In other words, Nitze was saying that he could no longer serve a President — from whom he had been willing to accept a senior appointment three months earlier — because he thought Nixon’s Watergate-related infirmities precluded the effective conduct of foreign policy. He also had substantive disagreements. It was an amazing attack so short a time before Nixon’s trip to Moscow. But it made dramatically clear that Nixon had no domestic base for any significant agreement in Moscow regardless of its content.
That is almost certainly how the Soviets read it. It had been noticeable for months that in their encounters even with Nixon the allusions to Watergate multiplied. On April 11, on a visit to Washington, Gromyko had said to Nixon:
We in the Soviet leadership are most satisfied that you hold true to the line you have taken despite certain known difficulties — which I don’t want to go into — and we admire you for it on the human plane.
That same day, by coincidence, our Ambassador in Moscow, Walter Stoessel, had been received by Brezhnev. The General Secretary wondered whether and to what extent American “domestic problems” could hinder the course of events. Brezhnev answered his own question by saying this would become clearer in the near future — showing that he was following Watergate closely. But the finer points of constitutional government still eluded him. He expressed, in Stoessel’s words, “amazement that the United States had reached the point that the President would be bothered about his taxes. . . . He respected the President for fighting back.” On April 28 in Geneva, Gromyko had asked me in detail about the impeachment process. Since Dobrynin was no doubt reporting at length about events in Washington, one reason for the extraordinary query may have been to bring home to us the growing Soviet doubts about our bargaining position.
Whether it was Watergate that caused Moscow to put East-West negotiations into low gear in the spring of 1974; whether it was the general trend of our domestic debate; or whether both of these were used as a cover for decisions that Moscow made for its own reasons cannot be established from American documents alone. The fact is that during April 1974, Soviet conduct changed. Usually preparations for a summit as well as the SALT talks followed a familiar pattern: An outrageous Soviet opening position would be followed by a period of prolonged haggling. After the Soviets had decided that they had squeezed all they could from intransigence, there would be a breakthrough. Although its initial formulation would still be unacceptable it would give the congenital haggling some concrete basis. If then we stuck to our basic concept, the gaps would gradually narrow until some outside event — usually a summit — would supply the incentive for the final push.
This seemed to be true of the SALT negotiations in the spring of 1974. For well over a year both sides had been making proposals for the record. Then in March, all agencies in our government had converged on a scheme of “counterbalancing asymmetries”: a Soviet edge in total delivery vehicles (reflecting the existing program of both sides) counterbalanced — in our view, more than counterbalanced — by an American advantage in numbers of MIRVed missiles. When I visited Moscow in March, Brezhnev seemed to accept this principle. He proposed an extension of the 1972 Interim Agreement, which would continue the Soviets’ existing advantage in delivery vehicles, but he conceded us an advantage of 100 MIRVed missiles over the extended term of the agreement. For reasons I have explained in Chapter XXII, we considered the 100-missile gap in our favor inadequate, even derisory. But if past practice were any guide, the negotiations that Gromyko and I would pursue would soon see more realistic figures.
It did not happen that way. Instead, negotiations stalemated. The Soviets rejected various schemes to lower their MIRV ceiling; they refused to set separate limits for the land-based ICBMs that were our gravest concern. The curious aspect of our domestic debate was that nobody in our government favored accepting what the Soviets had put forward. There was no basis whatever for the often expressed fear that Nixon might make a disadvantageous deal to preserve his Presidency. What the White House sought was a realistic elaboration of our March proposals, which all agencies had approved: some consensus on what counterbalancing asymmetries might be in the American interest should the door to a breakthrough open. And it followed extremely careful procedures — much less freewheeling than in earlier periods — to elaborate this consensus.
But suddenly battle lines were drawn, for reasons that I still find difficult to explain in retrospect. The leader of the revolt within the Administration was Nixon’s own Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger. I have already described my high regard for Schlesinger’s analytic skill and overall ability. He had done a remarkable job in strengthening our military capabilities despite a largely hostile Congress; in the process he had revised our defense doctrine in important and healthy directions with respect to both strategic and tactical forces. In this, one of Schlesinger’s staunchest allies had been Senator Jackson. What may have started as a marriage of convenience soon turned into a symbiotic relationship. The two men became fast friends, sharing similar assessments. This gradually edged Schlesinger into open opposition to his President.
Undoubtedly, there was an element of personal rivalry as well. As I have already pointed out, Schlesinger saw no intellectual reason for conceding my preeminence as Presidential counselor. He resented the not always tactful methods — to put it mildly — by which I operated. For example, until late in my term of office I handled the SALT negotiations using my own staff and excluding representatives from the Department of Defense. This was both tactless and unwise; participation would have been educational for the Defense Department representative; he would have learned to calibrate Pentagon rhetoric against negotiating realities (as indeed occurred when SALT expert James P. Wade joined my team in the Ford Administration); it would have made it easier to gain Defense Department support in NSC deliberations. On the other hand, Schlesinger was no shrinking violet, either; he gave as good as he received. After a while, Schlesinger missed few opportunities to score points against me, even though our strategic assessments were substantially similar. He found it convenient to cast himself in the role of being more vigilant and wary on SALT matters than I was — as one would expect from a Secretary of Defense. On the other hand, I was usually more ready to resist what I considered geopolitical encroachments. At any rate, the differences between Schlesinger and me, though partly rooted in the different perceptions and missions of the departments we headed, were more personal than intellectual. It was a pity; for he was one of our ablest public servants and the country needed our cooperation. In more normal times we probably would have had much less difficulty working in tandem. (Of course, in normal circumstances neither of us would have been in the cabinet in the first place.)
Be that as it may, Schlesinger, by early June, seems to have come to much the same conclusions as Nitze. He no longer wanted progress on SALT; he thought there was not enough moral capital left in the Administration to sustain a debate on a controversial agreement. He therefore began to block the diplomacy openly. And if he was at least my equal in intelligence, I conceded him pride of place in arrogance. In any normal administration this would have led to his immediate dismissal — a course that a Watergate-haunted Nixon could not even consider.
The previous December, Jackson had made a public proposal of a SALT agreement calling for reductions and equal aggregates, and describing the concern with MIRV limits — the heart of our SALT position — as “exaggerated.” In April, Jackson wrote Schlesinger asking for his comment. On June 3, 1974, by what must have been prearrangement, Schlesinger sent a reply praising Jackson’s proposal — in other words, dissociating himself from the American negotiating position now before the Soviets (see Chapter XXII). The practical consequence was to undercut the various schemes that were still on the table, all of which were attempts to balance asymmetries, that is to say, to offset one set of unequal aggregates against another. Schlesinger’s letter enabled Jackson to claim that the Defense Department supported his position, in effect that it opposed its Com
mander-in-Chief.
Schlesinger’s June 3 letter paralleled one by Paul Nitze to the President. Nitze, whose resignation was still some ten days away, argued that any agreement that permitted the Soviets more than 200–300 MIRVed ICBMs was strategically intolerable because a larger number would put America’s land-based strategic forces at risk. It was the fallacy of many SALT opponents to ask arms control negotiations not simply to stabilize the arms race but to solve all our strategic dilemmas as well. The absence of a SALT agreement would not keep MIRVed Soviet missiles to below 300, nor would it ease the potential vulnerability of our land-based force; in fact, by all projections it would lead to larger Soviet MIRVed forces and an increased or at least earlier threat to our land-based ICBMs. A useful debate would have been whether these projections were reasonable; whether the absence of an agreement eased the Soviet threat; and whether a SALT agreement could alleviate our vulnerability. After all, it was not as if the Congress in the era of Vietnam and Watergate was eager to undertake a really large-scale building program, or even the relatively paltry $2 billion a year Schlesinger was talking about.
All this, it must be reiterated, occurred in the absence of any particular bureaucratic provocation. I was only just back from the Syrian shuttle. When Schlesinger dropped his bombshell, there had been no new move on SALT toward the Soviets. It was a maneuver to preempt a non-maneuver, for Nixon was not planning any fancy footwork in Moscow.
Nixon reacted to Schlesinger’s letter to Jackson by calling the Defense Secretary to the Oval Office on June 6; he obviously suspected that there had been collusion with Jackson. And in truth in a normal Administration no Cabinet member who valued his position would publicly dissociate from a Presidential policy. It was a symbol of how far his Presidency had disintegrated that Nixon found himself obliged to deal with his Secretary of Defense as if the latter were a sovereign equal; it was a tribute to his tenacity that, overcoming his fear of personal confrontations, he managed to analyze the basic problem very well:
Let me tell you how I see the players. It is amusing that Defense, State, and everyone now see Communism is bad and you can’t trust the Soviet Union, I knew both of those things all along. Nitze’s view is that we should stonewall the Soviet Union on everything — SALT, MIRV, TTB,IV ABM. I understand. There are differences in objectives within the bureaucracy. State would like it to blow up because they didn’t dream it up — the same with CIA. In the DOD — not you — they would like to stonewall so we get a bigger budget — more ships, etc. That is not totally selfish. They honestly believe no agreement is to our advantage. It’s like in SALT I — although we didn’t give anything up. Frankly, as Secretary you have to lead the Department. You must express your views. It has been the practice of recent secretaries to send over letters to get on record — with something that can’t be accepted or refused, so it can go either way. I am disappointed to see you go this route.
Schlesinger was opaque but firm. He insisted that he was in favor of MIRV limits but agreed that above the figure of 360–450 Soviet MIRVed ICBMs the limitations were meaningless; no more than Nitze did he explain how the absence of an agreement would keep the Soviets to that limit. He implied that he favored a ceiling of equal total aggregates at around 2,500 delivery vehicles — which happened to be at least 350 above any planned American program and about 100 below Soviet totals. The difficulty was that Nixon had no alternative scheme. What he wanted from Schlesinger was general flexibility and moral support, not endorsement of any particular new proposal since none existed. In that situation, Nixon’s almost plaintive plea was uttered in a vacuum:
We need your help. Help Kissinger to devise a way around this. I will take on Brezhnev. I made the speech about the U.S. being second to none. The American people in their simplistic way are not on a peace-at-any-price kick, but they want peace. Many of my friends are horrified at our even talking to the Soviet Union. But are we going to leave the world running away with an arms race, or will we get a handle on it?
In this weird situation, stonewalled by the Soviets, assailed by subordinates, Nixon assembled the National Security Council on June 20, five days before leaving for Moscow. There was no decision to make; it was a deliberation to examine the contingency that the Soviets might make an offer while we were in Moscow. At Nixon’s request, I outlined where we stood:
With no added U.S. forces, the Soviet Union will pass the U.S. in number of MIRVed missiles by the 1980’s, perhaps by 1980, maybe by 1982. This depends on the rate of building. At the maximum rate they have gone in the past, the gap would become quite dramatic. Our real choice is either to achieve constraints on their programs, or have a build-up of our own. The worst case is to have no constraints on their program and no build-up of our own.
Nixon intervened to indicate that this was exactly what might occur: “If there were no constraints, we could raise hell to try to drum up Congressional support and that might happen. But I am mainly concerned that it might not happen either.”
I then summed up the strategic issue:
[T]he status of the negotiations is as follows. The current scheme we were talking about would be an extension of the Interim Agreement numbers to perhaps 1979 or ’80 — the date is important here because Trident comes in in the 1977–78 period. In return for this, we would expect to achieve limits on the total number of MIRVed missiles. They have offered us 1100 versus a thousand for them. We have told them that this is not adequate. It would stop us essentially in the next year or so, and allow the Soviet build-up to continue. I know of no one in the government that recommends accepting this approach. But they may offer a better differential. . . . Right now, Mr. President, you have no decisions to make. We have an offer, but only an unsatisfactory offer. But suppose they should increase the gap — would we then be prepared to extend the Interim Agreement to 1979 or 1980, and bring some larger missiles into our deployments? . . . You may face such decisions. I have no indication that you will, and in fact my prediction is that you will not have to face it, because they won’t offer an increase in the differential.
It must be noted that what I put forward was a request to explore the margins of our own proposal. We were seeking contingency guidance should the Soviets respond more flexibly than we anticipated to what we had put before them in March with the approval of all agencies represented at this meeting. Schlesinger responded with an elaboration of what he had said to Nixon on June 6, an entirely new scheme that, a week before a scheduled summit meeting, simply wiped out the negotiating record of the previous six months, dismissing as irrelevant the only proposal currently under discussion. He proposed equal total aggregates of 2,500; a limit on MIRVed ICBMs of 660 Minutemen for us and 360 for the Soviet Union; no limitation on submarine-based MIRVs; and extension of the Interim Agreement to 1979.
The trouble was that this proposal had essentially been rejected by the Soviets in March and for understandable reasons: It constrained no American program; it would reduce the only major Soviet MIRV program. The ceiling for the Minutemen was above what had been published as our plan in the Defense Secretary’s annual posture statement projecting our forces five years into the future. The Soviets, on the other hand, had — according to our own estimates — the capability to deploy at least 500 more MIRVed ICBMs than the Pentagon plan would concede them over the life of the agreement. Our only proposed counter was to build 150 Minuteman IIIs with three warheads each as against six on the best Soviet missile. Thus we were trying to stop a possible 3,000 Soviet warheads by threatening to build 450 of our own. Nobody, regardless of how strident his anti-Communist rhetoric, could have made this sound menacing enough to induce Soviet agreement. Brezhnev had told me in March, when I presented it the first time, that he would not be in office long if he accepted it.
Schlesinger would hear none of it. The fact that the Soviets had already turned his proposal down was not conclusive; they had so far only dealt with me; at the summit they would confront the master:
Mr. Brezhnev
has a very high respect for you, Mr. President. You can be very persuasive — you have great forensic skills. I believe if you can persuade them to slow down to 85 per year versus 200 per year, you will have achieved a major breakthrough.
“Major breakthrough” was an understatement. Forensic skill could not achieve it; the task would have defeated Demosthenes or Daniel Webster.V It would require a downright miracle.
Only a conviction that Nixon was finished could have produced so condescending a presentation by a cabinet officer to his President. Nixon recorded in his diary that it was “really an insult to everybody’s intelligence and particularly to mine.”9 And in a calmer period, it would have been seen that there was no possible justification for the self-righteous dogmatism with which our domestic opponents conducted the assault on East-West policy. For the issue was perfectly susceptible to rational analysis. Both Schlesinger and I agreed that a ceiling of 1,000 on Soviet MIRVs was too high; in fact, it was no ceiling at all. We agreed that a limit of 360 for Soviet missiles was desirable; we differed only about its attainability. Assuming my judgment was right and the Soviets rejected the scheme despite Nixon’s forensic skill, the issue came down quite simply to this question: Was there any limit on Soviet MIRVs higher than 360 and lower than 1,000 that would constitute an improvement in our position? Common sense would suggest that there had to be.
Schlesinger had indicated that his counterproposal, if we failed to agree that summer, would be to recommend augmenting our Minuteman III program by 150 (or 450 warheads). Holding the Soviets to 800–850 MIRVed missiles, a level that I considered (perhaps wrongly) as attainable, would have deprived the Soviets of an additional 900–1,200 warheads compared with Brezhnev’s proposal and 3,000 warheads compared with current levels. If that was considered insignificant, it is hard to know what the shouting over a Soviet edge of 300 single-warhead missiles in SALT I was about.
Years of Upheaval Page 170