Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  That we were within reach of agreement in the Crimea was proved not quite five months later, in late November, when another President signed an accord in Vladivostok that fulfilled both the framework established at the summit of 1974 and the schedule set by the summit of 1973. The Vladivostok agreement enshrined the principle of equal aggregates. The counterbalancing asymmetries approach, which I had favored, by then had been shown to have no bureaucratic or domestic support. In the process it was barely recognized that to achieve a paper equality in overall totals we let the Soviets have an additional 2,400 or more warheads they would not otherwise have had.VI It was a triumph of theology over analysis.

  Brezhnev may not have wanted to risk a SALT agreement with a mortally wounded President. But no occasion was too unpromising for him to pursue his obsession with China. My former associate, William G. Hyland, has since suggested that a fundamental motive of Brezhnev’s détente policy was to isolate China: thus the many overtures to us attempting to lure us into arrangements whereby we would acquiesce in China’s destruction. When it became clear that we would not go along with this, Hyland suggests, Brezhnev’s interest in détente may have flagged as well.12 How much cooperation Brezhnev genuinely expected from us, or could have expected from us, in his designs on China is not clear, nor was it clear to either Hyland or me then. But there were surely enough signs that it was never far from Brezhnev’s mind. In 1970, before détente really got under way, there had been an approach to one of our SALT negotiators seeking American acquiescence in a Soviet preemptive move against China.13 In 1972, there were broad hints during my April trip and at the Moscow summit, though no explicit proposals. In 1973, Moscow did not conceal that its version of the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War was designed to prohibit an American nuclear response to a Soviet attack on China. Also in 1973, Brezhnev had sounded me out in Zavidovo and had warned Nixon in San Clemente that our arming of China would mean war. In April 1974, Podgorny, meeting with Nixon in Paris on the occasion of Pompidou’s funeral, had suggested that China should be forced into the disarmament process if it did not join voluntarily. We had rebuffed or ignored all these overtures.

  Now the Soviets returned to the charge. Brezhnev’s tête-à-tête discussion with Nixon in the grotto turned out to be on the subject of an unconditional treaty of nonaggression between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nixon told me about it cryptically in Oreanda and suggested that we explore the proposition. Perhaps, he said, it could be put on the agenda of the mini-summit together with SALT later in the year. Gromyko apparently warned Nixon that China was a threat to peace when they chatted during the reciprocal dinner that the President offered to the Soviet leadership on the evening of July 2.14 Nixon called me over and, in the hearing of Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter, summarized Brezhnev’s proposition and instructed me to pursue the nonaggression idea in the Channel for inclusion on the mini-summit agenda — much as he had told me privately in the Crimea.

  A year earlier I would not have given the exchange a second thought. I would have assumed that Nixon was engaged in one of his complex maneuvers to gain time and was using the prospect of the nonaggression treaty as an inducement for Brezhnev to concede on more immediate matters. Based on the unhappy experience with the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, I would probably have judged the strategy too risky, but I would have been confident that I could convince Nixon that it was too dangerous to flirt thus with condominium: It had the clear implication that the United States was giving the Soviet Union a free hand to attack China.

  Now as I watched the tormented, physically suffering President discipline every ounce of his strength to get through the week, I was not so sure that Nixon would be able to handle the forces he was unleashing. He seemed to me to be risking either our Soviet or our Chinese anchor or both for a marginal tactical success. I told Scowcroft that I would not carry out this order and I would resign if Nixon insisted on it. Nixon never returned to the subject and the Soviets never raised it again because I told Dobrynin that it was not a useful line to pursue.

  I do not mean to suggest that Nixon meant to go through with the scheme; given his record, his acuity, and his convictions, he would surely have stopped well short even if he had toyed with it briefly. But it was symptomatic of the disintegration of the Nixon Administration that this degree of suspicion could arise between two men who, whatever our difference in personality, had worked together for five and a half turbulent years to elaborate and to a great extent implement a new design for our foreign policy — a key element of which was, after all, the Chinese connection.

  This was the atmosphere in which I met with the press in Moscow on July 3. Much had changed since those innocent days of two years earlier when I had briefed the media on SALT I and genuinely thought that the chessboard of diplomacy revealed unusual, even historic prospects. Now the atmosphere was redolent with skepticism and suspicion. I had been abroad, with but two brief interruptions, for more than two months: first the Syrian shuttle, then Nixon’s Middle Eastern trip, finally the Soviet summit. The two interludes in Washington (for ten days and six days respectively) had been more taxing than the journeys. The first was consumed defending myself on the wiretap issue, the second on the charge of “secret deals” on SALT, and both with frenetic preparations for the Presidential trips. Before and during the Soviet trip we had been subjected to broad innuendos — in public statements and hints by Senator Jackson, by Paul Nitze, by retiring Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt, and in press commentary — warning against excessive concessions. It seemed to me also that the delicate structure of East-West relations was being undermined at the very moment of upheaval in our institutions, risking international crises we might not be able to surmount. It led to two utterances at the press conference that could be read as gaffes but were cris de coeur, expressions of despair over trends that risked a structure so painfully built up and especially over the nihilism of our domestic dialogue. In response to a question about why the arms limits were not broader, I replied:

  [B]oth sides have to convince their military establishments of the benefits of restraint and that is not a thought that comes naturally to military people on either side.

  Later in the press conference I was asked what would happen by 1985 if we failed to conclude a new SALT agreement before 1977. I responded with passion:

  If we have not reached an agreement well before 1977, then I believe you will see an explosion of technology and an explosion of numbers at the end of which we will be lucky if we have the present stability, in which it will be impossible to describe what strategic superiority means. And one of the questions which we have to ask ourselves as a country is: What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?

  The first comment was a statement of fact, perhaps not too tactful but based on much experience. Military men cannot be expected to think creatively about restraining the arms race; nor is it desirable that they do so. Their duty is to keep the nation strong; their assignment must be to prevail should all else fail. Military men who become arms controllers are likely to neglect their primary mission. It is the political leadership that must strike the balance on which restraint may be based. Truisms as my remarks were, they were less than prudent when uttered in the Soviet capital.

  As for my observations on superiority, they fairly accurately predicted what has in fact happened. But they lent themselves to the oversimplification that strategic superiority had lost all significance, which was not really my view.15 I had been haunted by the loss of our strategic superiority for nearly twenty years. I had been preaching, both as an academic and as a policymaker, that we were entering a new era in which greater attention had to be paid to regional defenses, especially of the conventional kind. I had been a strong advocate of programs necessary to maintain the strategic balance, from ABMs and MIRVs to new SLBMs and cruise missiles. But I
was beginning to despair of the rote tendency to measure the strategic balance by numbers of delivery vehicles in a period when the numbers of warheads on both sides were much more worrisome and when any analysis showed that no building program could avoid casualties likely to paralyze statesmen and frighten peoples toward pacifism. Whatever we did, it would be impossible to recapture the overwhelming superiority that we had enjoyed until the early 1960s and it was sheer escapism to yearn for a past that technology proscribed.

  The issue of the significance of superiority was much more complicated than our domestic debate allowed. We had gone through several phases: Until the early Fifties we had an atomic monopoly enabling us to substitute strategic power for conventional inferiority without fear of retaliation. Until the Sixties we were in a position of such superiority that in a first strike we could probably have destroyed the Soviet retaliatory force, and the Soviets had no comparable capability. In any event the Soviets, calculating the worst-case scenario, would not risk it. Until the early Seventies, in fact, the worst-case scenario analysis of the Soviets was bound to be a significant restraint on adventurism. Thereafter, our loss of strategic superiority was a strategic revolution even if the Soviets did not achieve a superiority of their own. For that, to some extent, freed the Soviet capacity for regional intervention. The Soviets would still not lightly tempt a war with the United States because they feared our mobilization potential and they could never be totally certain that we might not use strategic nuclear weapons against all calculation. But by the time of the 1974 summit we could no longer avoid, as I pointed out earlier, a fundamental strategic reassessment.

  And that was precisely what our domestic debate was inhibiting. Two simpleminded schools of thought seemed to me to be drowning out all rational discussion. One sought to base strategy on the horrors of nuclear war and calculated the minimum number of nuclear weapons required to inflict some horrendous civilian slaughter. The other side of the debate was counting every numerical advantage as strategically significant unrelated to circumstance or risk. I always favored maintaining a substantial counterforce capacity as insurance and to absorb Soviet calculations in worst-case assessments. But in my mind it was a palliative; there was no way to escape the necessity of greater efforts in regional and conventional defense. My nightmare was that our internal squabbles were focusing on symbolic issues. My call for an analysis of what constituted strategic superiority did deal with the heart of our security problem, even if my formulation of it turned out to be too epigrammatic to explain the range of my meaning and yet sufficiently aphoristic to lend itself to being exploited in our domestic debate. My real fear was made clear in the sentences immediately following my comments on superiority:

  [W]e will be living in a world which will be extraordinarily complex, in which opportunities for nuclear warfare exist that were unimaginable 15 years ago at the beginning of the nuclear age, and that is what is driving our concern, not the disputes that one reads in the day-to-day [debate].

  But Washington in July 1974 was not hospitable to such reflections. While we were still in Moscow, Defense Secretary Schlesinger held a press conference at the Pentagon expressing his confidence in the military devotion to arms control and challenging my views on strategic superiority without exactly explaining what they were. To a disintegrating Presidency was now added a public disagreement between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense.

  The strange thing was that by all normal criteria, the summit had been a success. Significant agreements had been signed — not so earthshaking as on previous occasions but the sort of accords that showed that the two superpowers took progress in their relationship seriously. Even in SALT we had come much closer to an understanding of each other’s position than was generally realized; otherwise it would not have been possible for a new President to conclude the negotiations within four months of entering office as Ford did at Vladivostok. Furthermore, it remains desirable, as I have said, to shift summits away from the obsession with spectacular signing ceremonies to an emphasis on a serious review of the international situation. And that was what Nixon and his opposite numbers accomplished in June 1974 with less strain than at any previous meetings. In that sort of tour d’horizon, Nixon was at his best; he managed to overcome the agony more and more devouring him for one last exhibition of his conceptual prowess.

  The gentle Soviet treatment of the mortally wounded President was indeed one of the best testimonials to the impact of his policies. The Soviet system has no categories for those who lose political power for whatever reason. It must have been tempting to make Nixon — the old Communist-baiter — feel his decline. He could have been harassed in the manner at which the Politburo are masters. Instead, he was treated with respect and courtesy, a tribute to his predictability, which Soviet leaders prize more than sentimentality, and to his firmness and sober calculation, to which the Kremlin pays more attention than to professions of goodwill.

  That is not the way it appeared to our media. The New York Times lamented the “fragility of détente.” The Washington Post referred to the summit as a “great disappointment.” Newsweek spoke of a “summit that never peaked.” All in all, the end of the 1974 summit brought home to me that we had reached the end of the line. If authority was not soon restored, a debacle was certain — not because the summit had failed but because preparing for it had made clear that the President was losing control of his Administration.

  By the middle of July, I had become convinced that Watergate had to be brought to an end and that this almost certainly required Nixon’s resignation. Until then I had sought to banish the hitherto unthinkable idea. I understood that Nixon’s power was draining away. At the latest in May, after the publication of the tapes, his fate was sealed. But I had seen it as my duty to ward off crises by prolonging the illusion of authority and continuity for as long as possible, to the point that I did not permit myself to speculate on how the end might come. And I was arrogant enough to believe that I would be able to keep foreign policy going no matter how badly damaged the President was.

  The events surrounding Nixon’s journeys destroyed that illusion. They proved that no Secretary of State can by himself manage the foreign policy of our nation. The ebbing of Presidential authority encouraged a creeping irresponsibility within the government, in the Congress, and in the media that would ultimately undermine our security. It did not matter who was right in the various controversies raging within the Washington bureaucracy. The impossibility of resolving them would sooner or later deprive our policy of strength and direction and our strategy of credibility. What had been a nightmare began to appear a necessity: that it might in fact be better for the nation if Nixon’s Presidency came to an end. I remained convinced that he had been judged with extraordinary severity; that hypocrisy as well as justice animated his tormentors. I admired his endurance and self-control; despite all our disagreements I felt more warmly toward my doomed chief than at any previous time. Nor did I do anything to give effect to my views. Whatever happened and whoever else deserted, I had determined to stick by the President, who had appointed me to high office, to vindicate the continuity of government. But in the recesses of my soul, I began to feel what I am told is sometimes the attitude of survivors toward the terminally ill. I hoped that since the end was unavoidable, it would — for the sake of our country — be quick, and that if it had to happen it would — for the sake of the President — be merciful.

  * * *

  I. Colson’s assertions were flatly contradicted by an unsolicited letter he had sent me on June 11, 1973, in which he said:

  At no time in the interview [with the US Attorney] did I suggest that you caused the Plumbers to be formed, although I did say that the concerns of all at that period of time were very grave.

  I specifically told the prosecutors that I was not privy to the formulation of the Plumbers, that I was not present at meetings when it was decided the Plumbers be formed.

  II. The full text of the Ni
xon letter is in the backnotes.3

  III. These excerpts from the CBS evening news on Saturday, June 22, give the flavor. (I want to stress that correspondent Dan Rather was fair; he was a victim of what the newscycle produced for him):

  RATHER: Washington sources say that the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement that Congress approved provides that the Soviets are to have 950 of the missiles, but that a later agreement, apparently a secret one, raised the Soviet total to 1020. And these sources say, the original figure of 710 US sea-based missiles was cut to 656. . . .

  JACKSON: I can answer that better after he’s testified on Monday. I don’t know whether these agreements, understandings, interpretations involve Dr. Kissinger and the Russians, or whether it involves just the President and the Russians. This we’ll have to find out. . . .