BRENT SCOWCROFT BEGAN working as deputy national security advisor at the start of Richard Nixon’s second term in office—which also marked the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency. The process was a long and painful one. Although the Watergate burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate apartment complex on June 17, 1972, the story was slow to develop, with only the Washington Post and then the New York Times investigating. The scandal broke open in March 1973 when James A. McCord, one of the four men arrested in the Watergate break-in, wrote to Judge John Sirica claiming that the now-indicted burglars had lied at the behest of John Dean, counsel to the president, and John Mitchell, the attorney general. On April 20, 1973, Nixon fired Dean, and aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman resigned. On May 22, 1974, Scowcroft learned that Nixon had lied about the cover-up in his statement eleven months previously, on June 23, 1973. On July 31, 1974, Scowcroft found out from chief of staff Alexander Haig that there was a problem with the White House tapes.114 And on August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned from office.
Watergate damaged the US government’s foreign policy, hampered its ability to act in Vietnam, eroded the momentum for SALT II, and disrupted the prospects for a stable US-Soviet relationship.115 Besides hurting Nixon’s effectiveness internationally, it weakened his political power domestically vis-à-vis Congress, the press, and the public. It also depressed the president psychologically, sapping his energy and diverting his attention from governing.
Solitary by nature, Nixon became even more reclusive and withdrawn as the scandal worsened and spread—so much so that over the “last sixteen months” of the Nixon presidency, William L. Stearman of the NSC staff recalled, “Al Haig was the President of the United States.” Because Nixon “was so totally wrapped up in Watergate . . . he was a part-time president at best.” Haig was running “the day-to-day operations,” Stearman observed, and making most of the decisions. And everyone in the White House “more or less assumed this was the case,” he added. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski called Haig the nation’s “thirty-seventh-and-a-half president” in light of his role in the period before Nixon’s resignation.116
Haig himself remembered the White House officials being “stressed to the limit” during the last weeks and months of the Nixon presidency, with most of them simply “seeing [their] way through . . . holding things together” as best as they could.117
In consequence, as the Watergate scandal grew increasingly serious and as Haig played an ever larger role running the government, Scowcroft began working more and more closely with Nixon’s chief of staff.
The two had an unusual relationship. They were former classmates and fellow junior faculty members at West Point; Haig had been brought back as a tactical officer, responsible for the day-to-day command and discipline of the corps of cadets. Scowcroft said that he and Haig were “very close” when they first overlapped in the White House. Haig helped keep Scowcroft informed, since Kissinger often kept important information from his deputy (and everyone else, for that matter). And when the relationship between Kissinger and Haig soured, Scowcroft and Haig still “had a relationship there that worked very well,” one that allowed for a “gradual evolution” of Scowcroft’s responsibilities as deputy national security advisor, Scowcroft noted. He conceded he was able to interact with Haig “in a more benign and more nuanced way” than could Kissinger.
Yet Scowcroft and Haig were also wary of each other, as Walter Isaacson reports in his biography of Kissinger. Haig was suspicious of his classmate and protective of his position, and Scowcroft didn’t fully trust or feel comfortable with Haig.118 Scowcroft admits they had a complicated relationship; he and Haig were each a little uncertain and somewhat distrustful of the other. Scowcroft describes Haig and him as getting along “okay”—not a great endorsement.119
Besides elevating Haig to de facto president, Watergate exacerbated Nixon and Kissinger’s tense, difficult, and in many ways perverse relationship.120 Each man was insecure, socially awkward, and, from his own perspective, an outsider (although the longer Kissinger held office the more he shed his social awkwardness and outsider status). Nixon resented Kissinger’s celebrity and his tendency to take credit for the administration’s achievements; Nixon didn’t allow Kissinger to give his first televised press conference until mid-1972 or make his first on-the-record speech until April 1973, lest he be outshined. Conversely, Kissinger thought Nixon took undue credit for what Kissinger himself had accomplished.
Scowcroft was caught in the middle. “Richard Nixon is perhaps the most complicated personality that I have ever encountered,” he commented, “a mixture of compulsions, fears, and so on.” Neither was “Henry Kissinger . . . a simple personality,” he added. “And the interaction of the two was quite a burden for me, who frequently found myself in between them. The two of them admired each other, but each was jealous of the other. Watching them operate was awesome. Dealing between the two of them, as I had to do, was a very complicated human process.”121
Scowcroft thought that both men were brilliant—imaginative, unpredictable, and ambitious to reshape the course of American history. He regarded Nixon as the better global strategist, someone who was “a deep thinker” as well as “quite wise.”122 Nixon was the first US president to use diplomacy to take advantage of the split between the Soviet Union and China; later he fully approved of Scowcroft and Bush’s response to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and he quickly reached out to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union to help steer it toward a path of integration within the larger international community.
Yet to speak of a Nixon-Kissinger rift, as some did, was too strong a claim, in Scowcroft’s view. Each man needed the other for his continued political success, at least until Nixon’s final days in office. Moreover, they were intellectually compatible, they implicitly trusted each other’s judgment, and they usually found ways to accommodate each other.123
One such accommodation was deciding what position Scowcroft would have in the administration. In May 1973, after Haldeman’s forced resignation as chief of staff, Nixon wanted to appoint Scowcroft to that role, but according to Rose Mary Woods, Kissinger wouldn’t agree to release him. It wasn’t Nixon’s style to force the issue, so Haig got the job instead.124
Watergate propelled Scowcroft into serving as a go-between for Nixon and Kissinger and collaborating more with Haig. The scandal affected him in other ways, too. Well before Nixon resigned, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger developed a fourteen-step plan for a potential presidential transition, Woodward and Bernstein reported in The Final Days. Separately, Kissinger telephoned fourteen key foreign ambassadors and initiated presidential messages to the leaders of thirty-seven foreign countries to ensure the continuity of US foreign policy. Fearful of what a desperate Nixon might do, Kissinger and Haig also arranged for the US military to clear any presidential commands with them before carrying them out.125
As the president became more removed from governing, Scowcroft, who was one of the few people Nixon trusted, sometimes received odd late-night demands from him. After a martini or two, Nixon “would order all sorts of unusual things to be done—which I didn’t do—and the next morning he’d’ve forgotten all about it.” While the president didn’t drink much, Scowcroft said, “alcohol affected him strongly.” So he knew to essentially ignore Nixon “when he got in that kind of a mood.” And the next day, the president almost always “never mentioned the evening before.”126
Another weird—and famous—nighttime incident involved Kissinger, who told Scowcroft and Eagleburger that late one evening Nixon had asked him to kneel down with him and pray, which they did. Kissinger said the president was slurring his words and that Nixon asked him not to let anyone know “I was not strong.”127
The day before he resigned, Nixon called Scowcroft and two or three others—Scowcroft didn’t identify them—to plan “some mundane thing that he wanted done. . . . It was a real human tragedy,” in his description. Nixon “was trying to maintain the spirit of normalcy” when his world was crashing down around him. Scowcroft learned the next day, on August 6, that the president didn’t have the votes in the Senate to defeat the resolution for impeachment.128 That spelled the end of his administration.
On September 8, a month after the resignation, President Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he might have committed in connection with the Watergate scandal. The controversial decision put an end to Ford’s honeymoon with Congress, the press, and the American public. It’s possible that some sort of a deal between Ford and Nixon had been brokered through Haig or arranged by Ford’s legal aide, Philip Buchen. The vice president and Haig discussed the president’s power to pardon in a meeting on August 1, 1974, when Ford found out that Nixon planned to resign, but there is no hard evidence of any sort of deal. To Ford, Scowcroft, and other White House officials, the pardon made sense and was the right thing to do given the circumstances.129
Despite Scowcroft’s position as an insider within the Nixon White House and his close relationship with the president, he escaped being tarnished by the Watergate scandal. Not so Henry Kissinger.130 Because of the wiretaps he’d put on the telephones of his NSC aides (such as Morton Halperin) and staff members in the office of the secretary of defense, Kissinger came under attack for having his own secret taping system. (Scowcroft said he knew about the “dead key” that allowed secretaries and others—such as him—to listen in on Kissinger’s phone conversations. The secretaries would then type transcriptions of these “telcons,” which Kissinger sometimes edited.)131 There was speculation, too, that the secretary of state had known of the break-ins (including an earlier one on May 28, 1972) and the cover-up much earlier than he admitted, through David Young, one of his former aides who co-managed the political intelligence unit known as the “White House Plumbers.”
But despite the increased criticism being directed at Kissinger and the White House, Nixon’s resignation initially gave Kissinger even more power. Whereas Nixon usually had the upper hand when dealing with Kissinger, Ford, with his limited foreign policy experience, usually deferred to his secretary of state. And given his role as de facto national security advisor and his close relationships with both Kissinger and Ford, Scowcroft also acquired more influence on US foreign policy.
President Ford had gotten to know Scowcroft through a series of weekly one-on-one briefings, up to two hours in length, given by the deputy national security advisor to Ford when he was vice president. These afternoon tutorials had begun in October 1973 at President Nixon’s request, following Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation, and covered a range of complex topics in international politics and US national security. Their purpose was to educate Ford, since the new vice president had mostly focused on budgetary and domestic issues when he was a member of Congress. Although Kissinger had started off doing the briefings, Scowcroft soon took over and handled virtually all of them from November 1973 through early August 1974.132
Scowcroft conducted the tutorials “with phenomenal intensity,” according to White House witnesses. But rather than merely lecture Ford, he had the NSC staff draft short papers, no more than twelve pages in length, on major issues such as arms control, US-Japan policy, human rights, and specific European allies. Each week, he assigned a paper for Ford to read and digest in advance of their meeting. Scowcroft would brief Ford on what had happened around the world that week that affected the United States, then lead a discussion about the issue covered by that week’s paper. In this way the vice president grew familiar with the context and development of national security policy, came to learn some of the ins and outs of current events, and acquired a working knowledge of the “personalities and idiosyncrasies of the principal actors in foreign affairs.”133
The informal tutoring forged a close bond between the two, one that strengthened further once Ford became president, since Scowcroft now went in to see him three or four times a day for up to a half hour at a time, gave him daily memos on pressing issues, and, when solicited, offered him advice. In a difficult time, the national security expert John Prados writes, Scowcroft was “a rock of stability.”134
Scowcroft recognized that his relationship with Ford was much closer than the one he had had with Nixon. It was hard for anyone to get close to Richard Nixon, even his wife, Pat. Ford was much less complicated than his predecessor. He’d never sought the White House; in fact, he probably would have been content to stay on as House minority leader and perhaps become Speaker of the House before retiring from Congress and perhaps taking up another occupation.135 After being thrust into the presidency, Ford initially planned not to run for election in his own right, changing his mind only to avoid being a lame-duck president for a full two and a half years.136
Rather than an “imperial president,” Ford was personally modest, down-to-earth, and plainspoken. He was also convivial, relaxed, comfortable with himself, and, like Scowcroft, secure enough not to let Kissinger’s “huge personality” bother him. Both he and Scowcroft had grown up in middle America, were moderate to conservative Republicans, and were deeply patriotic. As they got to know each other, Ford came to greatly respect Scowcroft’s first-rate intellect, independent thinking, and utter reliability.137 Scowcroft, in turn, became very fond of Gerald Ford. And after the Ford presidency, the two stayed close. Ford was “a very warm, good-hearted human being,” Scowcroft said, and “a very dear friend.”138 Their personal bond helped them forge an effective policy partnership.
EVEN APART FROM Watergate, the mid-1970s were a period of enormous conflict and crisis in American society and in US foreign policy. The issues were many: the continuing war in Vietnam; strained US-Soviet relations and the deterioration of détente; a crisis in the intelligence community; turmoil in Europe over economics, party politics, and terrorist organizations such as the Irish Republican Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang; and the Yom Kippur War, the OPEC embargo, and the first oil crisis of 1973, followed by a period of high inflation, large commodity price increases, and, briefly, wage and price controls.
These crises were played out against a domestic backdrop of political polarization. Americans’ trust in the federal government plummeted. Whereas 76 percent of the public had trusted the government “almost always” or “most of the time” in 1964, according to public opinion surveys conducted by the National Election Study, by 1974 only 36 percent of Americans trusted their “government in Washington to do what is right.” Once Americans lost that trust, they never regained it.139
Democrats in Congress acted boldly against Nixon and then Ford. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973, designed to prevent future presidents from waging undeclared wars like that in Vietnam. They passed revisions to the Freedom of Information Act to force improved access to executive branch materials. They enacted the Privacy Act in 1974, allowing Americans to inquire what information federal agencies had on them in their files. They passed the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, also in 1974, which required the president to inform Congress of all covert operations. And they passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act over Nixon’s veto, thereby giving rise to the budget reconciliation procedure (what is now just termed “reconciliation,” since it has been applied to non-budget-related legislation as well), which gave Congress enhanced control over federal spending.
In 1974, the so-called Watergate babies—the seventy-five Democrats and thirteen Republicans elected as new members of the Ninety-Fourth Congress—gave the Democrats majorities in both houses of Congress. Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and other hawkish Democrats were joined in their opposition to the Ford administration by Albert Wohlstetter, Paul Nitze, and other prominent foreign policy experts, military strategists, and staunch anticommunists. Many later became members of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) and eventually “neoconservatives” (the term was coined in 1973 but wasn’t in widespread use until the 1980s). Helping the CPD and their allies were key members of the press, particularly syndicated columnist Robert Novak and New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire.
The Ford White House had to swim against these fierce political currents. Scowcroft recalled that he and his colleagues had a “very defensive attitude” and that they took on a “bunker mentality.” Events, he said, were “weighing us down.” The Ford administration’s difficulties were exacerbated by its own internal divisions. Holdovers from the Nixon administration, including Kissinger and Scowcroft, favored détente, US-Soviet arms control agreements, closer US-China ties, and US internationalism. Other officials who had been with Ford when he was vice president and a congressman, including Robert Hartmann, Ford’s chief speechwriter, were more skeptical of the Soviet Union, more protective of Nationalist China, and less internationalist. Meanwhile, those surrounding Donald Rumsfeld (who served as Ford’s White House chief of staff and then as his secretary of defense)—a group that included press secretary Ron Nessen and deputy chief of staff Dick Cheney—were more pragmatic than the Hartmann group and less ideological.140
Scowcroft kept away from controversy and out of public view, devoting his efforts to US-Soviet relations, Vietnam, problems in the Middle East, Angola and other countries in southern Africa, intelligence, and relations with US allies with respect to SALT, NATO, and conventional arms control. Kissinger still dominated the conceptualization and formulation of US foreign policy and grand strategy. But Scowcroft was someone who could efficiently handle difficult national security issues because of his adeptness as a bureaucratic operator, a quality that had first become evident during his years as an up-and-coming Air Force officer collecting aeronautical intelligence in Yugoslavia and ensuring the success of the US Air Force’s component of Vietnamization.
Scowcroft’s capacity as a strategist—that is, a strategic thinker with the power to directly influence US foreign policy and national security by having his hands on the levers of government—would emerge for the first time in the mid-1970s. It would become increasingly evident the longer he worked on national security policy at the highest levels. But Scowcroft was a policy implementer and bureaucratic operator—a “fixer”—before he became a strategist.
Even in the Yom Kippur War that began on October 6, 1973, Scowcroft’s chief role was logistical. When the war started, Kissinger was in New York and Scowcroft was in Washington, where he served as an important back channel to Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. With Israel fighting on two fronts—against Egypt across the Suez and through the Sinai, and against the Syrians in the Golan Heights—the Israelis immediately petitioned the United States for resupply of armaments. Kissinger and Nixon agreed to a limited resupply, and the Israelis sent over an unmarked El Al 747 to pick up Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, bomb racks, and ammunition.
But Kenneth Rush in the State Department, William Clements in the Defense Department, and Nixon himself resisted any extensive resupply. The president wanted to be tough; he was confident that the Israelis would win (“Thank God,” he said), and he bemoaned the fact that now they would “be even more impossible to deal with than before.”
By the fourth day of fighting, however, it was clear that Israel was in serious trouble. The Israeli forces had suffered extraordinary losses, on the order of forty-nine airplanes (including fourteen Phantom F-4s) and five hundred tanks, and they were running out of equipment and ammunition. Israeli leaders weren’t even sure they could hold on.
In a White House meeting early on October 9, the gruff and defiant Ambassador Dinitz insisted on an extensive resupply and hinted at an Israeli nuclear response against Egyptian and Syrian targets. Kissinger and Nixon changed their minds, promising that the United States not only would begin a modest resupply but also would eventually replace all lost Israeli matériel—so long as both parties agreed to keep it quiet.141 At about the same time, and making the administration’s decision much easier, the Soviets had started a massive airlift to Syria using some twenty Soviet transport aircraft.142
Yet Kissinger insisted on using chartered planes rather than Air Force cargo planes, against the wishes of the Defense Department, because he didn’t want the United States associated with an Israeli humiliation of Arab states. However, the fleet of civilian aircraft that Scowcroft coordinated with Israel ultimately wouldn’t undertake the mission because of the perceived danger. Neither did the Pentagon insist that they do so.
When the news reached the White House of the delay in resupplying Israel, they switched to USAF planes. But even then there were more delays. Scowcroft described Schlesinger as being unhelpful (calling the defense secretary “my chief foot-dragger”) in finding USAF cargo planes to lend to the effort.143 Nonetheless, under Operation Nickel Grass, the US government transported a total of over 22,000 tons of supplies, including almost 9,000 tons before the end of the war, in 567 missions; El Al planes flew another 5,500 tons with 170 flights. The first planes arrived on October 13, to the great relief of the Israelis, delivering more in one day than the Soviet aircraft had brought to Syria in the previous four days combined. By the end of the war, Israel received dozens of aircraft of different sorts, 200 tanks, 250 armored personnel vehicles, massive quantities of 105 mm, 155 mm, and 175 mm ammunition, and new tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided (TOW) missiles from the airlifts as well as sealifts that continued after the cease-fire on October 25, 1973.
When Israeli forces surrounded the Egyptian Third Army in the Sinai on October 19, the Soviets sent Kissinger a message saying they wanted to negotiate a cease-fire. So he flew to Moscow—on the same evening as the Watergate crisis that came to be called the “Saturday Night Massacre,” with the firing of White House special prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of attorney general Elliott Richardson and deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus. Kissinger didn’t want the plenary negotiating authority Nixon had given him, for he “didn’t want to be in the firing line as making the agreement by himself,” the deputy national security advisor noted. Kissinger’s reasoning was that he wanted to have more time—the delay of going back and forth to the president—so the Israelis could improve their position. When Kissinger and the Soviets quickly negotiated a cease-fire, the Israelis weren’t happy, since they had not been able to destroy the Third Army, but for Kissinger, “turning an Arab setback into a debacle” didn’t represent a “vital interest” for the United States.144
When the Soviets wanted to send in their troops after the cease-fire and there was evidence of a Soviet airlift fleet, Kissinger decided to raise the military alert level from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 3—not to prepare for war, but to send a clear signal that the Soviets couldn’t mistake. The last thing the United States wanted, Scowcroft noted, was Soviet troops in the Middle East. After checking that the cable traffic raising the military alert level had been seen, Kissinger called Dobrynin and gave him the message. Dobrynin said that the airlift planes had never contained troops, and that it was “all a big mistake.” Perhaps, but the Soviets had known of the Egyptian attack in advance, according to Robert Gates (a CIA analyst at the time), and even though this era was the high-water mark of détente, they hadn’t seen fit to warn the United States.145
It was over the course of the subsequent negotiations that Scowcroft got to know and respect Egyptian leader Anwar El Sadat. (At one point, Nixon gave Sadat a ride in the helicopter he and Scowcroft were using, Marine Corps One.) Egypt ended up throwing out the Soviets, perhaps because, in Scowcroft’s words, Sadat “was tired of the highhandedness of the Russians.”146
In the mid-1970s, Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford repeatedly depended on Scowcroft to quietly resolve difficult issues or sensitive problems in US national security policy. Prominent among such delicate issues were foreign military sales.
“I wanted you to meet General Scowcroft,” Kissinger told Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister in June 1974 at the Royal Guest Palace in Saudi Arabia. “He handles all the sensitive business in the White House for the President and me.” In this instance, “the sensitive business” was the sale of TOW antitank missiles to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.147 A year earlier, when Kissinger and Schlesinger discussed getting military equipment to Egypt in April 1973, Kissinger had told the secretary of defense to “let [Gen. John A.] Wickham and Scowcroft work out a $180 million package.”148 In August of the same year, when the Defense Department had questions about the sale of British-made Rolls-Royce engines, Kissinger told Schlesinger, “Brent will work it out with you . . . [and] one of the guys at ISA” (the Department of Defense’s Office of International Security Affairs, which handled the US military’s cooperation with and sales to foreign governments).149 And when the CIA found out in early 1974 that Soviet advisers had been seen around Damascus, Syria, in increased numbers and that Syria was transferring large amounts of supplies to front-line units, Kissinger checked with Scowcroft to see if the Pentagon had shipped the agreed-upon matériel to the Israelis. Scowcroft assured him that it had.150
Arms sales such as these represented an important part of US foreign policy, since selling weapons to other countries empowered those countries and enabled them to serve as the United States’ surrogates. They could thereby provide the White House with significantly cheaper and more convenient military and strategic options than would be available were the United States to act on its own. For example, US arms sales to Taiwan might raise the cost to China of intervening militarily, for instance, just as the sale of US military technology to China could improve its position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (depending on the type, quality, and sophistication of the weapons). In the same way, weapons sales to Israel and its Arab neighbors had to be approved with an eye toward their impact on regional politics and the United States’ larger strategic interests.
Foreign military sales also allowed US manufacturers to reduce their per-unit costs, provided them with more revenues and profits, and enabled US defense contractors to grow. This in turn facilitated investment in the R&D necessary for the next generation of weapons. And with the defense industry being big business, employing tens of thousands of workers and having a strong lobbying arm, members of Congress consider weapon sales important politically.
Furthermore, US presidents and their top advisers often agree to sell arms to countries to curry favor with their heads of state, even if those countries might not seem to need the weaponry.151 As a result, high-level diplomacy between top US and foreign officials, personal chemistry, and simple persuasion also play a role in determining US foreign weapons sales.
With all these factors in play, arms sales quickly get very complicated—hence Scowcroft’s close involvement. In working to facilitate the deals, he had to take into account diplomatic relations, international economics, intelligence, and crisis management issues involving several different departments and agencies within the US government, all within the broader context of Cold War politics and the global and regional balance of power.
For example, the United States had a “close defense relationship” with Iran in the mid-1970s. As a result, Scowcroft had to work closely with Carlyle E. Maw, under secretary for international security assistance in the Department of Defense, to sort out the issues involved in “trying to coordinate our arms sales with our foreign policy,” as Kissinger explained to President Ford and the secretary of defense.152
One of these issues was that the United States was helping Iran develop a nuclear power program that would provide the United States with $6.4 billion in sales of reactor components, fuel supplies, and services. But the United States had the right to determine how any plutonium was to be produced and how it was to be reprocessed, fabricated, or stored, and it reached an agreement with Iran on civilian uses of nuclear power.153 The US government also allowed Pratt & Whitney of United Technologies to coproduce aircraft engines with Iran, permitted the sale to Iran of 222 Harpoon antiship missiles, approved of the construction of two liquefied natural gas facilities in Iran that would export gas to the United States (though they were never built), and agreed to the sale to Iran of Bell helicopters, F-14s, F-16s, and Spruance-class naval destroyers. These military sales to Iran not only benefited US defense contractors but also gave the Ford administration some additional influence with respect to OPEC’s oil pricing and other issues in the Middle East—at least until the shah was toppled from power.
What held with Iran was more broadly true with respect to the Persian Gulf as a whole, where the United States was concerned about the stability of the Gulf states and the outside influence exerted by European states, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Issues of arms supply and training, military bases and their installation, technology transfer, and co-production of equipment all factored in, along with economic policies and regional relationships.154 Equally complex arrays of concerns were involved in such disparate issues as military deals with Japan in the wake of the Lockheed bribery scandal, the provision of nuclear fuel to India for its Tarapur power plant, and payment to the Philippine government for the use of military bases in that country.155
Scowcroft thus had to balance the attractiveness of weapons sales with other considerations. His principal concern was “losing technology to the wrong hands, whether Soviet or non-original recipients,” according to Bud McFarlane, his former NSC military aide. So when defense secretary Dick Cheney told McFarlane that forward-looking infrared radiometer (FLIR) or thermal imaging capacity was to be included on airplanes that the United States was selling to Israel, “Brent lost it.” Even though “it was a done deal,” according to Cheney, and even though the Israeli ambassador insisted the United States “had to do this,” Scowcroft refused. The technology had high strategic value, he pointed out, and “even some units of the USAF” weren’t equipped with FLIR.156
With Israel, as with other countries, Scowcroft had to weigh the United States’ overall interests against the internal politics of the purchasing country when negotiating and approving arms sales. Scowcroft and the Ford administration consequently restricted the sale of some weapons to the Israelis because they could be regionally destabilizing (such as Pershing missiles), technologically compromising (such as FLIR-equipped aircraft), or still in R&D (such the CBU-84, an air-delivered land mine).157
Arms sales could also be politically controversial when US military equipment sold overseas was used for the suppression of domestic populations, deployed aggressively against third parties not considered adversaries of the United States, or employed against the United States itself. Indicatively, when Kissinger, Scowcroft, and President Ford were preparing for the first presidential debate between Ford and Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, Kissinger asked what Schlesinger—who’d joined the Carter side—could bring up against Ford, and Scowcroft answered, “Arms sales.”158
In managing these and other delicate matters, Scowcroft was exceptionally effective. One reason was the fact that his “agenda was the president’s agenda,” as a widely experienced NSC staff member put it. While it might seem that this should be taken for granted, in reality presidential assistants and other staff sometimes give pride of place to their own favored policies or personal political prospects, not those of the president.159 After he resigned, Nixon confided to Bill Gulley that he couldn’t remember being as comfortable around any other military general as he was with Scowcroft. Nixon never doubted that Scowcroft’s loyalty lay with him.160
Nixon and Ford therefore occasionally used Scowcroft for diplomatic purposes, despite the fact that this was usually the State Department’s domain. For example, when President Ford and Kissinger were discussing what to do about the situation with Turkey and Cyprus in early July 1975, Ford noted that Representative John Brademas, a Democrat from Indiana, and former national security advisor Walt Rostow wanted to get involved. Kissinger immediately responded, “I think it is better if Brent handles this, so we won’t have too many different cooks in the broth.”161 Another time, after he became national security advisor, Scowcroft had to coordinate contingency plans with respect to Cuba and the presence of Soviet pilots.162
So Scowcroft’s unique combination of intelligence, knowledge, tact, self-confidence, and loyalty made him especially valuable and effective as a fixer for the Nixon and Ford administrations. But Scowcroft also had larger concerns to worry about, including the SALT nuclear weapons treaty and other aspects of US-Soviet relations, attacks from the right on the two administrations’ foreign policy, and threats from Congress against the intelligence community. In the years of the Ford administration, these problems would test Scowcroft’s talents to the fullest.