In a 236-page “State of the World” document, issued in early 1972, Nixon claimed that he had already brought about the radical shift in foreign policy that he had promised on assuming the presidency. “Our alliances are no longer addressed primarily to the containment of the Soviet Union and China behind an American shield,” the document declared. “They are instead addressed to the creation with those powers of a stable world peace.”
That was the theme that Nixon expected to define 1972, his fourth year in office, and one that he expected to culminate in his reelection by a landslide. He carefully arranged the timing of a series of foreign policy triumphs to occur at regular intervals throughout the year, carrying him through to an easy reelection and a strong second-term mandate. He would visit Beijing in February, sign SALT and ABM treaties with the Soviet Union in May, and sign a peace accord for Vietnam shortly before or after the election.
What he did not expect was that these steps toward realizing his foreign policy dreams would galvanize the opposition that had already begun to mobilize against him.
ON JANUARY 25, 1972, Nixon ordered even more troops home from Southeast Asia; by May 1, only 69,000 would remain in South Vietnam. In a speech on January 27, Nixon said that the United States was prepared to withdraw all American forces within six months of the signing of a cease-fire and peace treaty, so long as the North Vietnamese returned American prisoners currently in their hands. If the agreement specified new elections, he added, the current Saigon government would step down before they occurred. Such a cease-fire should cover the whole of Southeast Asia, and he promised that after the war the United States would reconstruct all of Indochina, including North Vietnam. The January 27 speech was as complete a statement as could be imagined of American disengagement from the war, and of Nixon’s eagerness to settle that war on almost any terms. Nixon’s proposal went beyond what even the liberals of the Senate had called for.
Surprisingly, the usually vocal right wing said hardly a word against it. In later years the neoconservatives would rail that the United States had abandoned South Vietnam instead of “staying the course” and winning the war, but the conservatives of the time raised little objection about Nixon’s new posture toward Vietnam—certainly not enough to deter even slightly Nixon’s reelection express. Perhaps they reasoned that a Republican victory in the fall was more important than any disagreement with Nixon over the conduct of the war, since the domestic and foreign policy positions of that year’s Democratic presidential contenders were anathema to Republican conservatives.
Most polls in early 1972 showed Nixon ahead of any challenger. But he was harried on the right by George Wallace, who was running again, this time as a Democrat. Muskie led the Democratic pack, followed by George McGovern and Scoop Jackson. If Jackson gained any traction as a Democratic standard-bearer, it would mean problems for Nixon, for he bridged party lines on Nixon’s wedge issues: Jackson was against busing but sent his children to an integrated public school, he was an environmentalist but not a left-winger, and he had better support than Nixon from organized labor. Nixon believed his ideal opponent was McGovern, who would draw the antiwar crowd’s support just as the war was winding down, and could be painted (in Jackson’s phrase) as the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
To assure McGovern’s nomination, Nixon supporters went after Jackson and Muskie. Muskie took a first blow when a spurious letter surfaced during the New Hampshire primary season charging that he had made racist remarks about “Canucks,” a derogatory term for the French-Canadian minority in Maine. When a series of slurs about the candidate’s wife followed, the candidate reacted by breaking down and crying during a public appearance in New Hampshire; he barely prevailed in the primary, which he was expected to win handily, and his candidacy was mortally wounded.
The prominence of the Muskie sob story obscured a challenge to Nixon in New Hampshire from John Ashbrook, a Republican congressman from Ohio. With the backing of some (though not all) of the Manhattan Twelve, Ashbrook charged that Nixon’s conduct was opening the door for China to fill the power vacuum in Southeast Asia caused by the U.S. troop withdrawal and warned that the president would give away too much to the USSR at the forthcoming SALT talks. Ashbrook maintained that Nixon had abandoned every pledge he had ever made—chief among them “that Communism was the deadly enemy of freedom, and that America must never betray the allies who stood with her in opposition to its advance.” Nixon won the New Hampshire primary with 67 percent of the vote; Ashbrook came in a distant third, well behind peace candidate Pete McCloskey. But Vice President Spiro Agnew, a favorite of the right for his bellicosity and militarist tendencies, gathered an unprecedented 45,000 write-in votes—a tally that was judged to be a protest against Nixon. Combined with Ashbrook’s appeal on foreign affairs, it suggested that future Republicans who ran against Nixon’s foreign policies could score big at the polls.
WHEN NIXON STEPPED off the plane in Beijing, he stuck out his hand for Zhou En-Lai to shake. This symbolic gesture was meant to supersede the memory of John Foster Dulles refusing to shake Zhou’s hand in 1954. In this and in many other ways, the Nixon-Mao-Zhou meetings in late February produced a great show for the world’s media. Yet the substance of the meeting had less impact on world affairs than the opening-to-China announcement had: As the principals understood, the fact of their meeting in Beijing was as important as anything actually decided there.
As conservatives had feared, while Nixon was smiling for the camera, Kissinger was conveying secrets to the Chinese, sharing U.S. intelligence about Soviet armaments and nuclear strike capabilities. “Nobody in our government except for the President and [his accompanying staff] know that we have given you this information,” Kissinger told them. He and Nixon also reiterated to Zhou, privately, that they opposed independence for Taiwan and would actively discourage Japanese expansion in East Asia and Korea. To the Chinese rulers, Nixon gave a guarantee: “US would oppose any attempt by the Soviet Union to engage in aggressive action against China.”
Alexander Haig read the notes of such meetings each day, and while working on the leaders’ final statement (known as the Shanghai Communiqué), he grumbled repeatedly to Haldeman aide Dwight Chapin that Nixon and Kissinger “are selling us out to the Communists!” At that time, Chapin thought Haig was simply expressing his frustration at being overworked; later he realized that Haig’s anger was far more deep-seated.
Others shared Haig’s sentiments, and Nixon knew it. Aware that many people might reject the secret pledges he was making to China, Nixon concealed those promises from the top foreign policy officials—Laird, Rogers, and Helms—and from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He hid precisely those matters that would most upset conservatives such as arms negotiator Paul Nitze, and Scoop Jackson, Bob Dole, and other senators. Nixon was willing to commit the United States to these actions, yet he was unwilling to tell people he’d done so. The problem for Nixon’s radical new policy toward China was in the follow-through. In order to move the two countries toward full diplomatic recognition and becoming each other’s most important trading partner, thousands of details had to be arranged by the bureaucracies of State, Defense, CIA, and other agencies; without their cooperation, little could be accomplished. But since Nixon and Kissinger were keeping some important matters from the bureaucrats, and many bureaucrats were uncomfortable with the policy, very little actually happened. While Nixon succeeded in making the opening to China, opposition to his policies prevented the fruits of the new accommodation between the United States and China from being reaped during his remaining years in office.
Nixon was also unwilling to share the details of the new Chinese relationship with the American electorate. Had the public learned, for instance, that he’d discussed the abandoning of Taiwan with China, and that his team had passed state secrets to an ally of the Soviet Union, it might have produced an uproar and cost him deeply in the fall election.
Jackson in particular would have made hay out of the information; he badly needed such an issue to invigorate his campaign. After his poor finish in New Hampshire, in order to remain viable Jackson would have to perform well in the next primary state, Florida. In that primary Nixon secretly backed Wallace, to the tune of $600,000, hoping that Wallace would knock off Jackson and slow the campaigns of the other mainstream Democratic candidates. Donald Segretti, employed by Nixon associates, sent out a letter on fake Muskie stationery that accused Jackson of homosexuality—and, absurdly, also alleged that Jackson had fathered an out-of-wedlock child with a seventeen-year-old girl. The letter had some effect: Jackson finished third and left the race shortly thereafter. Segretti later pled to criminal distribution of the letter and served several months in jail.
After the Florida primary, Jackson’s rising antipathy toward Nixon moved him to agree to chair the effort to elect enough Democrats to make the next Congress veto-proof.
Wallace exceeded Nixon’s expectations by winning every Florida county; he now became a more serious threat to Nixon, whether he won the Democratic nomination or ran in the fall on the American Independent Party line. Through the next two months Wallace continued to win Democratic primaries; McGovern ran right behind him, picking up strength and delegates.
IN THE SPRING of 1972, E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, and the Miami Cuban émigrés—the team that had burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist—moved their base from the White House to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. From that base of operations, they engaged in activities that would culminate in the June 17 attempted burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex.
Although today popular history connects Richard Nixon with the planning of that break-in, and with the other illegal actions performed that spring, the weight of evidence reveals the opposite: that Nixon knew little to nothing about those preparations. White House tapes and a myriad of documents show Nixon, Kissinger, and the NSC staff occupied that spring with the details of the May summit with Brezhnev; with the continuing SALT talks, which were expected to produce a document for Brezhnev and Nixon to sign at that summit; and with Vietnam, where the largest battle of the war was shaping up.
General Creighton Abrams, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, had expected North Vietnam to launch yet another Tet offensive in 1972, and tried to delay it by bombing the North and its supply lines. Nixon also gave direct orders to attack the enemy on the ground before this year’s Tet, and when the order wasn’t carried out he railed against Abrams. The decision to hold back the troops wasn’t Abrams’s fault: Unbeknownst to the president, Laird had countered his orders. Nonetheless, when the North Vietnamese began their offensive a week before Easter Sunday and made steady initial progress, Nixon became irate and blamed everyone but himself. But he was the true culprit. If there was one reason for the inadequate U.S. and South Vietnamese response at the outset of the Easter Offensive, it was that Nixon had reduced American strength in country to a level that could not sustain the war. When Nixon figured out that Laird was countermanding orders, he called Admiral Moorer on the carpet, saying, “I am the commander in chief, and not the secretary of defense—is that clear?” Nixon would brook no further excuses from Moorer: it was to be full speed ahead.
Moorer tugged his forelock. He was enthusiastic about the aggressive actions Nixon was finally willing to take—increased bombing of the North and of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). After serious discussions with Haig, Nixon authorized the heaviest bombing of the war. The operation known as “Linebacker” targeted the North Vietnamese troops and oil storage depots near Haiphong and Hanoi, though not the cities themselves—Nixon and Kissinger had specifically promised the Soviets to spare the cities, in the hope that the USSR would reciprocate by pressuring North Vietnam to end the war at the peace table. In conjunction with the bombing, the United States mined North Vietnam’s ports (other than Haiphong), elating Moorer, who had been urging that measure for eight years. According to military historians, Linebacker did exactly what Nixon, Moorer, and Haig desired: It “ruined North Vietnam’s economy, paralyzed its transportation system, reduced imports by 80 percent, and exhausted its air defenses.”
Nonetheless, ARVN units continued to fall back. The North Vietnamese captured several large cities. Abrams cabled that the situation was no longer looking good.
Once again, at an important juncture in a battle, Nixon sent Haig to Saigon. And once again Haig returned and told the president that the South Vietnamese forces had “not been outclassed or outfought as in the past,” that Abrams was only being “alarmist.” Yet in retrospect the opposite seems true: While the South Vietnamese forces, aided by American power, had successfully fended off the largest attacks of the war, the net effect of the Easter Offensive was that the South lost more troops than it could replace, and the North overran a sizable portion of South Vietnam that it never again relinquished.
In the Reagan years, it became an article of conservative faith that the “success” of repelling the Easter Offensive could have led to a “win” in South Vietnam. This belief was coupled with a second assertion, that the United States had not been able to capitalize on the success because of a “cut and run” policy that had been enacted into law by a liberal Democratic Congress. Yet the facts contradict this misreading: Some 475,000 U.S. troops had already been brought home before Easter 1972, and among the remaining forces seasoned veterans had largely been replaced by younger and greener recruits. Those factors compromised any potential U.S.-led ground invasion of North Vietnam and any chance of the United States “winning” the war after repelling the Easter Offensive and the successful Linebacker bombing campaign.
THE MOST NIXONIAN of foreign policy moments occurred during that Easter Offensive, as Nixon enjoyed his capacity to drink toasts with the Soviet leaders in Moscow and sign historic agreements to limit nuclear weapons even as his regular-ordnance bombs destroyed the Soviets’ ally North Vietnam. He had left detailed orders with Haig to ensure no “letting up” of the bombing during his visit, to prevent any newspaper from writing that “we made a deal with the Russians to cool it in Vietnam while trying to negotiate agreements with them in Moscow”—even though Nixon had agreed to spare the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong for precisely that purpose.
Moorer and his fellow Chiefs, however, judged the conjunction of bombing and treaty signing as incongruous at best, and at worst as bordering on treason—a fraternizing with the ultimate enemy while engaged in the largest battle of a long war.
For months before the summit, the Chiefs had been alarmed by reports from SALT negotiators that Kissinger was prepared to allow the Soviets to keep building SLBMs despite the United States having canceled its own new ones. This had produced what a SALT historian called an “open revolt” in which “Moorer, Laird, and Jackson…agreed with conservatives” that for the Soviets détente was simply a diplomatic cover permitting the continuation of the expansionist Brezhnev Doctrine. Now, while Nixon and Kissinger negotiated in Moscow, back in Washington Al Haig took up the cudgels on SLBM. As Haig recalled in 2000, one evening during that 1972 summit, “disturbed” by the SLBM decision, he roused Nixon and Kissinger “out of bed at midnight and made them renegotiate on the submarine issue for four hours, because they had made a profound mistake and the Chiefs wouldn’t agree to it. Nor would I.” He added that Fritz Kraemer had become “profoundly disappointed” with Kissinger over the details of the SALT agreement.
“It is no comfort that the liberals will praise the agreement,” Nixon warned Haig upon his return, thinking about the chances of Senate ratification. “But let us remember that the liberals will never support us—the hawks are our hard core, and we must do everything we can to keep them from jumping ship after getting their enthusiasm restored as a result of our [bombing] operation in the North.” Nixon was right: The most effective public opponent of the Nixon policies became Scoop Jackson, who regularly coordinated his actions with the Chiefs, Nitze, other hard-liners—and with Haig. Philip Odeen, an NSC staffer on arms control, later recalled that the White House took “a lot of pressure…from Scoop Jackson and people who shared his views, a lot of it coming through Al Haig.”
The conservative hawks had new allies in the fight to derail the Moscow accords: the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov and the exiled novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who expressed sentiments similar to the longtime warnings from Kraemer, Burnham, and the Buckleys not to trust the Soviets. In particular, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn echoed Kraemer’s objections to any pact on the grounds of moral relativism, as exemplified by the Nixon administration’s willingness to ignore the Soviets’ massive human rights violations in an unseemly rush to sign treaties with Moscow that would appeal to the American public. Moreover, Jackson added, in pursuit of the agreement the administration was continuing to trade with the Soviets, bolstering their economy rather than wrecking it, and thereby hastening the fall of the Soviet empire.
Jackson objected to many specifics of the ABM and SALT agreements, charging that they were either significantly flawed, to the detriment of the United States, or dangerously ambiguous. The Soviets refused, for instance, to specify the “throw weight” of their missiles or to give precise definitions to the terms “light” and “heavy” missiles. Though Jackson lacked the votes to defeat the ABM and SALT agreements, he managed to delay them by voicing such objections, forcing the administration to go on record with responses that would limit its later parameters for negotiation. As Odeen recalled, “What the issues and goals were going to be for SALT II in part came out of a group on the Hill, Richard Perle [and others who] had a lot of clout with the White House political types.”
ON MAY 15, George Wallace was shot and nearly killed while campaigning in Maryland. The news of Wallace’s fate—he would survive but be permanently paralyzed—did not make Nixon unhappy. The timing also allowed him to exert greater control over the investigation: J. Edgar Hoover had died less than two weeks before, and the FBI’s new acting head, Nixon appointee L. Patrick Gray III, was easily able to wrest supervision of the case (and of the shooter, Arthur Bremer) away from local and state police.
From his hospital bed, Wallace continued to win primaries—Maryland, Michigan, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Nixon believed that the Democrats would never nominate Wallace but feared that he might run on an independent line, and so Nixon importuned the Reverend Billy Graham to try to persuade him to drop out entirely. Ultimately, however, the matter was decided at the polls: As the primaries moved into northern states, George McGovern gained ground, and by early June the South Dakotan had outdistanced Wallace and all but wrapped up the nomination.
AS MOST PEOPLE know, late on the night of June 17, 1972, police caught burglars inside the Watergate office building headquarters of the Democratic National Committee—burglars later found to have been in the pay of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). But many aspects of that burglary have escaped attention. For instance, during the preparations for the burglary, the burglars—a group of Cuban ex-CIA operatives—ran into instances of such poor planning that they later told interviewers that they thought it unworthy of their CIA-veteran leaders, Hunt and McCord. Those leaders had taken the burglars’ IDs from them and had issued them easily traceable hotel keys and new hundred-dollar bills, which were found upon their arrest. The currency led investigators down a clear money trail, and to serious trouble for the White House. The burglars also had an additional mysterious item seized by the police—a key that fit only one lock in the DNC offices. It opened the desk of a DNC secretary who did not work directly with Chairman Larry O’Brien or other top officials in the office—a fact that belied later claims that the burglary was aimed at O’Brien or those other officials.
Bob Woodward, recently hired at the Washington Post, began his investigations into Watergate when he attended the burglars’ arraignment on June 18. The presence of the Cubans and McCord at the arraignment startled Woodward. When McCord told the judge he’d recently retired from the CIA, the reporter muttered, “Holy shit! The CIA.” But he didn’t pursue the angle, though Post managing editor Ben Bradlee was a longtime friend of CIA director Helms and a brother-in-law to Cord Meyer, the Agency’s assistant director for plans.
Bob Bennett, today a senator from Utah, was then head of Mullen and Company, a public relations firm and CIA front that employed Hunt. Later, a CIA memo from agent Martin Lukoskie described Bennett as boasting of feeding stories to Woodward to steer him away from the CIA’s hand in the Watergate affair. Precisely which stories has never been documented, but after making his own inquiries White House counselor Chuck Colson came to believe that Bennett had pointed various reporters toward him in the period just after the break-in. Later, when the Senate Watergate Committee tried to get the CIA to confirm or deny whether Woodward had ever worked for or been associated with the Agency, the committee did not receive a satisfactory answer; a few hours after Senator Howard Baker sent a memo to the director about this, Woodward called Baker to complain—an action that does nothing to dispel the notion of a possible working conduit between the CIA and the Washington Post.
WHEN NIXON LEARNED of the attempted burglary at the Watergate, according to everyone he interacted with on that day, he was incredulous. Since he was not in Washington when the news came, his immediate reaction was not preserved on tape, but it likely resembled the surprise he displayed on learning of the Pentagon Papers leak in the spring of 1971, and after hearing about the extent of the Moorer-Radford spy ring that December. To Nixon, it made no sense politically for anyone to have targeted the Washington DNC headquarters: After all, the party’s chief officials were in Miami, the Democratic nomination was wrapped up, and of all his potential rivals the Democrats had chosen McGovern, the easiest candidate for him to defeat.
Nixon did not publicly acknowledge, then or ever, that the climate he had created in the White House (and, by extension, in the CRP) had emboldened others to conceive the break-in. Nor did he insist on finding and exposing those who might have ordered the break-in. Rather, because of his inaction, his employees immediately began a cover-up of White House involvement in that planning. They presumed that he wanted this cover-up, and he gave them no reason to think otherwise.
By June 23, six days after the break-in, this cover-up was already threatening to unravel. In a meeting that day, White House officials told the CIA to try to block the FBI’s efforts to investigate the matter. A tape of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman recounting that order later became known as the “smoking gun” when revealed in transcript form in late July 1974, it led directly to Nixon’s resignation.
John Wesley Dean III, the White House counsel, was at the center of these cover-up activities. Dean, who had roomed with Barry Goldwater, Jr., at Staunton Military Academy and was close to Senator Goldwater, had entered the administration after working as chief minority counsel to Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee and on a National Commission on the Reform of Federal Criminal Law. An associate deputy attorney general under John Mitchell in the Department of Justice for a time, he had then been brought over to the White House. In July 1970, when White House counsel John Ehrlichman moved up a notch, Dean was given his position.
On June 21, 1972, four days after the Watergate break-in, Ehrlichman had phoned the FBI to let Pat Gray know that Dean would be handling the matter for the White House; Dean then met with Gray and informed him that he would sit in on all FBI interviews of White House personnel. According to Gray’s memoir, Dean learned late on June 22, from a visit to Gray at FBI headquarters, that the FBI had traced the money carried by the burglars, and that the top men at the FBI, in trying to figure out the complicated money trail, had raised the possibility that they might have stumbled on a CIA operation because the trail led into Mexico. According to Gray, he also told Dean he’d already spoken that afternoon with CIA director Helms, who denied any connection between the CIA and the break-in. “There is no CIA involvement,” read a note Gray penned during his conversation with Helms, time-dated at 5:37 P.M. Gray writes that he also reiterated to Dean on June 23 that, although the FBI had not entirely ruled out some CIA connection, in regard specifically to the money trail, “Dick Helms has told me the Agency has no involvement in this.”
At 8:15 A.M. on June 23, 1972, Dean telephoned Haldeman to say that the FBI was “out of control.” The Bureau had traced the hundred-dollar bills, and later that very day, Dean warned, the Bureau would learn why a check from a Nixon reelection campaign contributor, written on a Mexican bank, had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars. “Our problem now is to stop the FBI from opening up a whole lot of other things,” Dean said, according to Haldeman’s contemporaneous notes. Dean added that Mitchell and CRP finance chairman Maurice Stans wanted the Mexican bank inquiry stopped because they were worried that the FBI would uncover and reveal the names of CRP contributors who had been guaranteed anonymity. Dean further told Haldeman that the FBI believed that the people behind the burglary were CIA, and that Mitchell had suggested that Haldeman have Dick Walters—the Agency’s new deputy director—call Gray, “and maybe the CIA can turn off the FBI down there in Mexico.”
Mitchell’s logs show no conversations between Mitchell and Dean on June 22 or on the morning of June 23, but Dean’s invocation of Mitchell’s name carried weight with Haldeman, as it did with Nixon when Haldeman repeated Dean’s message to the president. Haldeman said that Dean “analyzed very carefully last night and concludes, concurs with Mitchell’s recommendation that the only way to solve this” was to have the CIA block the FBI. Nixon adopted the blocking idea. He instructed Haldeman to speak to Walters and get it done. Nixon also suggested that pressure could be put on Helms by mentioning that Hunt’s long involvement with the Cubans would “open up whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”
Walters had been appointed deputy director at Nixon’s request. Nixon’s long association with Walters gave him reason to expect the deputy director to be responsive when he and Agency director Helms came to the White House to meet with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. In that meeting, Helms was compliant, especially after Haldeman mentioned the Bay of Pigs—which, as Nixon expected, infuriated and cowed Helms. The CIA director later testified that he agreed to have Walters call Gray because it was possible the president knew about a Mexico CIA operation that even Helms himself was unaware of.
According to Gray’s memoir, Walters came to see him and said, “If the investigation gets pushed further south of the border, it could trespass onto some of our covert projects. Since you’ve got five men under arrest, it will be best to taper the matter off here.” Walters then referred to an interagency agreement under which the FBI and CIA agreed not to expose the other’s sources. Gray agreed that the investigation would be handled “in a manner that would not hamper the CIA.”
In several phone calls and meetings between June 23 and 28, according to Walters, Dean pressured him unsuccessfully to have the CIA put up bail and otherwise pay for the burglars. On the twenty-eighth, Walters—who usually relied on his phenomenal memory—took the uncharacteristic step of recording in several memcons his June 23 White House visit, his conversations with Gray, and his subsequent interchanges with Dean. These memoranda effectively enmeshed the White House in having the CIA obstruct the FBI. The Walters memcons would become among the most important documents in the history of Watergate. They would also be critical to the right’s campaign to undermine Nixon.
IN AUGUST, WHEN the Senate took up a resolution to ratify the SALT treaty with the USSR, Scoop Jackson introduced an amendment that would change the parameters of future agreements. It had been cooked up by Perle and another, uncredited contributor, Fred Charles Iklé. The author of an important historical study on how modern wars ended, Iklé had been a strategist at RAND for some years. Reliably anti-Communist and suspicious of arms control efforts, he had been hired by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), the State Department division responsible for directly negotiating with the Soviets on arms control.
The amendment required that the United States would not be limited to a lower level of strategic forces than that of the Soviet Union. Nixon did not like it, but he worried that the ABM and SALT agreements might fail if Jackson withheld his support. Dismissing that possibility, Kissinger recommended rejecting the amendment. Nixon overruled him and accepted it. Jackson then supported the SALT I treaty, which passed by an 88–2 margin.
This overwhelming vote—in a Senate still deeply divided into hawks and doves on the Vietnam War, and during an election year in which Democrats wanted to accentuate their differences from Republicans—was a significant triumph for the White House. Nixon had completed a far-reaching agreement with America’s principal Cold War enemy, and on terms so mainstream that even the seriously polarized Senate had united to support it.
But this was the high point for détente in the Nixon years. Although the superpowers agreed to limit ABM sites to two apiece, and to freeze the number of offensive missile launchers, there was no agreement on stopping either side from developing MIRVs to replace MRVs, and in other ways the SALT I treaty reflected its name: it was an “Interim Agreement” that covered only “Certain Measures.” Substantial further work would be required in order to make meaningful inroads in halting the nuclear arms race and in achieving true cooperation between the superpowers. Because of opposition from Jackson, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and those who agreed with their hard-line anti-Soviet positions, almost no further progress was made during the Nixon years.
Richard Perle, Jackson’s assistant, had become more polished and more hard-line since 1969. According to Douglas Feith, who later worked as a summer intern for Jackson, Perle “helped make Jackson more effective than Jackson otherwise would have been.” This effectiveness was not limited to opposing SALT I. Perle also helped generate another amendment, this one to a U.S.-Soviet trade bill that took Jackson’s fight against Nixon’s policies to a new level. Eventually known as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment for its initial sponsors in the Senate and House, it penalized the USSR on trade unless Russian Jews were permitted freer emigration. Kissinger hated this amendment because it constrained his ability to maneuver. Nixon also publicly disagreed with Jackson-Vanik, but he was dogged by polls showing that his stance was costing him electoral support from American Jews.
As a result of this impasse, on September 30, 1972, Nixon invited Senator Jackson for a stroll in the Rose Garden. During their walk—beyond the reach of aides or microphones—they made a deal. Jackson agreed to withdraw Jackson-Vanik and to lobby against fellow Democrats’ attempts to make Jewish emigration an election issue. In exchange Nixon agreed to fire twelve members of ACDA whom Jackson disliked, plus chairman Gerard Smith, and to allow Jackson to choose their replacements.
Nixon seems not to have recognized that, in allowing Jackson to choose the administration’s arms control negotiators with the USSR, he was handing the SALT talks to men whose predilections were directly contrary to his own and Kissinger’s. The president doubtless thought that he and Kissinger would be able to use their back channels and personal diplomacy to override the bureaucrats on arms control. But that notion did not take into account the makeup of Jackson’s revamped ACDA—including Iklé as the new director; Paul Nitze; and a new member, Jackson’s longtime friend General Edward Rowny, a Kraemer pal and a hard-line anti-Communist. Iklé would soon hire Paul Wolfowitz, whose doctoral thesis had been on nuclear proliferation, to join the group. The formidable combination that resulted—Iklé, Rowny, Nitze, Wolfowitz, Moorer, Zumwalt, Jackson, and Perle—would mount serious challenges to Nixon’s policies toward the USSR, and all but knock the détente express off the rails.
“IT LOOKS LIKE we’ve got three out of three, Mr. President,” Kissinger said on returning from Paris in early October. Nixon had achieved a détente treaty with the Soviets, rapprochement with China, and, now, apparently, agreement with the North Vietnamese on a peace accord to end the Vietnam War. At the celebratory dinner—steaks, a Chateau Lafite Rothschild—Nixon noted in his diary that Haig “seemed rather subdued.”
By late October 1972, during the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Nixon’s lead in the polls was so enormous, and the electorate’s apparent distaste for McGovern was so strong, that liberal Democrats such as former senator Eugene McCarthy assured Kissinger that they weren’t lifting a finger on behalf of their party’s nominee. Nixon’s reelection seemed assured.
Although peace in Vietnam was the goal most fervently desired by the American public, the other two accomplishments—bringing Red China into the family of nations, and achieving some measure of détente with the Soviet Union—would have longer-lasting implications, leading eventually to the end of the Cold War. But few people saw the forthcoming peace in Vietnam—not yet assured, despite Kissinger’s jubilation—as a victory. For those on the left, peace in Vietnam came too late and at too great a cost in American lives. For those on the right, it was not a peace but a surrender, a decision to walk away from a true confrontation with the forces of evil.
At this significant moment, Nixon invited to the White House a man who had been sending him strategy memos for years, and who had at last been publicly identified as Kissinger’s mentor: Dr. Fritz Kraemer.