It would be too much to say that the ministers assembled shared this perspective. On the whole, they would have far preferred to have had no meeting, or, failing that, to navigate through one without either decision or a blowup. But confronted with a specific program, they were obliged to take a position. Walter Scheel spoke for the European Community in his usual elegant style. It was anything but a clarion call to action. He was torn between a Community mandate that seemed to prohibit any institutionalized consumer cooperation and the reality that most of the ministers gathered in Washington agreed with our approach and were not prepared to thwart American proposals in our capital. Scheel’s personal views corresponded to those of the other foreign ministers. He therefore took up my hint in our private conversation that we should avoid the issue of how to define permanence with respect to any new institutions that might emerge. Since the problem was new, ad hoc groups were needed to deal with it; how long they operated would depend on the continued requirement for them, not on their bylaws. However watered down, what Scheel said amounted to acceptance of our basic approach to consumer solidarity. Helmut Schmidt spoke for the Federal Republic of Germany, making Scheel’s hints explicit and giving concreteness to his foreign minister’s allusions.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home came closest to giving us all-out support. Masayoshi Ohira spoke elliptically, endorsing consumer cooperation and a consumer-producer conference. In classic Japanese fashion he made his point so indirectly that I slipped a note to Simon with the query: “Bill: Do you understand the main point Ohira is making?” Simon, who was attending his first international conference as a principal, scratched his reply: “I am not sure. Being inexperienced in this I take his remarks as being very forthcoming and encouraging as far as cooperation, but they intend to pursue bilateral deals with great vigah.”
This degree of support for the American position was enough to set off the fireworks. One of the unwritten rules of diplomacy is to separate personal relations from official disagreements. The diplomat is presumed to reflect the interests of his country, not personal predilections. He is assumed to quarrel not out of preference but for reasons of state. This pretense is, of course, far too absolute. In reality, the subjective element cannot be so easily eliminated; still, the myth is useful. It maintains civility even in the midst of controversy. It permits compromise, even yielding, without involving the ego and thus smooths the way to a solution. Jobert was incapable of this distinction. He could be charming and insinuating; his mordant wit was as entertaining as it was perceptive. But once engaged — especially before an audience — Jobert did not seem able to maintain self-control. Sarcastically, he accused Scheel of violating Community instructions and therefore speaking without authority. He implied that Schmidt was committing treason — presumably against Europe — and acting as an American mouthpiece. He had come, he said, to save the unity of Europe because his colleagues had accepted their invitations without reference to France. He presented himself as the watchdog of the Community mandate. The fears that had brought him to Washington, he claimed, had been warranted.
Jobert was no gentler with the United States. He accused us of having assembled an ill-prepared, ill-conceived conference designed to achieve American predominance rather than to settle the energy problem. He quoted Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie in criticism of Administration policy. He offered no proposal of any kind, neither an alternative to what we had put forward nor a supplement. He wanted no common energy policy in any guise. He was out to torpedo the conference. Plainly, France was ready to gamble on fulfilling its energy needs through bilateral deals; it would seek a preferred position through political support to radical regimes, particularly Iraq. It would attempt to drag Europe in its wake by means of the European-Arab dialogue.
The silence of his colleagues around the table should have made clear to Jobert that this time he had overplayed his hand.
After the plenary sessions end, the real work of conferences begins, and that usually turns on a draft document purporting to reflect the consensus. Almost always one issue emerges that symbolizes the conflicting views and permits a test of the contending positions. The manner in which it is resolved will determine the course of the conference; afterward, matters generally fall into place. In this case, the issue was whether some follow-up machinery (never mind its label) should be established to take up the tasks we had listed.
Before that issue could move to the confrontation stage, the European Community had to sort out its internal position. It had to decide whether to stick with Jobert’s interpretation of its mandate, or Scheel’s. Ministers had the option, too, of not acting as a Community at all but making their decisions as individual sovereign nations. That process would take the better part of Tuesday, February 12, the day the conference was supposed to end. It was therefore agreed to extend the conference by one more day — even though this presented some difficulties for the British delegation, eager to return home for the general election that was then only two weeks off.
Before these deliberations could start, there was the obligatory dinner given by the Chief of State of the host country, in this case Nixon. The tormenting year had taken its toll. Watergate had drained him. Most of his news conferences were consumed in relentless badgering over this or that new revelation. On January 30, less than two weeks before the opening of the conference, he had interpolated seemingly extemporaneous remarks — almost surely carefully prepared — at the end of his State of the Union address, asking for a quick resolution of the proceedings to impeach him so that the normal processes of government could resume. It was an idle hope, unfulfillable procedurally, inconsistent with the psychological need of many of his opponents to prolong his humiliation, thwarted finally by his own inability to put the tawdry collection of events that constituted the body of Watergate into a definitive revelation that might have ended his ordeal.
The energy conference was in these circumstances more of a nuisance to Nixon than a source of exhilaration, which normally would have been his attitude. I reported to him twice a day on our sessions. His comments were perceptive; he backed the strategy. But there was an uncharacteristic detachment, almost as if he had become an observer of his own Presidency. In this atmosphere the State dinner was a depressing prospect. Nixon sought to escape it; at a minimum he wanted not to have to give the obligatory toast. As late as 5:30 P.M., two hours before the start of the dinner, I was still pleading with Nixon, Haig, and Scow-croft for some Presidential remarks.
In truth, there was no point in the dinner without some comment from Nixon. Social gatherings of participants at an international conference tend to be dreary affairs. The same people who have been boring one another or wrangling with one another all day meet again in the evening, seated in the same protocol order. It would be astonishing if they had anything new to say. The principal significance of the assemblage is as a gesture of respect by the host, reinforced by whatever message he wishes to convey to them. At last Nixon agreed to say something; he was insistent, however, that it should not culminate in a toast — the reason he gave was that Alec Home was the only foreign minister present he liked; if protocol forbade his toasting Home, he would toast nobody. I urged him to recognize Scheel in his capacity as President of the European Council; Nixon was noncommittal. When Nixon rose to speak, I had no idea of either what he would say or how he would conclude.
As it turned out, Nixon’s speech at the dinner — improvised, reluctantly delivered — caused the greatest stir of the conference. Only a few of us knew the absurdity of Jobert’s — and in truth many other ministers’ — conviction that it was part of a carefully calculated pressure play. It was in fact vintage Nixon, spontaneous and all the more noteworthy because he was truly its sole author. My only contribution to it had been to warn Nixon against being confrontational; I had thought the tactical situation favored our approach and that we would prevail to the extent that we could avoid the appearance of American pressure. Nixon said that he agreed. But he also liked
to live dangerously. Even in his salad days, he had amused himself by showing how close he could come to transgressing against the “points to avoid” that he himself had insisted be part of the briefing memoranda for each meeting. Time and again he had skirted so close to the precipice I had defined as perilous that it was hard to tell whether the briefing memorandum served as a warning or as a challenge. Given Nixon’s nature, probably a combination of both.
Nixon ran true to form this evening. He did not issue threats; on the contrary, he explicitly disavowed them. Nothing was further from his mind, he said innocently, than to link the fields of energy and security. It was not his fault — he was only describing reality when he portrayed the pressures in the Congress urging him to withdraw forces from all over the world, including Europe:
[T]here has been growing in recent years — and perhaps it has been accelerated to a certain extent by our very difficult experience in Vietnam — a growing sense of isolationism, not just about security — those, for example, who believe that the United States unilaterally should withdraw forces from Europe and, for that matter, withdraw its forces from all over the world and make our treaty commitments to other nations in the Far East and in Europe meaningless — but also with regard to trade where those who completely oppose the initiatives we have undertaken in the trade area and who oppose even some of the initiatives in the international monetary area that you are all familiar with.
He of course avowed that he would resist the lure of isolationism as long as possible, but he nevertheless owed it to his guests to warn them that these forces in America might be strengthened by European unilateralism in energy and might yet overwhelm him:
[I]t is possibly good short-term politics, but disastrous long-term statesmanship for this reason, because if each of the nations in effect goes off on its own or, as I have put it, goes into business for himself, the inevitable effect will be this: It will drive the prices of energy up, it will drive our economies down, and it will drive all of us apart. . . .
I believe that the, let me put it, the “enlightened selfish interest” of each nation here is better served by cooperation in security, by cooperation in trade, and by cooperation in developing our sources of energy and in acquiring the energy we need to keep the great industrial complex of the free world moving ahead to ever and ever higher plateaus.
Summing up, Nixon — in a sort of “to hell with it” mood — affirmed what he had just denied, that he was linking security and energy policy after all: “Security and economic considerations are inevitably linked and energy cannot be separated from either.” And to end my private suspense, Nixon did make the toast to Walter Scheel I had recommended — though he arrived there by a circuitous route. He pointed out that he had contemplated toasting foreign ministers who had been Prime Ministers (his bow to his friend Alec Home) but finally gave pride of place to the only Foreign Minister who also carried the title of President (of the Council of Ministers of the Community) — for Nixon cognoscenti a neat way of separating the toast from any attribution of personal merit to the German Foreign Minister.
The speech was a remarkable performance. And it had the desired effect. All media reported the linkage that Nixon had both denied and affirmed — some, especially in Britain, approvingly; others, almost exclusively in France, citing it as an example of the American quest for domination that had to be resisted. And the speech made clear to the participants that what had been put forward at the conference was the considered view of the American President, not the personal idiosyncrasy of his lieutenants.
Even then, compromise would have been easy for Jobert, and indeed such a course could have scuttled our strategy more effectively than intransigence. Most foreign ministers would have leaped at any available face-saving formula even at the risk of depriving the conference of operational significance. But Jobert chose to fight to the finish. He resisted any consumer institutions. (His real purpose was shown a few weeks later when he proposed — unsuccessfully — a European energy grouping whose principal virtue in his eyes must have been that we were excluded.) He was adamant against any follow-up to the Washington Energy Conference in whatever form.
Tuesday, February 12, the second day of the conference, thus turned into a showdown. The plenary sessions were frequently interrupted for consultations, the most important of which were the caucuses of the members of the European Community. The United States adopted a low profile; we went to great lengths not to spark the Franco-American duel that might have enabled Jobert to rally his colleagues in the name of European solidarity.
At 11:45 A.M., Home came to my office to announce the tentative outcome of European deliberations. The eight would resist French efforts to prevent consumer institutions. Their biggest worry was that while they stood firm, we would compromise bilaterally with France. It was an ironic relic of the period when Jobert had shrewdly lured us into bilateral talks on the Atlantic dialogue excluding the European Community. I assured Home that no talks were taking place; we would inform him of any approaches; we would conclude nothing without the agreement of the allies who stood with us. I also suggested that if the deadlock persisted into the closing plenary session, the best procedure might be to have Japan put forward the proposal for follow-up machinery. It would be less challenging for France, more compatible with the cohesion of the European Community, if the Europeans did not themselves put forth a scheme objectionable to Paris or derived from an American proposal. Home said he would have a word with Ohira.
At one o’clock I gave a lunch for all the foreign ministers. To show conciliation I placed Jobert out of protocol order, to my right. The gesture was only partially successful. Jobert arrived late but then suggested a private meeting between us — a suggestion that, even if overheard by only a few of our colleagues (as he had ensured that it would be), would spread like wildfire among the others. Jobert clearly hoped to upset the deliberations of the Europeans. I had a word with Home to tell him that our understanding stood. He informed me that Ohira was willing to introduce a resolution calling for follow-up machinery.
At 4:00 P.M. Jobert and I met for forty minutes. As so often before, he said that he hoped I understood his belligerence was based on instructions; he himself professed to hold more flexible views. He agreed with me that an open rupture would hurt everyone. He would be prepared to put a compromise to Pompidou based on our conversation of the previous Sunday night. I reported Jobert’s proposal to Nixon as follows:
They don’t want this conference to set up machinery that is semi-permanent because they don’t want Washington to get the credit for having done it. . . . [T]hey have now proposed to me that there be a conference held in a month in Paris under OECD which would set up the machinery and they would be willing to have a few machineries of a temporary nature set up between now and then.
The implication was that France would not exercise its veto at the OECD but rather work to support follow-up machinery; as a sign of good faith it would even support some interim machinery prior to the OECD conference.
It was a tempting proposal, but it also had the makings of a booby trap. For one thing, the OECD was an unwieldy institution that the French, if they were being mischievous, could use to wage guerrilla warfare against our proposals. The interim measures might be permitted to lapse. In a month’s time, the existing unanimity (minus France) might dissolve into second thoughts. The key was whether France and we were agreed on the substance. Another time we might have tried it, but we had lost all confidence; we had, after all, gone this route before. If we now settled directly with France, we might never get the other European nations to hold firm again.
I told Jobert that I would have to check his proposal with Nixon and with the other participants. We would be able to consider it only if he would support the establishment of interim machinery along the lines apparently backed by the consensus of the conference; if Pompidou promised a positive French vote at the conference; if, in short, the OECD in Paris was primarily a ratification and
elaboration of decisions taken in Washington.
To my amazement, Jobert said that he would submit these propositions to Pompidou. In turn I informed Home of the conversation, reiterating my promise to take no separate step with Jobert that the other members of the European Community had not approved (a neat reversal of the procedures on the Atlantic Declaration).
There was another brief plenary session at 5:00 P.M. with everyone still marking time waiting for Jobert.
Around 6:30 P.M. I went to a private party for the ninetieth birthday of Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, whose life spanned our century. Nixon attended too, being a great admirer of that astringent, waspish lady with the wicked sense of humor. He had introduced her to me as my “date” at a small family dinner during his first week in the White House. On that occasion I was still an obscure member of the White House staff and, having just left academic life, slightly overwhelmed by the propinquity to power and not at all sure how I would fare. “You will be a great success,” she had said then. “You have that twinkle in the eye.”
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