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) hav
e 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.
The Moscow Summit, 1974
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 Repub
lican 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.
Years of Upheaval Page 169