ON THE WHOLE, Jews stood apart from the convulsions generated by the American reformation and counterreformation. Of course, they participated in the cultural, social, and political movements of the day, particularly on behalf of liberalism. But Judaism, as a faith, did not experience a revolution. Instead, by the 1960s, Jews were secularizing at rates higher than Christians, and in 1964 Look magazine featured the plight of “the vanishing American Jew.”1
But then three developments, none of them directly related to or caused by American Jewry, reinvigorated a commitment to both Jewish cultural identity and Judaism. The first was the emergence of the Holocaust as a significant cultural and political force in American life. Jews had never exactly ignored or forgotten the Holocaust, but neither had they dwelt on it. It evoked an unsettling range of emotions—guilt, shame, remorse, anger—that they understandably wanted to avoid. And avoid them they could, so long as Germany had been rehabilitated as a faithful NATO ally against communism and so long as nothing stirred the collective memory of the awful events of only a decade or two before. In 1960, however, Israel captured one of the key architects of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, in Argentina; he was tried, convicted of mass murder, and executed in 1962. Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher and theorist of totalitarianism and herself a Jew, attended the trial and published her observations in a hugely controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The trial, followed by Arendt’s book, reintroduced the Holocaust to a people who had thus far discussed it only privately, in hushed tones. For a younger generation of American Jews, the Holocaust was no longer taboo. Over time, it would instead become a basic common denominator of what it meant to be Jewish.2
The second development, equally important, reinforced the new resolve among Jews to defend their identity in the modern world. Over the course of six days in June 1967, Israel and its Arab neighbors fought a war for supremacy in the Middle East. Tensions had been ever-present since the founding of Israel in 1948, and following the Suez Crisis of 1956 Egypt and Israel began a low-level state of almost continual warfare. In May 1967, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and armies on all sides mobilized. It was unclear whether the Arab coalition—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq—was about to invade, but to Israel and its supporters in America it seemed clear that the very existence of the Jewish state was at risk. On June 5, Israel launched a surprise preemptive attack against its main threat, Egypt, and went on the offensive; six days later, on June 10, the Arabs sued for peace. For Arabs, the war was an unmitigated disaster that resulted in Israel’s capture of Jerusalem and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For Jews, however, it was celebrated as a resounding triumph that ensured the survival of Israel.
For American Jews, the impact was momentous. Zionism was widely applauded but its popularity had never been especially deep or profound. To most American Jews, Israel was an abstraction that held little emotional attachment. The Six Day War reversed those attitudes almost instantly. Jews, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum explained to an appreciative audience at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, “have experienced a profound transformation since the six-day war … No one can truly understand Jews or Judaism today … unless one takes into account the magnitude and depth of this transformation, which verges on collective metanoia,” or spiritual conversion. At first, Jews feared that Israel would be annihilated, driven into the sea by the same atavistic forces of anti-Semitism that had fueled the Holocaust. Then, with Israel’s stunningly lopsided and completely unexpected victory, Jews celebrated the victory of Jewish might and resolve. If the war began as potentially another Holocaust, it ended with a new dawn of Jewish perseverance. Among American Jews, support for Israel now became the identifier of both their Judaism and their Jewishness. Anti-Zionist Jewish groups, such as the American Council for Judaism, closed their doors after June 1967 for lack of support. This Jewish American identification with Israel deepened with the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on two separate fronts only to wind up with the same result: an Israeli victory. Israel, wrote social scientist Charles Liebman afterward, “provides the major symbolic content for the American Jewish religion today.”3
Finally, the rise of multiculturalism enabled Jewish pride to flourish in a domestic climate that was receptive to ethnic assertions of a unique and not originally “American” identity. Before, the immigrant experience was based upon the melting pot and its assumptions of assimilation. However, the emergence of a powerful rights consciousness among minorities in the 1960s, pushed forward by the civil rights and Black Power movements and the removal of immigration quotas, challenged the legitimacy of the melting pot. Native Americans followed with their own “Red Power” movement and the establishment of political action groups like the American Indian Movement. Descendants of older European immigrant generations, among them Jews but also Italians, Poles, Irish, and Greeks, claimed recognition for their own special qualities, a development marked by Michael Novak’s 1972 book The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics—which, not coincidentally, marked the beginning of his conversion from leftist radicalism to neoconservatism. In multicultural America, nobody doubted the patriotism of these ethnic communities. It was now safe to proclaim the virtues of old world ethnicities—and faiths. Indeed, it was not only safe but fashionable. Non-Jewish Americans, mired in their own humiliating stalemate in Vietnam, applauded Israel’s decisiveness, strength, and vigor against Arab enemies who were indelibly, if not always accurately, associated with Islam. Not coincidentally, Conservative Judaism, an American innovation that had attempted to preserve Jewish traditions by subsuming them within a generic Americanism, declined in the 1960s and ’70s at the expense of Orthodoxy.4
Moreover, Jewish self-confidence and mainstream acceptance bolstered the already considerable political influence of American Jews. Though Jewish support for Israel had already played a large role in domestic politics, it had not yet coalesced into one of the most effective lobbies in Washington. The Six Day War changed that almost overnight. Donations to the American Israel Political Action Committee and other pro-Israel groups soared; memberships to the major Jewish organizations also increased. While most Jews remained liberal despite their climb up the socioeconomic ladder—Milton Himmelfarb quipped that they lived like Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans—their backing for Israel came at a time when many of their fellow liberals were becoming increasingly critical of Israel, especially its occupation of the territories seized in the 1967 war, and sympathetic to the Palestinians. Though they remained loyal Democrats, on policy toward the Middle East and the Soviet Union Jews often found common cause with the Republican Party. With an appeal in both parties, and with their population scattered throughout the country but concentrated in key states—Florida, New York, and California in particular—Jews were able to influence the domestic debate on Middle East policy, sometimes (but not always) decisively. Their opinions certainly could not be ignored, no matter which party was in the White House. From a loose collective of various Zionist organizations, the Israel Lobby was born.5
Thanks in large part to Israel’s victories in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the new Jewish self-confidence also coincided with the sudden reemergence of Christian Zionism. Swinging wildly across the ideological spectrum, most Christian conservatives had abandoned anti-Semitism for Christian Zionism, or at the very least a pro-Israel and anti-Arab view. Whereas Jews had once been vilified as Christ-killers and money manipulators, Israel now stood at the heart of premillennialist prophecy belief in America—all other developments, be they the activities of the United Nations or the Soviet Union, were dependent upon those of the Jewish state. As evangelicalism and fundamentalism surged in popularity and numbers in the 1970s, premillennial dispensationalism and other forms of prophecy belief surged with them, even into mainstream culture. Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth popularized biblical prophecy and rejoiced that recent developments in Israel had brought humanity to the brink of the end times. In order to protect Israel, and thus help ensure the unfolding of prophecy, Bible-believing Christians became arch-Zionists. Already distrustful of socialist Baath parties, pan-Arabism, and Islam, evangelical Christian Zionists had little to moderate their pro-Israel views. Among non-Jews, they quickly became the Jewish state’s staunchest defenders.6
Just as important was the rise in support for Israel among liberals. In the 1950s, pro-Israel mainline Protestants such as Reinhold Niebuhr had been anomalies; now, in the 1970s, they represented the mainstream. Several developments were responsible. The emergence of Holocaust memory had a profound impact on Christians as well as Jews. In light of the Holocaust, Israel’s plight in the 1967 and 1973 wars led many newly sympathetic Christians to rally to its side. “The Yom Kippur attack on Israel, and the threat posed, are as vicious a challenge as that put by Hitler’s ‘final solution’ just a generation ago,” said the mainline group Christians Concerned for Israel in a statement typical of wider attitudes. The Judeo-Christian ethic and the civil rights movements had made prejudice against Jews—and by extension, Israel—unacceptable, even un-American. Many Christians, particularly mainline liberals, criticized Israeli occupation of the West Bank and harsh treatment of the Palestinians, but the prevailing attitude was broadly sympathetic to Israel. Overall, then, the plight of the Jews, be they Israeli or Soviet, fit perfectly into several of the major narratives of Americanism, for liberals as well as conservative evangelicals.7
UNDER PRESIDENTS Nixon and Ford, détente became the centerpiece of U.S. grand strategy. It was not an attempt to end the Cold War but to manage it (though that was not how Nixon and Kissinger portrayed it to the American people). Its main components included both the substantive—the expansion of East-West trade, nuclear arms limitation talks, ending the Vietnam War—and the symbolic—Nixon’s stroll along the Great Wall of China, his trip to Russia in 1972, a visit by Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to the United States the following year. The 1975 Helsinki Conference, a comprehensive attempt to settle the status of Europe, was a mixture of both substance and symbol and marked the climax of détente. By the time Gerald Ford left office in 1977, détente was already reeling under the strains of both domestic and international politics. It would be dead by 1979, the victim not only of great power rivalry but also the unpredictable vagaries of U.S. domestic politics.8
In fact, the seeds of détente’s demise had been sown shortly after the Moscow summit between Nixon and Brezhnev in May 1972. Despite its potential to ease the world’s nuclear nightmare, some Americans were becoming restless with détente. They had never been comfortable with the warmer, cooperative relations with Moscow that détente needed to function. Their focal point was an emotionally charged issue that ultimately led to détente’s unraveling: the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jews. Because of the Soviets’ semi-official persecution of Jews (not unlike Russia’s semi-official pogroms in an earlier age), Soviet Jews desperately wanted to immigrate to Israel; and Israel, now a strong U.S. ally, desperately wanted to receive them. The Kremlin consented to the right of Jewish emigration, but only on individual payment of a punitive fee—by some counts as much as $30,000—which only further inflamed opinion in the United States. It was one thing for the Soviets to persecute their own people; it was another thing entirely to prevent them from fleeing such persecutions. To the rights-conscious American mind, here was as clear a violation of human rights as one could find, especially the freedoms of worship and movement.
Since the late nineteenth century, the status of Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union had been a perennial concern in the United States. But it only became a major issue capturing the attention of those beyond the Jewish community when political or geopolitical conditions gave it a wider resonance. Such was the case in the early 1970s, with the maturation of a global human rights discourse that had begun with the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the signing of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Suppressed by the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War, human rights promotion was not widespread until the 1970s when legitimacy, based on a respect for human rights, became a genuinely significant factor in world politics. Human rights activism was especially pronounced at the grassroots. With increasing domestic political support in a number of countries, NGOs dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights grew in size, stature, and authority throughout the decade. Much of the impetus for this growth came from liberals in support of liberal causes, such as the exposing of war crimes and police brutality in right-wing authoritarian regimes. And in many cases, U.S. support for dictators became as noteworthy as the dictators’ crimes themselves.9
However, the rise of human rights also fueled an anti-communist agenda, for fewer regimes in the world violated human rights as systematically as the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe. The range of communist human rights abuses was vast, but anti-détente activists focused on two in particular: religious liberty and emigration. Freedom of worship had a long history in debates over U.S. foreign policy, often emerging from the bottom up to influence policymaking elites. This was certainly the case over the treatment of Soviet Jews, an issue that Nixon and Kissinger wished would just disappear. But at a time when religion was again flourishing in the public square, when the Religious Right was in formation and flexing its muscles, when Israel gave American Jews a new confidence, and when human rights was a legitimate concern for international relations, Soviet Jews presented themselves as a perfect vehicle for the destruction of détente from within the United States. In turn, with its presumably universal relevance, religion was an ideal vehicle for the promotion of universal human rights.
For American Jews, supported by their Christian sympathizers, the status of their coreligionists in the Soviet Union was nothing new. In 1963, prompted by reports of orchestrated mob violence against Jews, the City of Philadelphia passed a resolution calling on President Kennedy “to reaffirm the unequivocal opposition of our country to acts of repression and discrimination against the Jewish people of the Soviet Union,” which City Council president Paul D’Ortona then passed on to the White House. The next year, protesters marched on the Soviet UN mission in New York and listened to denunciations of Soviet anti-Semitism by Senators Kenneth Keating, Jacob Javits, and senatorial hopeful Robert F. Kennedy. In 1965, the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry asked the Johnson administration for public support in its fight against the Kremlin’s “policy of forced assimilation which has brought the second largest Jewish community in the world today to the brink of religious and cultural extinction.” And in 1968, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon condemned Moscow’s interference with Jewish education and religious training. Overall, however, advocates of Soviet Jews received little comfort from the White House and State Department.10
Much as he wanted to leave it on the campaign trail, Nixon continued to face the issue as president. In March 1969, Lewis Weinstein of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, an organization that had strong backing from virtually every major Jewish group in the country, asked Nixon for a meeting to discuss ways to ease the burden on Soviet Jews and allow them to emigrate to Israel. And for the next eight years, the cause of Soviet Jews would simply not go away, no matter how inconvenient it was for détente. Throughout the presidencies of Richard Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, a wide range of groups—Jewish and Christian, religious and secular—maintained constant pressure on the White House. In 1973, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Israel’s founding, nearly 100,000 demonstrators—many of them dressed symbolically in striped pajamas to resemble both concentration camp victims and Soviet prison inmates—chanted “Free Them Now” and marched through the streets of New York to highlight the condition of Soviet Jews. During Brezhnev’s U.S. tour, supposed to be a watershed in the establishment of normal U.S.-Soviet relations, demonstrators hounded the Soviet premier in every city he visited. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops called upon the Soviet Union to respect the religious rights of its Jewish population. “The conscience of humanity is aroused,” claimed Bishop James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, “and the USSR must understand that its anti-Jewish policies are morally intolerable to free men everywhere.” The San Francisco Labor Council made a similar appeal by focusing on the case of Mikhail Shtern, a renowned endocrinologist who had been sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian prison after his two sons had successfully fled to Israel; other defenders of Shtern publicized his case with ads in the Washington Post. More incongruously given his geopolitical views, Hans Morgenthau, a University of Chicago political scientist and the founder of American realism, implored Nixon not to abandon Soviet Jews to their communist-controlled fate. Détente, he said, was simply not worth it.11
As the issue of Soviet Jews grew, it broadened to include the rights of Soviet Christians as well. Alexandra L. Tolstoy, the daughter of the great Russian novelist who fled to America after the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote Nixon in 1970 to highlight the anguish of the Russian Orthodox community in the Soviet Union, who could practice their religion only under very tight restrictions established by the Kremlin. Ukrainian Americans did the same for the rights of persecuted Catholics in Ukraine, as did Latvian and Lithuanian Americans for persecuted Lutherans and Catholics in the Baltic states. Likewise, American evangelicals pressed the case of beleaguered Soviet Protestants, particularly Baptists and Pentecostals. Even the religious freedom of the Russian Orthodox Church, assumed by many to be a stooge of the Kremlin, became an issue. In a return to the strategy first deployed by FDR and Truman, Americans were once again turning to religious liberty as a geopolitical weapon—only this time, the pressure was coming almost entirely from below.12
Like Kennedy and Johnson before him, however, Nixon was unwilling to go beyond platitudes about the importance of religious liberty because, like Kennedy and Johnson before him, he was unwilling to risk détente over what was essentially an internal matter of a sovereign nation. Yet for Nixon, the stakes were much higher. Kennedy had only just begun the process of détente, while Johnson had to set it aside due to the complications of Vietnam. For Nixon and Kissinger, on the other hand, détente was central: without Soviet cooperation, they believed they could not end the Vietnam War or maintain leverage in their new relationship with China. And precisely because détente was so central to Nixon and Kissinger, it was also where they were most vulnerable. What the Soviets wanted from the United States was trade, surplus food, and credit; what they prized most was Most Favored Nation status (MFN), which would give them the same access to American goods and technology as any other country and would allow them to develop the full potential of their vast natural gas reserves. Nixon and Kissinger were happy to oblige, but these economic aspects gave détente’s opponents their opening, for only Congress could authorize the executive’s economic promises to Moscow.
Inconveniently for Nixon and Kissinger, the Senate’s leading critic of détente was also its fiercest advocate for Soviet Jews. Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson was a classic Cold War liberal from Washington State cut very much from the same cloth as Harry Truman. In domestic affairs, Jackson was a progressive, allied closely to organized labor and an early supporter of the civil rights movement. But on foreign policy, he was staunchly anticommunist and a tireless proponent of a large military, positions he stuck to into the 1970s after they had become deeply unfashionable among most other Democrats. He remained an unwavering supporter of the Vietnam War, even after Nixon was elected president and many other Democrats became full-time doves. This was to be expected for a politician from a state that relied economically on defense spending—for good reason, Jackson’s nickname was “the Senator from Boeing.”
But Jackson’s fierce anticommunism and his commitment to America’s military strength were matters of conviction, too. Colleagues and observers, allies and enemies all noted how relentlessly moralistic Jackson’s political convictions were. Kissinger, himself not a pushover, marveled at Jackson’s tenacity during their frequent battles over détente: “Stolid, thoughtful, stubborn, as could be expected from the combination of Scandinavian origin and Lutheran theology, Jackson mastered problems not with flashy rhetoric or brilliant maneuvers but with relentless application and undeflectable persistence.” His ostentatious defense of Soviet Jews smacked of presidential posturing, especially for a non-Jew, and he made no secret about his White House ambitions for 1976. But to Jackson, Soviet Jews represented something much more than political opportunity: he was one of the Senate’s strongest supporters of Israel, he genuinely sympathized with the plight of Soviet Jews, and their symbolic power offered him a devastating weapon in his fight against détente. It was no coincidence that Jackson mentored a generation of neoconservatives who were hard-line anti-Soviet and pro-Israel, among them Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith. He was, Kissinger later acknowledged, the Nixon administration’s worst possible enemy: “a man of high principle” who was also “stubborn and persistent.”13
And like Truman, Jackson abhorred religious prejudice. He was a vocal supporter of Kennedy’s campaign in 1960 and came out strongly against Kennedy’s nativist Protestant critics, especially Norman Vincent Peale. He credited his feelings on religious liberty to a formative experience from his childhood in Everett, Washington. When local children taunted one of Everett’s only Jewish residents with shouts of “Kike!” Jackson’s mother rushed out to chase them away. “My mother was a Christian who believed in a strong Judaism,” he later recalled. “She taught me to respect the Jews, help the Jews! It was a lesson I never forgot.” Thus while Jackson was determined to undermine détente, the cause of Soviet Jews was a matter of principle as well as politics. Senator Jacob Javits, a Republican from New York and a key Jackson ally, claimed that their crusade was not simply a way to attack détente but a means to protect American values and the universal human right of religious liberty. Attacking détente was indeed one of Jackson’s prime motivations, but the most important goal was to relieve pressure on Soviet Jews.14
Jackson’s partner on foreign policy, his chief legislative aide Dorothy Fosdick, had strong views of her own. The daughter of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dorothy Fosdick had been raised on debates over the role of Christian morality in international relations. She may have been the daughter of the famous pacifist from Riverside Church, but she also formed an intellectual bond with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary next door. Her worldview owed something to both men but in the end resembled that of neither: she integrated her father’s unbending idealism with Niebuhr’s realist emphasis on original sin and willingness to deploy power. The result was a highly moralistic sense of right and wrong in international politics, and a fierce conviction that the United States had a responsibility to right the wrongs. Observers called her “hard-headed, warm-hearted.” With a doctorate in international relations from Columbia, Fosdick was also a Christian intellectual in her own right. She attended the landmark 1937 Oxford ecumenical conference as a missionary delegate; that same year, she gave a nationally broadcast radio address on religious liberty and the threats it faced from Nazism, fascism, and communism. As Jackson’s national security assistant, Fosdick bolstered her boss’s position on religious liberty with theological and intellectual substance.15
While Jackson and Fosdick led from the Senate, defenders of Soviet Jews could also be found in the House of Representatives. John G. Dow of New York suggested to Nixon that the Voice of America start broadcasting its programs into the Soviet Union in Yiddish, the mother tongue of Soviet Jews. Charles Vanik of Ohio was also a relentless campaigner for Soviet Jews, and soon teamed up with Jackson to sponsor congressional legislation on their behalf. But nobody was as indefatigable as Robert F. Drinan of Massachusetts. As a Jesuit priest, Drinan had a highly developed ethical worldview; as a practicing lawyer and former dean of the Boston College Law School, he also had a finely honed legal mind. He combined both his moralism and his legalism in a fierce advocacy of universal human rights. Drinan had made his name as an outspoken opponent of Vietnam and won election to Congress in 1970 on an antiwar platform. But his other main foreign policy concern—and the most important one for his many Jewish constituents in suburban Boston—was the condition of Soviet Jewry. To Drinan, both issues were grounded in basic human rights concerns: in one case, the United States was at fault, in the other the Soviet Union. What was important was not the moral superiority of communism or capitalism but the protection of rights of those who could not protect themselves. Like Javits, he was sympathetic to the idea of détente, but not if it came at the expense of morality. Not coincidentally, in campaigning for Soviet Jews Drinan often used the peaceful civil disobedience tactics from his campaigns for the rights of Vietnamese and Cambodians. In one episode, he and New York Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal barged into the Soviet Embassy in Washington demanding to present a petition on Soviet Jews to the ambassador; after a half-hour standoff, the two left without a meeting but with a clear moral and political victory. In another, Drinan asked Kissinger to help him obtain a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He would certainly have known that the Soviets would deny his application. The important thing was to embarrass them in the process—and Kissinger with them.16
But Kissinger was not so easily moved. Though Jewish himself, realism was the strongest current running through his worldview. The world turned on states exercising their power, not on individual people or groups exercising their human rights. “I have no doubt that Soviet Jews as a group are severely disadvantaged,” he told a colleague in April 1969, long before détente had become the overriding strategic priority, “but there is virtually no way in which we as a government can exert pressure on the Soviet Union to ease their plight. In fact,” Kissinger continued in what would become a common refrain over the next eight years, American pressure would be “counterproductive” because the Soviets “are exceptionally defensive about the Jewish problem, and inevitably regard any official US Government action on the subject as an attempt to interfere in Soviet internal affairs.” In late 1973, in a letter to his friend and former Harvard colleague David Riesman, Kissinger explained that “in our relations with the Soviets and in our efforts to improve those relations … we have recognized that differences in ideology and basic differences between our two systems will continue to exist.” Crusades to remove those differences would only lead to tension, possibly even war, which was decidedly not in the American national interest and certainly not at a time when the nation’s international power was at a low point. The Soviets had actually dealt with the United States quite reasonably, Kissinger said on another occasion; it was Jackson who demanded too much.17
Even under tremendous political pressure, Kissinger’s realism remained unaffected by the protests of Jackson, Javits, Vanik, Drinan, and other advocates of Soviet Jews. The important thing was stable relations between states, especially if they were nuclear superpowers. All else, including human rights, would then follow from détente. In the meantime, Americans simply had to be patient. It was not only unrealistic but also dangerous, Kissinger protested in 1969 to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a colleague but later a great critic of détente on human rights grounds, to expect the Nixon administration to do anything more. If the Kremlin felt threatened, he said in response to Moynihan’s moralistic exhortations, it “will probably act in regard to Soviet Jews exactly as it has recently in Czechoslovakia—in a cold-blooded manner designed to protect perceived Soviet national interests. If necessary, they will completely defy the UN Charter and world opinion.” Be reasonable, Kissinger seemed to be saying not only to Moynihan but to all his critics: détente will draw the Soviets into a more Western orbit and thus will give the United States precious leverage. “We will be able to secure an improvement in the lot of Soviet Jewry only if we somehow can convince the Soviets that an improvement will be in their own national interest, or conversely, that they will suffer some meaningful national damage if an improvement does not take place.” The promotion of justice could only be possible with the establishment of order. Détente was the first important step. But for now, Moynihan and the others would have to wait.18
Ironically, it was precisely the last part of Kissinger’s peroration to Moynihan that advocates of Soviet Jews had in mind: make the Soviets suffer the consequences of their brutality. Jackson was the most dogmatic. He believed that national sovereignty was no defense against the violation of human rights, a commonplace idea today but a new development in world politics then. Human rights were universal, not particular, and they transcended national borders. The condition of Soviet Jews “is not just a Jewish issue,” he declared, “but an American issue and a great humanitarian issue.” Jackson did not suggest going to war over Soviet Jews, but he did think it entirely reasonable for the United States to use whatever leverage it had to induce the Soviets to let their Jewish population emigrate. The universality of human rights, and the confluence on this issue between American ideals and interests, made it essential. Jackson made this point with characteristic emotion, telling a crowd in Denver: “Today, while we’re bargaining with the Russians over dollars and rubles, let’s do some bargaining on behalf of helpless human beings. When we talk about free trade let’s talk about free people, too.”19
In private, however, Jackson doubted that this would actually work. He did not trust communist ideology, and he certainly did not trust the Soviet Union. The Kremlin would never do the right thing, even if it was in its own best interest. Despite his jeremiads, Jackson was certain that the diplomacy of quid pro quo—American capital, credit, goods, and technology in exchange for Soviet compliance on a number of geopolitical issues—would never work in America’s favor. The concept that America, with its economic might, could induce changes in Soviet political behavior “is extremely doubtful,” concluded a report prepared by Fosdick. Kissinger believed that expanded trade ties would make the Soviet Union beholden to the United States, but the “more likely result is Soviet leverage on the United States.” Already skeptical about détente, angry at arms control (and the jobs it would cost Washington State), and convinced that trade would not relax Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration, Jackson resolved to do all he could to scuttle the linchpin of Nixon and Kissinger’s grand strategy.20
Neither Kissinger nor Jackson was willing to compromise to break this impasse (though to be fair to Kissinger, there was little he could do without abandoning détente, for only the Soviets could accede to Jackson’s demands). When Nixon traveled to Moscow in May 1972, he and Brezhnev discussed a new trade relationship predicated on the Soviets receiving most favored nation (MFN) status. But when Nixon returned to Washington with hopes of getting Congress to pass a trade bill that would grant the Soviets MFN, Jackson moved swiftly to sabotage his plans. Jackson teamed up with Representative Vanik to sponsor an amendment explicitly forbidding MFN to any country that did not have open emigration policies. The Soviets were unlikely to change their policy, not simply because it would undermine communist control but because they could never be seen to be bowing to foreign pressure to change their own internal political system. Without the trade bill, détente was effectively dead; but thanks to the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which had overwhelming support in Congress, the likelihood of the Soviets abiding by the terms of the trade bill were virtually nonexistent. Thus by the summer of 1972, even before Watergate, the Nixon administration found itself in a Cold War standoff not with the Kremlin, but the United States Congress.
During Brezhnev’s visit to the United States in June 1973, with Jackson-Vanik hanging ominously over their heads, American and Soviet officials hammered out the final details of a comprehensive trade agreement. Brezhnev made a conspicuous effort to win over distrustful senators, particularly those who had spoken out in favor of Soviet Jews. Some were indeed won over—“I think he was opening the door and saying, for goodness’ sake, can’t we get along?” exclaimed Vance Hartke of Indiana—but not Jackson, who said the moribund communist economy made the Soviets as vulnerable as “a crippled bird” and thus susceptible to further American pressure. Nixon, he warned, must demand more in the way of concrete, verifiable guarantees that a certain number of Soviet Jews would be allowed to emigrate annually. Jackson eventually suggested the figure of 100,000, which was more than double the number of Jews who had left in any one year previously and was totally unacceptable to the Soviets. In October 1973, the Yom Kippur War complicated matters: the Soviets were now desperate to curry favor with their beleaguered Arab allies, who were of course opposed to any increase in Israel’s Jewish population, and the United States was even more firmly allied to Israel. Meanwhile, throughout the entire process, the Israeli government quietly worked behind the scenes to build support for Jackson-Vanik on Capitol Hill.21
Now aware of the danger to the trade bill and thus to détente as a whole, Kissinger negotiated simultaneously with Jackson to lower his demands and with the Kremlin to allow more Jews to emigrate—and his sympathies were often with the Kremlin. Neither side, however, would concede very much, certainly not enough to break the deadlock. In late 1974, with Nixon felled by Watergate only to be replaced by a relatively weak figure in Gerald Ford and with congressional assertiveness on foreign policy at fever pitch thanks to Indochina, Congress was in no mood to compromise. The trade bill passed both houses of Congress in December 1974 and became law shortly after the new year—including Jackson-Vanik. As brilliant as he was, Kissinger had severely underestimated popular American sympathy for Soviet Jews and overestimated the appeal of détente. He dealt with the issue as a peripheral concern despite mounting evidence that it had become the central domestic political issue, even more important than arms control. Ever focused on the national interest, Kissinger lost sight of national ideals; when he realized their importance, he proved ill-suited to convey their meaning to the American people. He felt trapped—“Soviet behavior will depend on the incentive they feel in maintaining good relations with us” and Jackson had destroyed all such incentive, he complained to President Ford on the eve of the trade bill’s passage—but he had been caught as much by his own political obtuseness as by Jackson’s maneuvering.22
“Probably no other single question did more to sour the atmosphere of détente than the question of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union,” the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, reflected ruefully in his memoirs. Kissinger agreed. Jackson had mobilized an anticommunist crusade for human rights and religious liberty behind a coalition of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Jews. Only in retirement did Kissinger realize what had happened. Jackson had acted as “the indispensable link” between “conservatives who hated Communists and liberals who hated Nixon” and brought them together “in a rare convergence, like an eclipse of the sun.” Yet it was not such a freak occurrence. Religious liberty touched a nerve deep in the American worldview and was not bound by partisanship or ideology. To be sure, the atmosphere of the 1970s, especially the new emphasis on universal human rights, was unusually conducive to Jackson’s promotion of Soviet Jews. But in the American tradition, religious liberty is perhaps the oldest and most sacrosanct of all human rights. Kissinger was slow to recognize this, and in the end it cost him détente. And the Soviets never did receive MFN status.23
THIS WAS NOT the end of the story, however. Détente was reeling, already fragile by the time Jimmy Carter became president in 1977. The Soviets cut off all negotiations over Jewish emigration because they were no longer interested in MFN. Carter’s election victory brought Jackson’s presidential ambitions to a sudden end. But the defenders of religious freedom behind the Iron Curtain continued their crusade nonetheless.
Nearly two years before, on August 1, 1975, the United States, the Soviet Union, and over thirty other countries signed the Helsinki Final Act, the culmination of years of intricate negotiations toward a final settlement of postwar Europe. The Helsinki Accords, historians now agree, were a watershed moment in the Cold War, perhaps even marking the beginning of the end. But nobody perceived this at the time, and they were much derided in the United States as a sellout to communist tyranny and thus the ultimate sin Kissinger had ever committed in pursuit of détente. Behind a thicket of diplomatic bureaucratese, all signatories to the Helsinki Accords essentially agreed on two basic principles: the permanency of Europe’s existing boundaries—in other words, recognition of communism as the legitimate governing system of half of Europe—and the inviolability of basic human rights. The Helsinki Final Act was a document with a paradox at its heart, with its simultaneous pursuit of both order and justice. And because nobody seriously believed the Soviets and their allies would respect human rights, everybody focused on the concessions to legitimizing communist rule. Critics charged Ford and Kissinger with appeasement, and “détente” became such a dirty word in American politics that Ford banished its use during the 1976 election campaign.24
Yet in the long run, Helsinki’s human rights provisions were far more significant than its codification of borders. For the rest of the 1970s and into the ’80s, U.S.–based “Helsinki groups,” foremost among them Helsinki Watch (later renamed Human Rights Watch), partnered with churches and other religious groups to investigate communist rights abuses in Eastern Europe; they then reported these abuses to the media and Congress, making it impossible for the Soviets—and the Ford administration—to ignore them. The Ford Foundation and other philanthropic agencies, in addition to Congress itself, generously funded many of the Helsinki groups, such as the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR. Armed with the wording of the Final Act and backed by popular opinion in America, human rights campaigners like Father Drinan traveled to Romania, Israel, and elsewhere to interview victims of “Russia’s irrational and erratic” record on religious freedom.25
For a region where faith had once flourished and where underground churches were still active—and, in the case of Poland, were openly active—religion provided Helsinki watchers with an ideal measurement to gauge communist compliance. Unsurprisingly, they found it wanting. “Too many people,” Jackson told the National Council of Jewish Women in 1979, “think that Jackson-Vanik applies only to Soviet Jewry. It does not and never has.” By way of example, he referred to a family of Pentecostals who had recently sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy in hopes of fleeing the Soviet Union. “Before the Soviets can enjoy MFN and other trade benefits from the American taxpayer, these people too must have a hope of escape.” With information fed to him by Helsinki Watch and Christian Solidarity International, Jackson maintained the pressure on Soviet violations of religious freedom, of Christians as well as Jews. Motivated by the case of Reverend Georgi Vins, a Soviet Baptist, Jackson sponsored a 1979 Senate resolution on behalf of “Christians and other religious believers” in the Soviet Union who were “being persecuted simply because they desire to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience and the precepts of their faith rather than according to the dictates of the state.” Vins and his family were then given asylum in the United States, where they settled down in Elkhart, Indiana. Shortly after, the Senate invited Vins to offer an official prayer, in which he gave thanks “for the gift of freedom” and “the goodness of the American people.” Afterward, Jackson addressed his colleagues. “Throughout history,” he declared triumphantly, “there have been men and women who have said: You dare not coerce conscience. You dare not coerce worship. We must obey God rather than man.” This had always been a matter of God’s law and U.S. law. Now, thanks to Helsinki, it was also Soviet law, and religious liberty advocates would not let them forget it.26