The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  In late 1967, Senator Eugene McCarthy decided that the war could be stopped only if Johnson were driven from office. He challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination, and his improbable campaign, fueled by the passions of antiwar opponents including thousands of college students, caught fire. Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, also an opponent of the war, belatedly joined the Democratic contest. The combined challenge of McCarthy and Kennedy succeeded. On March 31, 1968, Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection and began to explore a negotiated settlement. Yet the Vietnam War raged on, proving far more difficult to stop than it had been to start.

  Richard Nixon took office in January 1969, having promised a “secret plan” to end the war. After a few months, it was clear that Nixon’s plan—“Vietnamization”—by which South Vietnam would gradually assume the responsibilities for the war as Americans came home—had flaws of its own. The leaders of South Vietnam, and its military, had no interest in stepping up to the responsibilities Nixon envisioned for them; the war was likely to continue for years unless Congress intervened.

  In one of its defining moments of greatness, the Senate stepped forward, becoming the cockpit of national opposition to the Vietnam War. Just as Democrats had to lead opposition to Johnson, Republicans now assumed leadership roles in opposing Nixon’s stewardship of the war. Starting in 1969, Republicans John Sherman Cooper, Clifford Case, Mark Hatfield, Charles Goodell—just appointed to fill Robert Kennedy’s seat—and Jacob Javits worked hand in hand with Democrats Frank Church, George McGovern, and Tom Eagleton on legislation to cut off funding for the war and reassert the constitutional role of Congress in declaring war. For almost four years, the quest to stop the war became the Senate’s raison d’être.

  In 1971, five years after his first set of hearings had questioned the rationale for the war, Fulbright convened a new series of hearings, providing a forum for a new group of opponents to the war. On April 22, 1971, a riveted nation heard the eloquent testimony of navy veteran John Kerry, one of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Testifying for two hours, Kerry brought the human costs of the war home and demolished the intellectual arguments of those who defended the war. “It was the moment,” Kerry remembered, “that the soldiers tried to stop the war.”

  That same week, Jacob Javits hosted a dinner for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. Eight Republican senators and House members came to the dinner with one message. “You don’t see any hawks around here,” Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott told Laird. “The hawks are all ex-hawks. There’s a feeling that the Senate ought to tell the President that we should get the hell out of the War.”

  By late 1972, Congress was prepared to pass the Church-Case amendment, which would cut off all funding for the war, excepting those funds needed to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam. The Nixon administration temporarily forestalled that action by seeking a little more time to negotiate. On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam and temporarily stopped the hostilities between North and South Vietnam. These accords were a direct response to the Senate’s pressure.

  Two years later, North Vietnam invaded the South and overran Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. Americans were left with the indelible image of U.S. embassy personnel escaping by helicopter as Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. The United States had suffered its first military defeat, but the war had finally ended.

  Along with Watergate, the tragedy of Vietnam was certainly a major factor in Jimmy Carter’s unexpected race to the White House. The effects of Vietnam would ripple through American life for decades; its lessons for policymakers would be debated endlessly. For the senators, the Vietnam experience taught one lesson with brutal clarity: no president could be fully trusted, so the Senate must play a major role in shaping national security policy. Although he was no dove, no one held that view more strongly than Scoop Jackson.

  HARD WORKING, HONEST, AND deeply committed to public service and the country, Henry “Scoop” Jackson was at least as much of a straight arrow as Jimmy Carter. Having reached Washington thirty-six years before Carter’s election, he had been on Capitol Hill since Carter was fifteen years old. Even if they had not run against each other for president, tensions were probably inevitable. Their personalities would clash, and so would their worldviews.

  The fifth child in a Norwegian family, Jackson grew up in Everett, Washington, a rough-and-tumble lumber town of 30,000. From the beginning, his parents, teachers, and friends found him uncommonly serious and hard working. One of his closest high school friends later commented: “[Scoop] had a fixidity of purpose, received good advice and uniquely followed it. He never took the detours that others of us took. . . . He was a very honorable man.”

  Those qualities were in short supply in Everett after Jackson graduated from law school. Prohibition had come to America, and Everett became a center for bootlegging; corruption spread to the local law enforcement officials. When the state attorney came under suspicion of corruption, the twenty-six-year-old Jackson sought the office and won handily. After several prominent prosecutions earned him significant publicity and a fine reputation, he ran for Congress two years later. He arrived in Washington in January 1941, aged twenty-eight, the youngest member of the House of Representatives at a moment of great national and international stress. By the end of the year, the United States would be plunged into war against Japan and Germany.

  The threat posed by the Soviet Union to the United States would become the central focus of Jackson’s career. After spending twelve years in the House, Jackson won election to the Senate in 1952. Once there, he educated himself about national security issues, serving on the Joint Atomic Energy Committee at precisely the time when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. Jackson saw the United States as being in an arms race with the Soviet Union, but also in a moral and ideological struggle. He believed that the Soviet Union could be deterred only through evidence of overwhelming U.S. military strength. He mistrusted arms control negotiations, doubting that the Soviets would adhere to any agreement they signed. He had only contempt for those who believed that restraint exercised by the United States in defense spending would be reciprocated by the Soviets.

  Jackson built a network of defense experts and scientists who ensured that he would be the most informed member on the issues that mattered to him. He benefited from the extraordinary talents of Dorothy Fosdick, who came to work for him in the Senate in 1955, after being the first woman ever to hold high-level positions in the State Department, on the Policy Planning Staff and as a member of the U.S. delegation to the newly created United Nations. Fosdick stayed with Jackson for twenty-eight years as his principal foreign policy adviser. Secretaries of State and Defense—not to mention presidents—came and went, but Jackson and Fosdick stayed on, relentlessly pursuing the issues of national security that mattered most to the senator. In 1969, Richard Perle joined Jackson’s staff and quickly became a Senate legend in his own right, exerting more influence on U.S. foreign and defense policy than most senators.

  The depth of Jackson’s knowledge and his relentlessness made him a feared adversary in Senate debates. Forty years after it happened, Bob Packwood still spoke in awe about the greatest debate he ever heard in the Senate, when Jackson had squared off against Stuart Symington, a former secretary of the Air Force, and Fulbright in a rare closed debate of the Senate over the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system in 1969. Packwood recited from memory Jackson’s devastating rebuttal of Fulbright’s naïve assessment of Soviet intentions.

  The peak of Jackson’s power came during Nixon’s presidency, which saw the most successful Cold Warrior of his era change course, working to defuse tensions with the Soviet Union. Commentators often observed that only Nixon, whose anti-Communist credentials were beyond question, could have opened the door to China, or sought détente with the Soviet Union.

  Jackson had adamantly opposed Nixon’s policy of détente. He deplored Nixon’s willingne
ss to overlook the Soviet regime’s abuses of human rights and mistreatment of dissidents. And, initially with very few allies, Jackson found a legislative instrument that made it possible to elevate human rights as a major objective of U.S. foreign policy and to block Nixon’s effort to promote détente. Along with House member Charles Vanik, Jackson wrote legislation to condition trade benefits for the Soviet Union on the willingness of the Soviet leaders to allow Jews to emigrate freely.

  Throughout the mid-1970’s, Jackson virtually stymied the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Kissinger ruefully recognized Jackson to be his most effective and persuasive critic. It is possible that no single senator had wielded as much power over U.S. foreign policy since Henry Cabot Lodge blocked President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations from being approved by the U.S. Senate in 1919.

  Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 but did not make it to the first tier of candidates. After George McGovern was crushed by Nixon in the 1972 election, Jackson’s admirers concluded that the moment was at last right for Jackson. They believed that the combination of Jackson’s domestic liberalism and his hard-line foreign policy views made him an ideal Democratic candidate against Gerald Ford, an unpopular president who was continuing Kissinger’s policy of détente. They were quite certain that the Democratic Party had learned that weakness on national security issues was politically disastrous, and they saw Jackson as the natural candidate of the labor unions and the Jewish community, which were powerful pillars of the Democratic Party. Jackson hoped that the end of the Vietnam War “would mollify the bitter hostility that antiwar activists felt toward him.”

  It was wishful thinking. While the Democrats would probably not nominate anyone as dovish as McGovern, “the Democratic party primary voters were not going to elect an anti-Soviet hardliner in 1976,” as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan later observed. Carter not only had the advantage of being able to run against Washington; he had benefited during the campaign from leaving his views on foreign policy and defense somewhat undefined. Jackson lost the nomination, and had to console himself with an easy, virtually unopposed, reelection to a fifth term in the Senate.

  When Jackson met with Carter during the transition, he still maintained some hope that Carter could be brought around to his more hawkish point of view. The president-elect was a Naval Academy graduate and a protégé of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy—not a resumé that indicated adherence to the McGovern wing of the party. Carter also had a close relationship with Schlesinger, President Ford’s secretary of defense, whose views were close to Jackson’s. The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a group of hawkish Democrats focused on the Soviet threat, co-chaired by Jackson and Moynihan, suggested no fewer than fifty-three right-thinking candidates for positions in the new administration. And Carter had seemed to listen attentively to Jackson when they met. But Jackson’s hopes were dashed as soon as the president-elect announced his national security team.

  First of all, Jackson shared the general amazement that Carter had chosen Theodore Sorensen to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It wasn’t that he was an unknown quantity—Jackson had known Sorensen since the mid-1950’s when Sorensen had chosen to work for Jack Kennedy, the rising star in the Senate with presidential aspirations, instead of Jackson. In fact, Jackson would have enthusiastically supported Sorensen for a position like attorney general—he was more than qualified for that—but he found nothing in his background to suggest that Sorensen could take on the leadership of the troubled CIA. Jackson’s instinct was sound. Sorensen’s nomination was withdrawn very quickly, after the revelations that he had registered for the draft as a conscientious objector and removed classified information without proper authorization when serving in the Kennedy White House. It was an early embarrassment to the new president.

  But Jackson was much more dismayed and angered by Carter’s choices regarding the issues that mattered most to him: arms control negotiations and the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Every one of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority’s choices were rejected. Instead, Carter had chosen to name the same person to two jobs simultaneously, filling the position of director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and chief negotiator on U.S.-Soviet arms limitations in a stroke. Unlike Sorensen, the nominee was undoubtedly qualified; but from Jackson’s standpoint, Carter had chosen perhaps the most wrong-headed person imaginable for dealing with the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union.

  Paul Warnke epitomized the views and sensibilities of the Democratic doves that Jackson detested. He had served as the principal adviser to Senator George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign, and in 1975, Warnke highlighted his availability for a cabinet position in the next Democratic administration by writing a major article published in Foreign Policy, entitled “Apes on a Treadmill.” In his article, Warnke described the United States as the principal culprit in the perpetuation of an arms race that left both superpowers armed to the teeth and feeling more insecure. Warnke believed that “the superpower aping has meant the absence of restraint,” but the United States could “present a worthier model. . . . We can be the first off the treadmill.”

  If Warnke saw the Soviet Union as “aping” the behavior of the United States, Jackson imagined the Soviet Union as a burglar, going house to house, eager to take advantage of vulnerabilities anywhere they presented themselves. He believed that the Soviet Union was aggressively moving forward to capitalize on U.S. weakness and uncertainty after the Vietnam debacle, and that the Soviet Union could not be trusted to adhere to any agreement that it signed. Where Warnke envisioned the superpowers working in tandem, restraining themselves and reducing arms, Jackson’s overriding interest was ensuring the superiority of U.S. military strength. In short, as far as Cold War and arms race strategy was concerned, Warnke and Jackson were polar opposites, and Warnke’s nomination was a harbinger of the new president’s aggressive approach to arms control.

  Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency with the historical legacy of the arms control efforts of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A central aspect of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviets had been the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). In May 1972, Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brehznev announced, with great fanfare, that the United States and the Soviet Union had reached historic arms control accords. SALT I was a five-year, interim agreement, specifying the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that each country could have, while imposing no restrictions on strategic bombers. SALT I actually allowed the Soviet Union a greater number of ICBMs and SLBMs than the United States, but the Nixon administration argued that those numerical advantages were more than offset by the technological advantages that the United States had, particularly with respect to MIRV missiles, a collection of nuclear weapons carried on a single ICBM, each of which could be independently targeted.

  SALT I was accompanied by an Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Defense System Treaty, which allowed the United States and the Soviet Union no more than two ABM sites, with one hundred interceptors each—one deployed around the nation’s capital and one deployed to safeguard a limited portion of the nation’s ICBM launchers. The theory behind that ABM Treaty was that nuclear war would be more likely if either side thought it could put in place a comprehensive missile defense system, because it would embolden that country to consider a first strike since the other country could not effectively retaliate.

  On June 1, 1972, Richard Nixon told a joint session of Congress that the SALT I Interim Agreement and the ABM Treaty represented a historic turning point, ushering in a new era of international relations. By giving up missile defense, Nixon contended, the United States and the Soviet Union had accepted the same basic premise of mutual assured destruction, so that both countries had the same interest in preventing a nuclear war. Henry Kissinger describ
ed the summit as “one of the greatest diplomatic coups of all time.” Kissinger, of course, was hardly objective, but Congress, the press, and most Americans responded enthusiastically to the SALT accords reached in Moscow. It was the high-water mark of détente between the superpowers.

  Henry Jackson, however, had not been caught up in the general euphoria. He disliked the limitation on the number of ABM installations, believing that it constrained the United States from using its technological superiority to build a comprehensive missile defense. He contended that SALT I had not allowed the United States enough launchers to prevent a Soviet first strike. He ultimately gave his support to the Interim Agreement, but conditioned it on the Senate adoption of a Jackson amendment, in September 1972, stating that the future treaty (SALT II) had to assure the United States of parity in levels of intercontinental strategic forces. It also expressed the sense of Congress that a more permanent and comprehensive agreement was dependent on “the maintenance of a vigorous research and development and modernization program” of America’s nuclear arsenal.

  Two years later, in November 1974, President Gerald Ford and Brezhnev reached the Vladivostok Agreement, their framework for a SALT II treaty. That agreement posed equal ceilings of 2,400 intercontinental delivery vehicles and limited each side to 1,320 MIRV vehicles. It placed no constraints, however, on Soviet heavy missiles, forward-based systems, or missile modernization.