Soviet leaders were speaking soothingly, if deceptively, of their hope for reconciling with the West. Brezhnev, for example, had declared in the 1960s, “The Soviet Union is ready to develop Soviet-American relations in the interests of our peoples, in the interests of strengthening peace.”7 Important segments of the American public—including some in Congress, academics, and opinion leaders—believed him. Sympathy for the Soviets was a longstanding sentiment among the American elite.*
In the quest for a warmer relationship with the Soviets, a new word entered the popular lexicon: détente, a French word for relaxation or thaw. Though the word became identified with President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the policy had been introduced earlier, during the mid-1960s, when the Johnson administration sought to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union as America escalated the conflict in Vietnam. Nixon decided it was worth exploring whether détente with the Soviets was a realistic policy. This led to a series of summit meetings and treaty signings. They were public relations coups for both sides, but the photo ops rarely, if ever, resulted in improved Soviet behavior.
Though President Ford was considerably more savvy about the Soviets than he was given credit for, he leaned toward continuing the Nixon strategy Kissinger advocated. Schlesinger, by contrast, was less enthusiastic. Like Schlesinger, I was not necessarily opposed to high-level meetings between Soviet and American leaders. However, I was concerned that projecting a relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union could leave the wrong impression with the American people and our allies. It might feed the perception that we could minimize the Soviet Union’s global ambitions, which in turn could lead the American people and the Congress to believe that the defense budget could be reduced—even while we knew that the Soviets were increasing theirs.
My confirmation hearing quickly became an airing of differences over détente within the Ford administration, the Congress, and the country. A number of conservative senators wanted to have me on record opposing Kissinger’s policy. Others hoped that I’d signal a greater affinity than Schlesinger had for the Kissinger view. I told the members of the committee that I believed détente had become a code word for both the proponents and opponents of the policy.9 The Soviets weren’t incapable of reason, but we needed to understand that they looked at the world differently than Americans did. Because they were accountable to no one, the Soviet leaders had no obligation to tell the truth to their citizens, to us, or to the world. It seemed dangerous to me to try to predict their actions or their strategy based on thinking it would be a mirror image of how we in our free system might act if we were in their circumstances. By the end of the hearing, most senators were left with the accurate impression that my views were not dissimilar from Schlesinger’s.
Only two senators voted against my confirmation—Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican from North Carolina, and Richard Stone, a Democrat of Florida.* I entered the Department of Defense in 1975 with the feeling that I had good support in the Congress. The department would need that support badly, because, in the aftermath of America’s withdrawal from Saigon, the morale of our military was at a low point.
Though no doubt a large portion of the country remained proud of our military in the aftermath of Vietnam, some of the loudest voices equated members of our armed forces with mass murderers and war criminals. In ways that would have been unheard of during World War II and that would not be countenanced today, some Americans hurled obscenities or spit at men and women in uniform. Even with America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, protests and marches continued against the military.
At the forefront of some of the demonstrations were two Catholic priests, the Berrigan brothers.10 In the 1960s they had picketed the homes of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. They led efforts to chain themselves to the doors of the Pentagon and to throw blood at the entrance.11
The week before Easter, 1976, Philip Berrigan brought a group of protesters to our house near the Washington-Maryland border. For days they demonstrated around the clock on the sidewalk, shouting, “Murderer!” We worried about our younger children, Marcy and Nick, going back and forth to school through the aggressive demonstrators. At one point, Joyce opened our windows and played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at the highest volume to keep up her spirits and to try to drown out the protesters’ chants. When they started digging a grave in our front yard, Joyce called the police. Three were arrested for destroying private property.12
At the Berrigans’ trial, Joyce’s only support in the courtroom was our eldest daughter, Valerie, who was home from Connecticut College for Easter.* Valerie was conflicted in a way I expect was typical of many young people at the time. She had been part of a student group at college that had invited Daniel Berrigan to speak about the war (although it had not been her choice to invite him). To her surprise, she had found his remarks not unreasonable. But though she walked across the courtroom and shook hands with him at the hearing, Valerie believed the Berrigan brothers’ destruction of our property had crossed a line well beyond lawful dissent. A public official ought not to have to serve as a doormat for every malcontent with a gripe against the government. Thanks to Joyce, the protesters were convicted.
In the grim atmosphere of the post-Vietnam period, the Cold War, and the relentless demonstrations, I tried to lift the spirits of the twenty-three thousand military and civilian personnel who worked in the Pentagon. I made an early effort to take in the daunting physical terrain of the building by walking through it. I found the experience depressing. To save energy, many of the sockets in the long hallways lacked bulbs. Much of the seventeen miles of dark corridors had bare walls, making the atmosphere dreary at best.13 Though they had every reason to be proud of its history and their service, there was little to inspire the men and women of the department into feeling that they were working in a great and historic institution.
I decided to turn on the lights—literally, with new bulbs and bright hallways. I asked that paintings depicting scenes of U.S. military history be dusted off, brought up from basement storage rooms, and hung on the mostly naked walls. We dedicated corridors to commemorate historic moments, missions, and people. My former NATO colleague, Secretary General Joseph Luns, traveled from Belgium to participate in the official opening of a new corridor honoring the NATO alliance.
In an attempt to demystify the Department of Defense, I had the Pentagon opened up for public tours, much like the White House and Capitol building. The tours allowed people from across the world to get a sense of what was taking place there and what the men and women of the armed forces had achieved.
Unfortunately, as I assumed my duties, I did not enjoy the support of outgoing Secretary Schlesinger who, understandably, was hurt by his removal. Our relationship previously had been friendly.* But the inaccurate rumors that I had been involved in masterminding his firing were gathering steam and no doubt contributed to our uneasy relationship.
I also found myself in an uncomfortable relationship with the number two at the department, Deputy Secretary Bill Clements, who had hoped to be appointed secretary of defense himself. Clements had on occasion bypassed Schlesinger in his dealings with the White House and the State Department, even boasting to reporters that he had greater influence at the White House on defense policy than his boss.14
Heading into a presidential campaign, I could not make significant personnel changes—particularly with someone as politically well connected as Clements.† Fortunately, the Pentagon at the time had statutory positions for two deputy secretaries, and the second slot was vacant. I recommended former congressman and NATO ambassador Bob Ellsworth to fill it. His principal responsibility would be to deal with DoD’s share of issues that resulted from the ongoing congressional investigations of the intelligence community.
While some Americans questioned everything the military did, there was another segment of the country that was inclined to do the opposite. There was a tendency to be so proud of the m
en and women in uniform that we thought of military leaders as infallible. Having served for close to twenty years in the regular Navy and the reserve, I had a healthy respect for the military and an appreciation for military advice.* But as secretary of defense my role was different. “The U.S. Secretary of Defense is not a super General or Admiral,” I wrote in Rumsfeld’s Rules. “His task is to exercise leadership and civilian control over the Department for the Commander-in-Chief and the country.”
Control wasn’t what a lot of people had in mind, however. I quickly faced what successive secretaries of defense have faced: a powerful set of forces known as the iron triangle—a network of entrenched relationships among the military and civilian bureaucracies in the Defense Department, the Congress, and the defense industry. With more or less permanent positions, those in the iron triangle knew that the secretary of defense and the department’s political appointees of either party were temporary. They could delay and simply wait out policies they did not favor. One responsibility in serving as head of the Defense Department is to look as far down the road as possible, point the department in the direction it needs to go, and then, to the extent possible, build momentum that will be hard to reverse.
Among the most important issues that faced us at the Pentagon in the mid-1970s was the selection of a new main battle tank for the Army. At the time, the expectation was that the new tank would be used to defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. As ambassador to NATO, I had worked to achieve a higher level of standardization of military equipment among our NATO allies as a way to save taxpayer dollars and improve logistical efficiencies. NATO standardization also helped to off set the Soviets’ advantage of a free hand to standardize weapons systems among the Warsaw Pact countries. Early in my tour at the Pentagon, I issued a memorandum to the department that set forth the importance I placed in standardization, and that I expected planners working on the new main battle tank to follow that lead.15
The Pentagon, however, was going in a different direction. Late in the afternoon of July 20, 1976, Deputy Secretary Clements and Secretary of the Army Martin Hoffmann asked to see me, along with a number of other senior officials. They were in sharp disagreement over competing tank proposals from Chrysler and General Motors.
The Army leadership strongly recommended the General Motors tank design, which had a standard diesel engine and a 105 millimeter Howitzer cannon, the weapon size the Army had used for years. The Army had no doubts its position would prevail. Its leaders seemed to assume my role in the decision would be to approve their recommendation. In fact, they were so certain of their position that they had already sent out a press release to members on the relevant congressional committees announcing that General Motors had won the contract. It was a classic example of the iron triangle in action.
However, Deputy Secretary Clements and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Dr. Malcolm Currie had come to a different conclusion. They favored Chrysler’s design: It could be filled with a larger, 120 millimeter cannon and it had, for the first time, a turbine engine instead of a diesel. They pointed out that our major NATO allies—including the British, French, and West Germans—had tanks with 120 millimeter cannons. They also argued that the turbine engine would be more agile and efficient than the diesel.
I listened to both sides in the assembled group in complete amazement. This was the biggest weapons decision for the Army in years. Yet they had arrived in my office with conflicting positions without giving me any advance warning or briefing to allow me the time to make an informed decision. Further, both sides insisted that I decide that complicated issue, which would have such long-term consequences for our country’s fighting force, then and there. I was notably unhappy about being put in that impossible position. After listening to their arguments, I told them I was going to delay a decision for a period of weeks until I could make an informed judgment. I needed more than fifteen minutes to decide the fate of a major weapons system that would serve the country for many decades.
Army officials were stunned at my reaction. “This can’t be delayed,” they argued. “The press releases announcing the decision are already out. Everyone’s going to be furious. Capitol Hill will explode.” Of course, I knew they were right. Angry contractors would take their grievances to Congress and the press. Members of Congress on both sides of the issue would be outraged.
I replied: “I’d rather deal with an explosion on Capitol Hill and in the press than with the problems our country will have if we make the wrong decision.” I told the Army to pull back its premature press releases. I added that I would release a statement of my own announcing that the decision would be delayed.*
Soon, various reports appeared in the press that civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense had defied the advice of the United States Army. That had the benefit of being true, except that it wasn’t nameless “civilians,” it was one civilian in particular.16 This led to a ferocious pushback from elements in the Army, active and retired, as well as in the Congress and the media.17
As I studied the issues in the days ahead, I concluded that Clements and Currie had been right in opposing the Army’s recommendation. Although some were still steaming, Hoffmann and some of his senior Army tank officials began to pull together to help move my decision forward. Not surprisingly, some on Capitol Hill were less than persuaded. A number of congressional districts and states stood to benefit from one or the other tank, and their representatives in Congress aggressively argued their positions. Threats of issuing congressional subpoenas for testimony were tossed around.18 Accepting all the pyrotechnics, I tried to make sure the goal remained clear: to get the tank that would best serve our armed forces and our country well into the next century.
The XM-1 tank contract taught me that overruling a recommendation by the military services would almost certainly lead to upheaval and come at the cost of additional scar tissue. It also proved the rule that “if you do something, someone won’t like it.” But the decision to delay was the right one.
The contract with Chrysler was announced on November 12, 1976, fourteen weeks after that meeting in my office. The episode over the XM-1 tank, now known as the M-1 Abrams tank, was an important lesson in reexamining fundamental assumptions on which we based our decisions. Over time, the turbine engine proved to be successful. And the additional benefit of NATO standardization on the 120 millimeter cannon served to strengthen our collective security and to reduce costs. Some fifteen years later, the main battle tank I had authorized in 1976 was used in battle for the first time—except not in Western Europe as had been contemplated, but in Kuwait and Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. The tank performed brilliantly.
CHAPTER 16
Hold the SALT: Tension over Détente
By 1976, the national security team that President Ford had inherited and then reassembled proved to be a capable group. It included several figures who would leave their imprint on American foreign and defense policies for decades: Secretary of State Kissinger, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, CIA Director George H. W. Bush, and White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney.
While Kissinger emerged from the Ford cabinet shake-up unenthusiastic about losing his second hat as national security adviser, he characteristically found humor in his situation. While briefing congressional Republican leaders on foreign aid around that time, he joked, “I’ve been so busy figuring out what jobs I have left that I haven’t had time to study this.”1 In truth, President Ford’s surprise moves flummoxed the wily Kissinger—a man not easily flummoxed. So entrenched was his well-deserved reputation as a master strategist who could predict the actions of leaders like moves on a chessboard, that some people even assumed he had to be the one behind the Halloween massacre, to eliminate me as an obstacle in the White House.2 Surely, some reporters contended, Ford’s moves had to have been part of some grand Kissinger plan. And if it was not Kissinger’s plan, then it must have been Rumsfeld’s. Once again, the conspiracy theoris
ts prevailed in the press, and the conventional wisdom didn’t give Ford the credit he deserved.
Privately, Kissinger thought it was “scary” to, as he put it, “monkey around with the whole NSC machinery when things are going reasonably well.”3 Kissinger, who had worked for Vice President Rockefeller and knew him to be his unfailingly strong ally in the Ford White House, at first believed Rockefeller’s assertions that I was behind his removal from the NSC post.
“The guy that cut me up inside this building isn’t going to cut me up any less in Defense,” Kissinger told Treasury Secretary Bill Simon immediately after the shake-up.4 If in fact Kissinger was angry, it did not last. Indeed, one of Ford’s stated reasons for moving me to the Department of Defense was that Kissinger and I were able to work together.
My relationship with Kissinger changed when I moved to the Pentagon. As secretary of defense, I was now a statutory member of the NSC. Since the days he had elbowed out Bill Rogers as secretary of state in the Nixon administration, Kissinger had become accustomed to making national security decisions with the President pretty much alone. As Kissinger knew well, my relationship with Ford went back to our days in Congress. I also wasn’t hesitant to express my views. Perhaps because Kissinger wasn’t either, the presumption, particularly in the press, was that we would be in constant conflict.
Though differences did exist, they were not many and they were on substance. One point of tension was unavoidable. Kissinger and I led institutions that were different in mission and makeup: One focused on sustained diplomatic engagement; the other focused on preparing for, deterring, and, when necessary, engaging in military conflict. Given the different perspectives, I thought it particularly important that Kissinger and I base our dealings on a common understanding of the facts and an open flow of information. This led to an early test of our relationship. As a former ambassador and State Department official, I knew that the distribution of sensitive cables sent to Washington from overseas posts would often be narrowly restricted by the Department of State, despite the fact that some needed to be read by a wider group of senior national security officials. I asked my staff to prepare a chart that tracked the flow of the restricted-distribution cables from the State Department to the Pentagon.5 The tracking chart made clear that the sensitive cable traffic to DoD had decreased precipitously.
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