The Nixon Administration strove to end America’s traditional oscillation between overcommitment and isolationism, between crusading and escapism. We sought to ground American policy in a realistic sense of national interest and the requirements of the balance of power; American idealism would furnish the staying power needed for a long-term struggle that had no clearly definable turning point. Such a policy could in the end be carried out only with public confidence and a shared sense of proportion. These qualities were never more needed — nor more elusive — than when so much of the nations’s energy was consumed in our Watergate purgatory.
Historians will forever debate whether without Watergate Nixon could have achieved this goal. Serious men and women whom I respect consider our approach incompatible with the American psyche much as I consider their alternative of a crusade à outrance incompatible with contemporary realities.I We obviously believed that we had set an attainable objective; no other conviction could have sustained us through the turmoil of the period. We were deeply aware of the ideological and geopolitical conflict — after all, we had persisted in Vietnam in a commitment made by our predecessors, over the bitterest domestic opposition since the Civil War, precisely to maintain the faith of free peoples in our credibility. But we recognized as well our responsibilities to the survival of mankind. And we could never forget the anguish our society had been undergoing for a decade. We sought no avoidable confrontations; we husbanded the hard-won faith of the public in our dedication to peace, considering it crucial for either of two possibilities: that despite our best efforts Soviet expansionism might propel us into confrontation, or that somewhere along the line what both sides began for tactical reasons might turn into genuine coexistence.
Détente was thus built on the twin pillars of resistance to Soviet expansionism and a willingness to negotiate on concrete issues, on the concept of deterrence and a readiness to explore the principles of coexistence. In Jordan and Cienfuegos in 1970; in the India-Pakistan war of 1971; most recently in the alert at the end of the October 1973 war, the Nixon Administration had vigorously opposed geopolitical challenges by the Soviet Union and its allies. We fought for a strong defense policy over bitter Congressional opposition. Simultaneously, beginning with the Berlin agreement of 1971, we also explored the prospects of negotiation. By the Moscow summit of 1972 our strategy was clearly visible; by early spring 1973 a number of agreements in arms control and technical cooperation had been achieved and others were on the horizon. None of them caused us to imagine that tensions with our adversary had ended; those who made that the test of our policy misconceived its design or misrepresented its purpose. We slackened neither our determination to maintain the military balance nor to resist Soviet expansionism. What we were prepared to do was to reduce the risks of competition and to elaborate criteria for coexistence. We had learned that in a democracy, the prerequisite for effective prolonged struggle is the continued demonstration of the willingness to end it. And we were convinced, finally, that the corrosive effect of a long period of peace on the cohesion of the Soviet system would be much greater than on ours.
A chief executive with the prestige that Nixon had earned with the foreign policy successes of his first term might have brought off this pedagogical effort. The realities of the nuclear age and the imperatives of protracted competition could have been presented in a patient, serious, open public dialogue such as transformed American isolationism in the aftermath of World War II. But the bitter divisions of Vietnam and the ugly suspicions of Watergate produced a domestic climate ill suited for any thoughtful discussion.
As a result, conservatives who hated Communists and liberals who hated Nixon came together in a rare convergence, like an eclipse of the sun. Conservatives were uneasy with the number of agreements being signed with a declared adversary. They did not believe America could remain vigilant while seeming “progress” was being made under the aegis of détente. They were convinced that American preparedness could be honed only by ideological militance. They wanted uncompromising verbal hostility; they sometimes seemed to prize rhetorical intransigence more than toughness in substance.
The liberal case was more complex. The Nixon Administration was pursuing arms control, East-West trade, and other negotiations that liberals had been urging for decades. But the blood feud with Nixon ran too deep. If Nixon was for détente, so the subconscious thinking seemed to run, perhaps the Cold War wasn’t all bad! At the same time many liberals who had fought bitterly against American overseas involvement — especially in Indochina — discovered during the Middle East war the peril to free nations if the United States abdicated its concern for regional balances of power against countries armed by the Soviets. Like many converts, they propagated their new insight with the same passion and sometimes the same absence of discrimination with which they had held their earlier, opposite, beliefs.
And both liberals and conservatives felt safe in their attack on our East-West policy partly because of its apparent successes. Had the Cold War been in full force, Nixon would surely have been blamed and there would have been a great clamor for a more conciliatory policy. But as time went on and there appeared to be no immediate danger on the Soviet front, it seemed safe to challenge our policy and tempting to turn the tables on the erstwhile Red-baiter — especially over human rights, which had the advantage of charging Nixon with moral insensitivity without any military or demonstrable political risks.
The result was intellectual chaos. For years Nixon had been decried as a Cold Warrior, as needlessly prolonging an anti-Communist war in Indochina. I received my share of brickbats for the insistence on ending the Vietnam war on honorable terms. Suddenly there was a new myth: that we were both being taken in by the Soviet Union. Human rights advocates affected outrage that détente was not being used to change the Soviet domestic structure by legislated ultimatums. Our arms control efforts were denounced as going too far by one side of the strange liberal-conservative coalition, and not far enough by the other. Doctrinaire defense experts demanded that arms control negotiations bring about what unilateral Defense Department programs had not sought and what the Congress would have proscribed had it been put forward: an exact numerical equivalence in all categories of strategic power. Liberals took the relaxation of tensions for granted while conservatives assailed it as if, in the midst of a national trauma, a failing President could court a crisis with a superpower. Whatever their disagreements with each other, both groups of critics combined, in the economic and arms control fields, to dismantle our policy by public attacks and legislative restrictions — without having a coherent strategy of their own to put in its place.
All this might have remained inchoate sniping but for the emergence of a formidable leader able to unite the two strands of opposition and direct them to concrete issues that lent themselves to legislative intervention in foreign policy. Senator Henry M. Jackson of the state of Washington was a mainstream Democrat, popular with the labor movement for his progressive views on domestic policy; he had earned his spurs on the conservative side because of his staunch advocacy of a strong defense and his courageous support of two administrations in the Vietnam war. He had the unsought advantage that the Nixon Administration did not perceive him as an opponent. We admired him; we could not believe that he was assaulting our basic assumptions; we thought the disagreements were tactical or based on misunderstanding and could be removed by patient explanation and ultimately by some negotiation between Jackson and the Administration.
We began to realize that the attack was fundamental. Jackson sought to destroy our policy, not to ameliorate it. Stolid, thoughtful, stubborn, as could be expected from the combination of Scandinavian origin and Lutheran theology, Jackson mastered problems not with flashy rhetoric or brilliant maneuvers but with relentless application and undeflectable persistence. He had carefully studied Soviet strategy and tactics; he was convinced that their goal was to undermine the free world, that any agreement was to the Soviets only a tactical man
euver to bring about our downfall more surely. This was a true enough reading of Soviet intentions. Where we differed was in Jackson’s corollary that therefore all negotiation was futile and his implication that the struggle with the Soviets had only a confrontational mode.
In my view, we had to find a policy appropriate to both international circumstances and our domestic condition. Jackson was an absolutist; he saw issues in black and white. We were gradualists, seeking a policy that could be sustained over an historical period. Jackson objected to almost any agreement that afforded some benefits to the Soviet Union. We took it for granted that the Soviets would sign no agreement from which they did not promise themselves some gain; our test was whether we were, on balance, better off with an accord than without. We did not accept the counsel of despair that we were bound to be outmaneuvered; our experience in the Middle East and elsewhere had convinced us of the opposite.
Jackson was not a man to welcome debate over firmly held convictions; he proceeded to implement his by erecting a series of legislative hurdles that gradually paralyzed our East-West policy. He was aided by one of the ablest — and most ruthless — staffs that I encountered in Washington. They systematically narrowed whatever scope for discussion existed between the Administration and the Senator by giving the most invidious interpretations to Administration motives; they were masterful in the use of press leaks. The impact of the assault was all the greater because it caught us philosophically and emotionally quite unprepared. Neither Nixon nor I had expected that the end of the war in Vietnam would see the demand for peace at any price replaced by a clamor for a course whose practical consequence was to elevate confrontation into a principle of policy — in the middle of our worst domestic crisis in a century and with the most hobbled Chief Executive of the postwar period.
The détente controversy was one in which passions ran deep. There will be differing perceptions of these events, including on the part of individuals for whom I have great respect and who on other issues were allies rather than adversaries. That was part of the tragedy. Nonetheless, I must endeavor to explain how the conflict appeared to those of us responsible for policy in a turbulent time. We suddenly found ourselves in the midst of assaults difficult to combat because symbolism dominated substance and specific objections were surrogates for a philosophical disagreement.
The Jackson-Vanik Amendment
ONE target of the campaign against détente was East-West trade; the triggering issue was Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.
It was a strange turn of affairs. As noted in Chapter VII, when Nixon came into office he was greeted by insistent pressures to increase East-West trade by granting Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to the Soviets — even though the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was less than six months old. We resisted, on the ground that the Soviet Union should first demonstrate a commitment to restrained international conduct and willingness to help settle concrete issues, including Vietnam and Berlin. That attitude — dubbed “linkage” — was decried as an unworkable relic of the Cold War, as a misguided device that would generalize all conflicts and fritter away opportunities for settlement of specific problems. We stuck to our position. When the Soviets reduced pressures in areas of vital concern, such as Berlin, the Middle East, or SALT, and stood aside while we pressed Hanoi, we went ahead in 1972 with a trade agreement whose terms included the settlement of wartime Lend-Lease debts in return for granting MFN status to the Soviet Union. Neither the terms of that agreement nor its context were challenged at that time.
We did not believe — as was later alleged — that trade by itself could moderate Soviet conduct. Our basic reliance was on resisting Soviet adventures and on maintaining the global balance of power; economic incentives could not substitute for equilibrium. We believed, however, that Soviet restraint would be more solidly based if reinforced by positive inducements, including East-West trade. And as I have explained, Most Favored Nation status is a misnomer; it gives the recipient only what over a hundred other nations are already granted; this status of equality, rather than economic boon, was indeed the principal reason for Soviet interest in it.
Suddenly, in Nixon’s second term the previous detractors of linkage adopted the theory with a vengeance. But they went us one better. We applied it to international conduct, to which foreign nations have historically and legally addressed themselves; our critics sought to use linkage to bring about changes in the Soviet domestic system — a much more problematical and sensitive area. Neither Senator Jackson nor other leaders of the campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration had expressed any critical opinion on the subject during Nixon’s first term. Our diplomatic efforts had achieved almost a hundredfold increase in the numbers allowed to leave — from 400 a year in 1968 to nearly 35,000 in 1973. We were convinced that we owed the achievement to quiet diplomacy; we never publicized it or made formal demands; our approaches were invariably in the confidential Presidential Channel. Even in the heat of the 1972 election campaign Nixon forbore to claim credit, preferring the continuation of his policy to scoring electoral points. Similarly, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn expressed fears for his life, I repeatedly raised the matter with Dobrynin in the Presidential Channel, promising that if Solzhenitsyn were permitted to leave the Soviet Union we would not exploit his presence in the West for political purposes.
I have already described in Chapter VII how Senator Jackson seized on Jewish emigration in 1972, holding our pledge of MFN for the Soviet Union hostage to the abolition of a newly imposed exit tax on emigrants. Initially, we saw merit in his efforts, which in fact proved highly successful. In April 1973 the Soviets agreed to suspend the tax; we thought the road was now clear to implement the agreed program. Un-fortunately, his success confirmed Jackson in the correctness of his assessment of Soviet tactics. He saw it as proof of his thesis that the Soviets would ultimately always yield to pressure. After the Soviets had in effect abandoned the exit tax, he raised his demands, seeking to turn a tactical success into a reversal of an established national policy. He continued to insist on his amendment, which barred MFN status to any nonmarket (that is, Communist) country that restricted emigration. (Its text is in the backnotes.)1
We were convinced that Jackson was acting like a man who, having won once at roulette, organizes his yearly budget in anticipation of a recurrence. Inevitably, his approach would backfire sooner or later. It was one thing for the Soviet Union to give ground with respect to a single administrative act, quite another to permit a foreign nation to impose policies on matters that international law clearly placed in the domestic jurisdiction of a sovereign state — and, to compound the injury, to do so publicly. Soviet policy on emigration would clearly depend on the overall state of US–Soviet relations. If Jackson succeeded in souring the relationship, he was almost certain to reduce rather than increase emigration. (The Jackson-Vanik amendment did, in fact, exactly that.) And suddenly to raise a new set of conditions after an agreement was concluded — conditions that had never been part of either our diplomacy or our domestic debate — seemed to us to involve serious questions about our reliability as a negotiating partner. I said in a press conference on June 25, 1973:
[I]t would cast serious doubt on our ability to perform our side of understandings and agreements if in each case that part of an agreement that is carried out later by one side or the other is then made the subject of additional conditions that were not part of the original negotiation.
But we did not believe that Jackson was going to drive matters to such an extreme. We respected him and admired his integrity. We thought that we could settle with him on terms that might extend our definition of what was possible without destroying the premises of our policy.
So we waited for Jackson, convinced that after building up some credit with Jewish constituencies he would eventually agree to a compromise. I told Jewish leaders repeatedly that we would cooperate in giving Jackson the major credit for any additional easing of Soviet emigration practices: I was prepare
d to grant that, if kept within limits, his pressures were helpful. Too slowly did it dawn on us that Jackson’s whole crusade depended on proving that our sense of what was attainable was flawed; he did not want a compromise, at least on terms deserving of that name. And the summer of 1973, with Watergate revelations cascading in a steady stream, was not the easiest time for the Administration to make its case against what Jackson presented as a moral challenge.
The Soviets complicated our problem with a series of characteristically heavy-handed blunders: In the summer of 1973, the historian Andrei Amalrik was sentenced to two years in prison. The distinguished physicist Andrei Sakharov was summoned by the police and warned about his political activities. Harassment of Solzhenitsyn was stepped up. Two other dissidents were put on trial.
Under the impact of these events, liberal groups who had heretofore favored détente and stigmatized Jackson’s views on Vietnam and defense began to support his amendment. The Americans for Democratic Action and the Federation of American Scientists came out for it. The New York Times, which in 1969 had argued that trade restrictions were self-defeating relics of the Cold War,2 began to reverse course. Nixon’s continuation of trade talks in the face of these human rights violations, the Times complained snidely on September 3, 1973, seemed to be reciprocated by the sparse treatment of Watergate in the Soviet press, creating “a de facto Nixon-Brezhnev alliance against dissent in each other’s country.” On September 18, the Times (while saying it still supported MFN) stressed its relationship to the human rights issue — thus strengthening the hand of MFN’s opponents:
The Soviet leadership would do well to recognize that American moral indignation over the fate of the Russian dissenters is a fact of political consequence. We would like to see this concern also expressed openly and at the highest levels of the United States Government. The recent trip to Moscow of H.E.W. Secretary [Caspar] Weinberger and the scheduled visit of Secretary of the Treasury [George] Shultz suggest, on the contrary, that the Administration is so intent on trade and detente that it is willing to shunt aside the equally important concern of the American people for human rights everywhere.
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