed me his new toy: a cigarette case that released its contents one at a time, at preset intervals. Brezhnev had all sorts of ingenious schemes to beat the system; one was to carry two of these pocket safes around at the same time.

  There was as well the unquenchable anxiety: Were we looking for a way out of signing the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War? I assured him that there was no such possibility. Would he be confronted with demonstrations? Would Senators treat him respectfully? Would there be attempts to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs? I expressed my confidence in his ability to handle any foreseeable situation. Fretfully, Brezhnev let himself be reassured.

  The arrival ceremony for State guests at the White House is simple and impressive. It was set for 10:30 in the morning on the expansive South Lawn. A few minutes before, to the tune of “Hail to the Chief” played by the Marine Band, the President and the First Lady appeared at the entrance of the South Portico from the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor. Nixon greeted the dignitaries waiting on the lawn, who invariably included the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the dean of the diplomatic corps, the ambassadors to and from the visitor’s country, and other officials. Another blare of trumpets signaled that the limousine carrying Brezhnev had entered the Southwest Gate and was moving slowly past an honor guard toward the President.

  All this went well enough. The limousine halted before the South Portico for the President to greet Brezhnev and they jointly mounted a platform to listen to the national anthems. But then things began to go awry. A contingent of troops in ceremonial dress representing each of our military services and exhibiting a colorful array of flags waited for review, but Brezhnev’s ebullience welled over. As he moved toward the soldiers, brought crisply to attention, he was distracted by a crowd waving American and Soviet flags. He rushed over to them and began to shake hands like an American politician on the campaign trail. Nixon managed to preserve the sanity of the escort officer and our Chief of Protocol by gently nudging Brezhnev back in the direction of the troops still standing at attention. Brezhnev returned to the stand while the Marine Band marched by; he and Nixon each made brief statements. The two leaders then walked up the curved stairway to the South Portico itself to wave to the crowd before disappearing into the reception rooms, where the President and his guest formed a receiving line for the assembled dignitaries. Here again Brezhnev sabotaged the schedule. The reception line moved with something less than its traditional briskness because Brezhnev could not forgo extended commentary to several old acquaintances. Brezhnev’s disdain for capitalist planning meant that a reception scheduled to last half an hour, or until eleven o’clock, was delayed by almost as long again and with it the opening of formal talks in the Oval Office. But we were not yet through with the unforeseen.

  The first Oval Office meeting between Brezhnev and Nixon was supposed to include Secretary of State William Rogers, me, and Hal Sonnenfeldt as note-taker on our side; Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Ambassador Dobrynin, and the splendid interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev for the Soviets. (Sonnenfeldt on our side understood Russian.) First, Nixon and Brezhnev posed alone for photographs. After the preeminence of the principals was established, the rest of the party was supposed to join them. As it happened, we waited over an hour in the Cabinet Room for a call that did not come.

  The full record of what was discussed will have to await the relevant Nixon tapes. The President did not tell me what had transpired. It is probable that Brezhnev repeated some of what he had told me in Zavidovo. The talks must have remained general because Dobrynin — who undoubtedly had Sukhodrev’s record available — never referred to them or implied that any conclusions had been reached. (Sukhodrev had promised to give me his record but never got around to providing it.)

  Finally, the rest of us came in at 12:35 P.M. Brezhnev, who took literally Nixon’s invitation that he outline his views on US–Soviet relations, launched into an extended discourse on the history of Soviet-American relations that with translation lasted nearly forty-five minutes. In that recital the 1972 Moscow summit was marked as a turning point in East-West contacts. All problems were soluble, Brezhnev insisted, so long as both parties renounced unilateral advantage and were prepared to compromise:

  All that was done in Moscow and that we have to do here therefore acquires unusual significance and importance. As you know, we Russians have an adage — life is always the best teacher. I believe that the life of our two great peoples and of our leaders had led us to the conclusion that we must build a new relationship between us now and in the future. Therefore, I am deeply gratified to emphasize that human reason led us both at the same time to recognize this and that is what led us to the successful meeting last year in Moscow. I very firmly believe, and will go on believing, that what was done in Moscow took place in the profound awareness of the importance of our joint ventures for the future and for peace. We met in Moscow last year not to compare our strength or to compete but to adopt important decisions. And I know that they won the unanimous support of our people and of yours.

  With John Dean’s testimony one week away, the unanimity of Nixon’s support among the American people was a wistful thought, at least to the Americans present, who were grimly aware of the turmoil ahead. On the other hand, our capacity for serious reflection was progressively impaired by growing hunger pangs as the meeting stretched into the afternoon with no sign of drawing to a conclusion. Indeed, it could not end since the President had not yet responded. Brezhnev, aware of a certain restlessness on the American side, kept checking his two watches. He did this, he said, in order to keep track of his body rhythm and to know when to call his colleagues in Moscow. Gromyko and Dobrynin, for the tenth time in my hearing, set him straight that Moscow was seven hours ahead of Washington, without much conviction that the lesson would stick. Brezhnev interrupted his own monologue repeatedly to ask the President, Rogers, and me whether he was tiring us out. We
gamely denied it as a point of national prestige, though we had a sinking feeling that we said it with decreasing conviction as the afternoon wore on.

  Nixon proceeded to respond, mercifully more tersely than Brezhnev. He had not been prepared for a prolonged meeting. The briefing memorandum supplied by my office had suggested that he and Brezhnev agree on the agenda of the summit and that he disabuse the General Secretary of any idea of a condominium. Nixon was not about to be bested by Brezhnev in philosophical discourse, however. He drew a contrast between the mood when Eisenhower met Khrushchev in 1959 in the Oval Office and the present one. I suppose he meant that this time there was no threat to Berlin, the challenge that had generated the invitation to Brezhnev’s predecessor. Then Nixon lauded the nuclear parity that had developed since then. This was the only time in my association with him that his usual sure touch deserted him in talking to a Communist leader. Strategic parity, unless the democracies increased their conventional forces, was bound sooner or later to turn into a strategic nightmare for us, freeing the Soviet superiority in conventional forces for intervention in regional conflicts.

  Nixon recovered quickly by stressing that we would have no part of any superpower condominium. “While we as practical men know what our strength is we also, as strong nations, can afford and should follow a policy of respect for the rights of other nations.” Nixon thus made sure that Brezhnev did not misunderstand the significance of the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, which, he said, “recognizes the rights of all countries and at the same time the responsibility of the two of us to develop methods that will avoid nuclear and other confrontations between us.”

  Nixon concluded by listing a long agenda of topics for the later sessions: European security, SALT, Vietnam, Cambodia, economic relations. Brezhnev agreed to it in great good spirits. “I hear Vietnam,” he said when Nixon raised the subject. “I did not raise it. But if you want we can have a discussion later. I remember we talked about it at the dacha.”

  His reference was to the tongue-lashing administered to Nixon in 1972 by Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny, who spoke seriatim at Brezhnev’s dacha, forty minutes from the Kremlin.16 The session had been at once brutal and irrelevant because it had been made for a record, not for practical effect — as the next exchange made clear. “Yes,” replied Nixon suavely, “it was a late dinner.” Brezhnev was equal to the occasion: “We had a very good time.” I do not doubt he meant it. What can be jollier than to have threatened without risk an ideological opponent engaged in its private purgatory in a faraway corner of the globe?

  The Oval Office meeting ended at 3:30 P.M. with the famished American delegation sprinting for the White House mess. Brezhnev, whether seven hours behind or ahead of us, apparently was in no need of sustenance.

  The rest of the summit followed the jagged rhythm characteristic of Soviet negotiations. Meetings would be canceled without explanation; or our Soviet counterparts would simply fail to show up. The meetings would be rescheduled just as suddenly and unpredictably. This happened not only in Moscow, where after all the Soviets controlled everybody’s movements, but also in the United States. At Camp David, to which the whole group repaired on June 20 for two days, Brezhnev’s cabin was diagonally across from the President’s retreat. On one occasion Brezhnev and his colleagues sat on their veranda in boisterous conversation in full view of the President’s quarters for two hours past a scheduled meeting, without so much as sending a messenger to explain their delay. Suddenly, just as if it was Moscow, they indicated they were ready. Whether by design or because of the difficulty of adjusting to Eastern Daylight Time, they chose the luncheon period once again. Nixon was more patient than I felt. He knew the Soviets could see that he was free. He agreed to the meeting, which dealt with the European Security Conference; it was largely a recital by Brezhnev of which Western European leaders had already agreed to the Soviet proposal to conclude the conference at the summit level. (Much of this was news to us and not without its irony, since these same European leaders were dragging their feet about meeting the President at a Western summit.)

  The rest of the week passed in discussions between the principals, signing ceremonies, and State dinners. One meeting was devoted to prospects of increasing Soviet-American trade. The mood of that now faraway period is reflected in Brezhnev’s expression of hope that the USSR would purchase twenty billion dollars’ worth of consumer goods from the United States. This, if true, was an extraordinary reflection on how skewed toward military production the Soviet economy is — and how inefficient. At another meeting John Connally, now a part-time Presidential adviser and practicing lawyer, made an appearance to urge on both delegations the importance of proceeding with the natural gas development of Siberia, causing the Secretary of State to mutter to me that he hoped someone would keep him in mind so benevolently when he returned to his law firm.

  After an effusive dinner at the Soviet Embassy on June 21, the delegations flew to San Clemente in the President’s plane on June 22. Having been a guest on Brezhnev’s far more lavishly appointed aircraft in 1972, I wondered whether the relative simplicity of Camp David and of Air Force One did not convince our Soviet guests that status conferred greater benefits in a classless society than in a capitalist one. We had left a cowboy hat and a Western belt replete with toy gun and holster for Brezhnev in his cabin on the plane. He eschewed the hat but found the belt irresistible. As we crossed the Grand Canyon, Brezhnev entered into the spirit of the occasion by imitating his allegedly favorite movie star, John Wayne, and drew the six-shooter from the holster.

  In San Clemente, Brezhnev insisted on staying in the same compound as the President. As Nixon had the only suitable residence, Brezhnev was lodged in a small cottage usually reserved for Nixon’s daughter Tricia; it had only a medium-sized living room connected to two small bedrooms with floral designs. Gromyko wound up with Julie Eisenhower’s even smaller cottage. San Clemente, of course, immediately brought to the surface again Brezhnev’s mania about time changes, this time driving him to retire as soon as he arrived, around 6:00 P.M.

  As it turned out, the two most significant conversations of the summit occurred on that last full day in San Clemente, June 23. They were unscheduled and descended upon us without warning. At a noon meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev, attended only by me and the interpreter Sukhodrev, Brezhnev vented his hatred for the Chinese. It was a replay of Zavidovo. His ire was not free of racial overtones. The Chinese were perfidious and they were sly in concealing their real aims. He considered the Chinese Cultural Revolution an example of moral degeneracy, asking what kind of leaders would oppress their people while making propaganda all around the world — as if the Gulag Archipelago of concentration camps and extermination had never been heard of in his fatherland of socialism. He strongly implied that Soviet doctors believed that Mao suffered from a mental disorder. At any rate, sane or not, “Mao had a treacherous character.”

  But Brezhnev was not interested in simply making a theoretical point. His purpose was eminently practical. He proposed a secret exchange of views on China through the Presidential Channel. He warned that in ten years China’s nuclear program might be equal to the Soviet program of 1973. That would not be acceptable to the Soviet Union, though he did not say what the Kremlin would do about it. In the immediate future the USSR would expose China’s bellicosity to the world by offering to sign a nonaggression treaty, which he was certain would be rebuffed by Peking. (He turned out to be correct.) Brezhnev added that he had no objection to state-to-state relations between Washington and Peking. Military arrangements would be another matter: “The peoples of the world would lose trust in us,” he said, with uncharacteristic concern for world opinion. The Soviet Union had no intention of attacking China, but a Chinese military arrangement with the United States would only confuse the issue, asserted Brezhnev with a subtlety that showed Gromyko’s fine drafting hand.

  Nixon replied coolly that he was prepared to be in touch through the Channel “on
any subject,” but he gave no analysis of his own of Chinese motives or purposes. I added that we had never had any military discussions with China. Neither Nixon nor I offered any reassurance about the future. Brezhnev seemed to imply a quid pro quo when he remarked out of the blue that the Soviet Union had stopped military deliveries to North Vietnam after the signing of the Paris accords. “There may be rifles but nothing of considerable significance. We will urge them to adhere to the Paris Agreement.”

  In the afternoon, just before a poolside reception, Gromyko took me aside. He was obviously worried that Brezhnev had been insufficiently explicit — though not even his worst enemy is likely to list vagueness of expression among Brezhnev’s faults. At any rate, the Foreign Minister wanted to reaffirm unambiguously, for the third time in six weeks, that any military agreement between China and the United States would lead to war. I said I understood what he was saying. But I gave him no clue as to our intentions. I saw no sense in giving blanket reassurance in the face of a threat, all the less so as I was convinced, as I have already explained, that while we should be careful not to provoke a Soviet attack on China, we could also not remain indifferent if it occurred. The impact on the global balance of power would be nearly as disastrous as a successful attack on Western Europe.

  The second surprise event started undramatically enough that final day with a conventional haggle between Gromyko and me over the Middle East portion of the joint communiqué. Gromyko was very wary. After all, the previous summit and its communiqué had been a major factor in the expulsion of the Soviet advisers from Egypt (see Chapter VI). This time Gromyko refused even to include a reference to Security Council Resolution 242, the different interpretations of which were the heart of the liturgy of Middle East negotiations, because we refused to go along with the Soviets’ pro-Arab interpretation of the resolution. In 1972, Gromyko had sought to avoid any expressions of differences on the Middle East; in 1973, he insisted on it. It was only a brief sentence, but it would prevent the debacle of the preceding year, when a vague anodyne formulation had been interpreted by Sadat as a Soviet sellout of Arab interests. (The agreed-upon paragraphs are in the back-notes.)17