One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (28 page)

Nixon saw the summit through another lens: as one more stab at a peace deal in Vietnam. He had gone to China. He was breaking bread with Brezhnev. If only he could somehow end the war by working with his enemies, he would go down as one of the greatest presidents in history.

But the formal centerpiece of the summit was a proposed strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT, for short) intended to curb the growth of the two nations’ immense nuclear arsenals. The arms race had accelerated through the 1950s and ’60s. Both nations could blast the world into radioactive ruins in a matter of minutes. Nixon knew that a major arms control agreement could help enshrine him as a great statesman.

Nixon, like all presidents since Eisenhower, had seen the Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war. They were terrifying. In May 1969 he had been through a dress rehearsal of the first day of World War III. He had flown from Key Biscayne to Washington on the Airborne Command Post, the “White House in the Sky,” a military version of a Boeing 707 converted into a flying war center, equipped to launch thermonuclear weapons across the world. “Pretty scary,” Haldeman noted. Nixon had “a lot of questions about our nuclear capability and kill results. Obviously worries about the lightly tossed-about millions of deaths.”

Full-scale SALT negotiations had started in November 1969. American and Soviet delegations regularly held talks in Vienna and Helsinki on how to curb the power of nuclear weapons technology: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines armed with city-busting bombs, and the dream of a missile defense—a prologue to President Reagan’s multibillion-dollar “Star Wars” boondoggle.

Ambassador Gerald Smith, chief of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, led the talks for the United States. But Nixon personally disliked Smith. So Kissinger took control of the agenda through one of his six NSC subcommittees, the Verification Panel, which met in the Situation Room; its members included CIA director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell. Kissinger set up a back channel to the Soviets with Ambassador Dobrynin; Secretary of State Rogers and Ambassador Smith were not informed of these private talks.
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On the eve of the summit, Nixon realized that many devils lurked in the details of the proposed treaty.

“I read last night the whole SALT thing and I think it’s going to be a tough titty son-of- a-bitch,” he told Kissinger on May 19, the day before their departure for Moscow. “There’s an awful lot still left to be worked out.”

“The way it stands now, unintentionally, you will have to break some deadlocks,” Kissinger admitted. “We have a few snags.” The thorniest might be MIRV.

MIRV was the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle—a warhead within a missile. A “MIRVed” missile could hold as many as fourteen nuclear warheads in its nose cone, each warhead aimed at a different target, multiplying each missile’s destructive power immensely. The United States had a decade’s head start on MIRV; the Soviets still were striving to test the technology. This constituted a huge American advantage in the arms race. Nixon called MIRVs “indispensable.” He had signed a secret National Security Decision Memorandum, drafted by Kissinger’s Verification Panel, flatly stating that “there would be no limitations on MIRVs” in any arms control agreement with the Soviets.

Kissinger prepared a grandiloquent list of talking points on SALT for Nixon to read on the flight to Moscow. “Never before have nations limited the weapons on which their survival depends,” one passage read. There were five words about MIRVs; Kissinger would ensure they would not be limited.

“The fact that the two great adversaries could sit down and seriously discuss something as sensitive to their security as strategic arms was something of an accomplishment,” said Ray Garthoff, executive secretary of the SALT delegation and deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. But he said it was tragic that “no serious attempt was made and no agreement reached, of course, to limit MIRVs.”

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Nixon arrived in Moscow at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, May 22. He was escorted to an exquisite fifteenth-century apartment in the Kremlin, a suite where czars had lived. The president’s security team determined that the place was bugged; thereafter, Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman held meetings and dictated memos inside the president’s black limousine, hoping its lead-lined doors and bulletproof windows would ward off Soviet electronic surveillance.

Shortly after Nixon was ensconced in his elegant rooms, an unexpected summons arrived: “P was whisked off to meet with Brezhnev,” Haldeman recorded.

They met one on one in the Soviet leader’s palatial Kremlin office. Within minutes, any hope for a deal with Hanoi seemed dashed.

“The war which the United States has for many years now been waging in Vietnam has left a deep imprint in the soul of our people and in the hearts of all Soviet people,” Brezhnev said. “To take in these circumstances serious steps to develop Soviet-American relations was for us not at all an easy thing.”

He quickly turned to SALT. “I think we should emphasize the agreements relating to the limitation of strategic arms,” he said. “I have received a report to the effect that two or three specific points now remain unresolved.”

Nixon replied, “This is something that you and I have to do, Mr. General Secretary. It is we who should settle the really difficult questions.… If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats we will never achieve any progress.”

“We would simply perish,” Brezhnev said.

Nixon agreed: “They would simply bury us in paper.”

“Such agreements do not lessen the danger of the outbreak of nuclear war,” the Soviet leader said.

Nixon conceded: “We still have enough arms to kill one another many times over.”

“Exactly,” said Brezhnev. “I trust you will agree, Mr. President, that only a radical solution of the problem—the destruction of nuclear weapons—can really rid the peoples of the threat of nuclear war. This would be a tremendous achievement.”

Banning the Bomb was not on Nixon’s agenda. The war remained uppermost. He strongly suggested “a confidential talk on the Vietnam problem.” He would have it. It would be harsh.

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At 3:30 a.m. on May 23, 1972, after three hours of sleep, Nixon started scrawling notes for his next talk with Brezhnev. “We are great powers—We are rivals—We have different goals—philosophies,” he wrote on a yellow legal pad. “Historically this means war—We have never fought a war—Neither will win a war—. Our interests will not be served—Our people do not want war.”

Nixon wrote that Moscow should put itself in the place of the United States: fifty thousand dead, two hundred fifty thousand wounded, fifteen hundred missing in Vietnam. He defined what peace with honor meant for him: a cease-fire and the return of American prisoners of war. He dangled promises of great economic and political rewards for the Soviet Union in exchange for its help in ending the war. Moscow had supplied most of the weaponry that had killed or injured three hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam. If the arms shipments stopped, the war would end, the wounds would heal, and a new era of cooperation under d
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tente would begin—“a great victory” for Washington and Moscow. There would be lucrative trade agreements, joint space missions, somber statements signed by both leaders on the pursuit of peace. Together they could build “a new world.”

Their first full day of negotiations in the glittering gold-and-ivory chambers of St. Catherine’s Hall was dismal, verging on disaster. Brezhnev insisted on spending a full session on SALT. But Nixon was bored to death by the details. Kissinger, the note taker at this session, sank into despair as Nixon and Brezhnev wandered into the dense brambles of nuclear weapons technology.

Brezhnev became infuriated when Nixon would not focus on the arms control deal. “We are both civilized men,” he said. “We know these weapons must never be used. Perhaps we shall not be able to achieve agreement here.” In a controlled panic, Kissinger cabled Gerald Smith, the chief American SALT negotiator, still sequestered with his colleagues at their headquarters in Helsinki. As Smith wrote, it was immediately apparent that Nixon did not grasp the substance of the SALT proposals: “That the President of the United States would get into such technicalities, important though they were, struck me as peculiar, if not dangerous. These first discussions of SALT appeared based on unawareness by our boss of the Helsinki record.”

“The President and Kissinger perhaps had been too busy to read these reports,” Smith wrote. “This fumbling start did not bode well for the summit.”

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The next evening, May 24, brought “the single most emotional meeting” Kissinger had ever experienced, as he described it to Nixon.

Brezhnev and Nixon signed their accord on cooperation in space, which would lead to an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz command module linking up above the earth three years later. It was late afternoon; dinner at eight was set at a government dacha, a country house on the banks of the Moscow River.

Brezhnev took Nixon’s arm and said, “Why don’t we go see it right now?”

Haldeman, trailing behind, watched in astonishment as “all of a sudden the P and Brezhnev disappeared down a corridor, zipped into an elevator, shot downstairs, came out into the driveway, popped into Brezhnev’s car and roared off.” Kissinger, waiting with two aides at his Kremlin residence, was aghast. He and the aides commandeered a Soviet limousine. “Followed by Nixon’s own car, full of Secret Service agents beside themselves that the president of the United States had been abducted in front of their very eyes by the Soviet Union’s Number One Communist,” the impromptu motorcade sped out into the countryside.

Brezhnev treated Nixon to a sixty-mile-an-hour joyride on a hydrofoil, and all hands seemed in high spirits as they sat down together in the dacha at 7:50 p.m. The Russian side: Brezhnev, Prime Minister Kosygin, and Nikolai V. Podgorny, chief of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The American side: Nixon, Kissinger, Winston Lord, and the NSC aide John Negroponte, who in the twenty-first century served as President George W. Bush’s intelligence chief. The Americans assumed they were about to be served caviar and vodka.

What they got was a three-hour harangue on Vietnam.

“We certainly did not choose this particular time to have the Vietnam situation flare up,” Nixon said, immediately on the defensive. His bombing campaign had continued almost unabated during the Moscow summit, and he realized that “this posed a very difficult problem for the Soviet leadership.” He continued: “It is our intention to end the war by negotiations.” But if Hanoi would not bend, “then I will do whatever I must to bring the war to an end.”

Brezhnev struck back hard. “Cruel bombing has been resumed,” he said. “Very cruel military actions have been taken against North Vietnam.… They can only amount to a deliberate effort to destroy a country and kill off thousands, millions of innocent people. For what sake is this, by what right is this being done?”

“I don’t want to hurl more epithets on you. There have been quite enough epithets heaped on you as it is. But how can the methods you use now be called a method of ending the war in Vietnam?” Brezhnev said. “No bombing can ever resolve the war.”

The Soviet leader kept lambasting Nixon:

We want to sign important documents with you in which we say we want to solve all differences through negotiation, not war, and advise others to follow that path. At the same time you will be continuing the war in Vietnam, continuing to kill innocent people, killing women and children. How could that be understood?

Then Prime Minister Kosygin took the whip hand. He reminded Nixon that he had gone to the United States to meet President Johnson in 1967. “He said he would strangle Vietnam,” Kosygin recounted. “To be very frank, you are acting even more cruelly than Johnson.”

Kosygin was as blunt as he could be. He asked Nixon if preserving President Thieu’s power in South Vietnam was worth the blood spilled in America’s name. “You want to send under the axe hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, maybe even a million, and your own soldiers, simply to save the skin of a mercenary President, so-called,” Kosygin said. “If instead of continuing to support the so-called President, you could formulate proposals which would really enable to bring the war to an end, would that not be a veritable triumph?”

We proceed on the assumption that you have another four years ahead of you as President. We believe that you do have another four years. From the point of view of history this is a brief period, but if you could find a constructive solution you would go down in history as a man who succeeded in cutting through this knot which so many American Presidents have been unable to disentangle.… Isn’t it worth achieving this by sacrificing the rot that is the present government in Saigon?

The clock ticked toward eleven. His hosts gave President Nixon the last word. “Our people want peace,” he said. “I want it too. I want the Soviet leaders to know how seriously I view this threat of new North Vietnamese escalation. One of our great Civil War generals, General Sherman, said ‘War is hell.’” All Nixon sought was a way out of hell in Vietnam.

Then at last came the vodka and a five-course supper and cognac. And when they were done, after midnight, the indefatigable Gromyko was waiting for Kissinger in Moscow to go back to work on SALT.

Kissinger was mortified. He was bone-weary “after the motorcade, the hydrofoil ride, the brutal Vietnam discussion, and the heavy meal.” Still worse, he had no bargaining room. He learned in a cable from Washington that the Joint Chiefs were backpedaling on points to which they’d previously agreed on SALT. Trapped between the Politburo and the Pentagon, Kissinger stalled until sunrise rather than strike a deal.

The Americans and the Soviets wasted nearly two days haggling over an issue that their SALT experts, still sitting in Helsinki, could have solved in two hours. The major sticking point was what the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine force would look like after SALT. The Americans were far ahead on this issue: their Polaris submarine-launched nuclear missiles had fourteen MIRVs. The Soviets had nothing of the sort.