Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  As it turned out, we never built the additional Minuteman IIIs, largely because the Pentagon never put such a program forward. The absence of an agreement soon turned the ceiling of 360 proposed for Soviet MIRVed ICBMs into fantasy. The Soviets have since exceeded the limit of 1,000 we thought intolerable in 1974. The current SALT II ceiling is 1,200, two hundred above Brezhnev’s offer. Three administrations later, the total aggregate of our strategic forces is slightly lower than was foreseen in the five-year plan of 1974. None of the successor administrations to Nixon’s put forward the aggregates the Pentagon asked SALT to produce in 1974. They were content to stick with our existing programs even in the absence of an agreement. So much for the argument that SALT is responsible for the strategic dilemmas we face today.

  In any other period a campaign to paint the “warmongers” of 1972 as the “peace-at-any-price appeasers” of 1974 would have been ludicrous. In the fevered atmosphere of Nixon’s last weeks, it was treated as the most natural accusation in the world. And the NSC meeting was followed the next day by the charges of a secret missile deal described earlier.

  What made the whole argument even more futile was that there was probably no chance of getting an agreement on terms compatible with our national honor, and Nixon would make no other. It was not our SALT divisions that prevented an agreement; this was foreclosed by a Soviet policy decision not to proceed — for whatever reason — during the summer of the visible disintegration of the Nixon Administration. But the squabbling did deprive the President of dignity on his last foreign journey as Chief Executive.

  If the summit took place under unfortunate circumstances within the United States, its international context was no more favorable. In 1972, the Soviets maintained the summit invitation despite the blockade and bombing of North Vietnam; this was the clearest indication that the Soviets expected to do important business; it was indeed their commitment to it. The Soviets did not want to fall behind the pace of the rapidly evolving Chinese-American relationship. In 1973, the Soviets wanted to conclude the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War and Brezhnev was most eager to discuss the Middle East. But by late June 1974 none of these factors, except the desire to isolate China, could overcome the reality that Nixon’s authority was disappearing almost by the week.

  The Soviet position was not particularly brilliant. In the abstract, the years of detente had been kinder to us than to our adversaries — the strident claims of our critics to the contrary notwithstanding. As I wrote in a briefing memorandum to Nixon for the summit:

  Sensitive as they are to shifts in the power balance, the Soviets leaders cannot fail to recognize that America’s diplomatic position has not, in fact, been weakened since you last saw Brezhnev, while the Soviet position in some respects has undergone a decline: in the Middle East, to some extent in Europe, and in the Far East. Indeed, Soviet setbacks and disappointment have probably raised some question in Moscow about the validity of pursuing a detente with the West and with the United States. Brezhnev’s commitment to this general line, however, is such that he cannot easily abandon it, without jeopardizing his own personal power position.

  The assessment turned out to be right. Brezhnev proved most reluctant to give up his attempt to ease East-West relations. What he abandoned — as the full extent of our domestic debacle sank in — was any major commitment to expand the existing framework. For that he needed what the French call an interlocuteur valable — an opposite number who could deliver. And that is exactly what Nixon more and more had lost the power to do. A second-term President is under a serious handicap in any event; every passing month brings him closer to retirement and political irrelevancy. In Nixon’s case Watergate multiplied this occupational hazard hugely. In the perception of almost all observers, he was approaching the end of his period in office in the second year of his second term.

  A statesman’s tools are insight and authority. Nothing can substitute for the intuition of what events are interrelated and basic, and which are surface manifestations, what factors are relevant and which are diversions. That quality of insight Nixon maintained, even honed, until the bitter end. But a statesman’s labor becomes an academic exercise if he cannot convince his opposite numbers that he is able to implement his perception. The stuff of diplomacy is to trade in promises of future performance; that capacity Nixon was losing with alarming rapidity. Inevitably, he became less and less interesting to the Soviets as a negotiating partner. They treated him politely, even respectfully, to the last. But by the summer of 1974 they were no longer prepared to make long-term commitments to Nixon or to pay a price for his goodwill. The trouble with the 1974 Moscow summit was not the danger of secret deals unfavorable to the American national interest; it was rather the opposite — an encounter doomed to irrelevance.

  Nixon stopped first in Brussels, where the heads of government of the North Atlantic Alliance met to celebrate their signature of the Atlantic Declaration over a year late. It was NATO’s twenty-fifth anniversary, but the mood was not joyful. The principals in the major allied countries — Germany, France, Britain, Italy — and the participants in the passionate debate of the previous year had all changed. The words of the Declaration were substantially what we had sought for a new Atlantic Charter. But an affirmation of unity requiring no concrete action that nevertheless takes fourteen months to negotiate is hardly a sign of moral rededication.

  Nixon’s reputation in Europe was high; most Europeans affected to regard Watergate more as a political coup by Nixon’s opponents than as a disregard of legality by the Administration. The Western leaders treated Nixon with the respect they felt for him and the solicitude shown to terminally ill patients. In a way, the reiteration of unity against potential Soviet aggression — among other things — while the President was on his way to what was turning into an annual summit with the Soviet leaders could be taken as an indication that the twin pillars of our East-West policy, containment and coexistence, were both in working order. Yet by the same token the symbolism lost dramatic impact because the meeting was taking on more the character of a farewell appearance than of a political event.

  Given these limitations, our Soviet hosts were uncharacteristically sensitive to Nixon’s human predicament. Brezhnev greeted him at Moscow’s Vnukovo II airport on June 27 as he had not done during his last visit. Brezhnev’s only position then was General Secretary of the Communist Party and he rarely went to greet foreign visitors at the airport unless they were also high Communist Party functionaries. He escorted Nixon to the same luxurious Tsars’ Apartments in the Kremlin that the President had occupied in May 1972. Soon after, there was a private meeting between the two leaders attended only by the Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, which delayed the start of the welcoming dinner for half an hour and caused the usual anxiety among those excluded. Nixon did not tell me what was discussed; the Soviets never referred to it. Nixon resigned soon after, so it had no operational consequences. It was like a solitary cry on the North Pole, a noise without sound disappearing into the void.

  But there were limits beyond which the Soviets would not permit personal goodwill to be pushed. When Nixon responded to Brezhnev’s toast, he extrapolated a mood into a general principle, as he often did when speaking extemporaneously. Praising the accomplishments of the past two years of US–Soviet relations, Nixon asserted:

  They were possible because of a personal relationship that was established between the General Secretary and the President of the United States. And that personal relationship extends to the top officials in both of our governments.

  It has been said that any agreement is only as good as the will of the parties to keep it. Because of our personal relationship, there is no question about our will to keep these agreements and to make more where they are in our mutual interests.

  It would have been difficult in the best of times for Soviet leaders to accept the proposition that their policy was based on personalities. Communist philosophy, after all, is nothing if not mater
ialist. Even in their private comments, Soviet leaders like to preen themselves on the belief that their policy is based on objective factors, not on accident or sentiment. But with Nixon all but doomed, Brezhnev had an interest beyond vindicating Marxist philosophy in unlinking his policy from Nixon’s fate. What TASS reported to the Soviet people, therefore, was a somewhat free translation of Nixon’s remarks. It dropped the word “personal” and edited Nixon’s remarks so that they would be taken as describing the relationship between two countries, rather than two men. Soviet solicitude toward Nixon clearly did not extend to associating the Kremlin with the proposition that détente depended on him alone.

  Our press caught the discrepancy at once. Leonid M. Zamyatin, Director General of TASS, who participated with Ron Ziegler in daily joint briefings for the media, explained smoothly that the Soviet translation was accurate and that news reports to the contrary reflected the journalists’ ignorance of the Russian language. Sukhodrev told us the omission was inadvertent — a statement events soon proved to be more tactful than accurate. Ziegler, carried away with his assignment of emphasizing Nixon’s personal indispensability, ascribed the whole contretemps to the fact that Pravda, the party newspaper published in the mornings, went to press on a short deadline. “I expect to see ‘personal relationship’ in tonight’s Izvestia,” said Ziegler, referring to the government daily, published in the evening. He soon learned that the Soviets’ devotion to accurate journalism is so intense that nothing appears in the Soviet media under the pressure of deadlines. Izvestia repeated the version of Pravda. TASS also made another modification of the toast. Nixon had referred to Brezhnev’s return visit to the United States as being scheduled for “next year” — following the pattern of annual summit meetings. The Soviets refused to commit themselves to a definite schedule: TASS reported the reference to a return visit but omitted a target date. No explanation was offered. None was necessary. The Soviets were cutting their losses.

  The Moscow summit of 1974 thus suffered from the same incongruity as the Mideast journey. Nixon’s paladins, now reduced in effect to Ziegler, stressed his personal role. But the Soviets had an interest in not tying a major policy to the fate of an individual. That, in fact, was also the American national interest and the only way we could rescue our international position from Watergate: to demonstrate that well-founded policies could survive our domestic debacles because they reflected long-term national objectives.

  In this mood of tension, anguish, and premonition, the petty squabbles among staff that had blighted the Mideast journey reappeared even more sharply and in sometimes absurd form. There was an unworthy dispute between Al Haig and me about whose suite in the Kremlin palace would be closest to Nixon’s — a status symbol of somewhat debatable value in the circumstances. Haig won the battle. It was like fighting over seats at the captain’s table on the Titanic after it had struck the iceberg.

  My personal relations with Nixon were unusually distant at this point. I could not tell whether he continued to resent my Salzburg press conference, or whether, as suggested by the columnist William Safire — considered close to several of Nixon’s associates — Nixon used my own difficulties to reestablish his authority.10 If the latter, it was a vain effort; Nixon retained enough power to diminish my standing; there was nothing he could do to restore his own. The most logical explanation is that he counted the thirty-four votes he needed in the Senate to defeat impeachment and found most of them on the conservative side. On this thesis, since I was under fire for détente, the Safire column was one of Nixon’s attempts to dissociate from me and an effort to reestablish his credentials with his erstwhile constituency.

  Whatever, contacts between the President and me were stiffer than before. The media had not forgiven me for the Salzburg press conference. They never let me forget the threat of resignation. They looked for every shred of evidence of seeming estrangement from Nixon, diminution of my authority, or tenseness on my part. The fact that Gromyko and I walked ten feet behind Brezhnev and Nixon on a stroll in the gardens at Brezhnev’s seaside resort in the Crimea was headline news: I was either sulking, or being relegated to a secondary role, or both.

  The truth was simpler. To be sure, I was exhausted from over two months of uninterrupted travel. But the President, in acute pain from phlebitis, was going through a much more traumatic experience than shuffling the members of his entourage. Nixon was much too serious a student of foreign policy and government not to understand that the biggest obstacle to serious negotiation was the Soviet conviction that if he survived politically he would lack authority but that in all likelihood he would not survive. Nixon must have found it hard to bear that I — with all the difficulties I faced — was certain to survive the debacle he could not bring himself to accept and yet which he now must have sensed was inevitable. And this on top of a long history in which the media had emphasized my role as peace negotiator and his almost as the “mad bomber.”

  No wonder that the physical effort required to keep functioning seemed to consume more and more of Nixon’s energy. Doubtless he was preoccupied and withdrawn — only incidentally from displeasure with me, above all because he was in the process of parting from what heretofore had given his life meaning, the obsession that had made possible the almost inhuman self-discipline and the public persona at odds with his basically shyer and gentler nature. And while surrounded by the appurtenances of the Presidency he had to steel himself for the days of exile when the bands would stop playing and his lifelong dream had evaporated.

  The procedures this time followed those of the Moscow summit of 1972.11 There was a welcoming dinner in the marvelous fifteenth-century Granovit Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace with its vaulted ceilings covered with religious paintings. There were generally two plenary sessions a day in St. Catherine’s Hall, a gilded, ornate salon. Gromyko and I met in the lacunae of the formal sessions to negotiate outstanding issues in the various documents slated for signature. Brezhnev took our whole party to the Crimea from Saturday afternoon, June 29, to Monday morning, July 1.

  On the Soviet side, the troika of Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny was still much in evidence though Brezhnev seemed to have less of a need to defer to the forms of collective leadership than he had two years earlier. He now dominated the discussions and was well briefed and acute, especially on military matters. One of the poignant features of the summit was in fact the disproportion between the protocol pomp and circumstance and what Nixon’s plight permitted to be realized. For as it had become apparent that no major breakthrough was in the cards, tension eased and indeed the appearance of harmony became its own objective. The atmosphere was congenial. Miraculously, meetings started on time. There was none of the attempted browbeating that characterized the first two summits, in 1972 on Vietnam and in 1973 on the Middle East. The reason was not all that flattering to us. Precisely because they did not want to risk too much on Nixon’s continuation in office, the Soviet leaders had scaled down their expectations. They recited their objectives but in what was for them a low-key manner. There was a discussion of the European Security Conference; by now so many West European leaders had agreed to culminate the conference at a summit gathering that there was no longer any purpose in America’s holding out on this point. (This was to be the Helsinki conference of 1975, which Gerald Ford was attacked at home for attending.) And the remaining issues in what later became the Helsinki Final Act were too abstruse — they were mostly pedantic drafting problems in a collective document — to lend themselves to top-level solutions, though they were discussed inconclusively at considerable length.

  There was some sparring on the Middle East. Brezhnev inquired as to the goal of our policy and stressed the need for joint US–Soviet action, though without the fire of his March meeting with me. The Soviets had learned from recent experience. Since it never hurts for a diplomat to give the impression that the inevitable has been affected by his policy decisions, Brezhnev made a point of noting the propriety of unilateral eff
orts where these were most efficient. Gromyko in a separate meeting with me allowed that our policy in the Middle East was more complicated than at first glance. It was said without rancor. The Soviets seemed at last to have drawn the correct conclusion from their embarrassments in the spring. Importuning for a formal role only highlighted their impotence; they would have to wait for a mistake on our part or a collapse of our current strategy.

  The Soviets finessed controversial items by scheduling many meetings between the leaders on subjects that normally would have been left to the foreign ministers: arcane technical discussions on agreements that had been prepared for signature at the summit. Of these, three were of some importance: an agreement to explore the possibilities of banning environmental warfare; an agreement to forgo the option of the second ABM site allowed by the 1972 treaty limiting defensive weapons; and a draft treaty to prohibit underground nuclear tests over a certain “threshold” of explosive power.

  The agreement to negotiate a ban on environmental warfare — for example, weather modification for military purposes — was the sort of marginally useful accord that ingenious bureaucrats devise under the pressure of the necessity to make their leaders look good. It was a bow to humane sentiments; it was not controversial because it was not easy to know what its subject matter would be and because few were bold enough to advocate environmental warfare publicly. A completed international convention on the subject was later signed by the United States, the USSR, and thirty other countries in Geneva in May 1977.

  The protocol on ABM systems had its origin in the treaty signed in 1972 limiting antiballistic missile defense sites to two in each country separated by no less than 1,300 kilometers. Each side was given the right to defend its national capital and one field of ICBMs. As it turned out, neither country had taken full advantage of its rights under the treaty. The Soviet Union already had an ABM system around Moscow; we had built one defense site protecting a missile field near Grand Forks, North Dakota. Neither country had proceeded with a second site. At the summit in 1974 it was agreed to formalize practice and to confine each country to one antimissile defense site. The agreement was slightly more advantageous to us than to the Soviet Union since there was no possibility that the Congress would ever appropriate money for the second permitted site, while the Soviets labored under no such inhibitions.