One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (29 page)

So the Americans could give a little without affecting the balance of power. But they did not want to appear to give an inch, lest they incur the wrath of the hawks back home. “The real problem,” Haig astutely wrote in a back-channel message to Kissinger from the White House on May 25, “is not the strategic implication of the compromise but rather the problem of the President’s public image and credibility.”
*

After midnight on Friday, May 26, immediately following a performance of
Swan Lake
by the Bolshoi Ballet, Kissinger and Foreign Minister Gromyko reconvened in St. Catherine’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Nixon retired to his elegant residence, to await the results of what might be a last chance to settle SALT.

The question of Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missiles remained unresolved. So did a proposal limiting the increase of the dimensions of intercontinental ballistic missile silos to 15 percent. Kissinger misunderstood the 15 percent limit. The Soviets’ chief nuclear weapons expert, Leonid V. Smirnov, had subtly changed a word of this clause: the
diameter
of the silo could grow by 15 percent. This let the
volume
of the silo, and the nuclear missile launcher it held, increase by 32 percent. And that gave the Soviets a chance to build far bigger missiles. Kissinger had not grasped the nuance.

It was a short meeting.

“There is no room for additional compromise,” Gromyko said.

“Then this makes it impossible to reach agreement,” Kissinger replied.

Smirnov turned to Kissinger and bade him good night. “After the ballet, have nice dreams,” he said. “Swans. Not evil forces.”

*   *   *

Everything changed overnight. At 10:00 a.m., Ambassador Dobrynin knocked on the door to Kissinger’s room in the Kremlin. He said the Politburo had convened at breakfast to vote on the SALT text. At 11:15 a.m., Kissinger and Dobrynin met Gromyko and Smirnov in St. Catherine’s Hall.

“There are two questions left open from yesterday,” Gromyko said. “First is your formula [for] submarine-launched ballistic missiles permitted for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. That is accepted. Hooray!”

“Hooray!” Dobrynin said.

“Second,” Gromyko continued: “‘The size of land-based ICBM silo launchers will not be
substantially
increased.’ We accept your proposal”—the 15 percent solution. Gromyko said he was ready to sign that day. Kissinger was stunned by the suddenness of it all. “Today?” he said. “Let me talk to the President first.” He left the great hall, hurried to Nixon’s side, and returned seventeen minutes later. “The President agrees,” Kissinger said. The Soviets and the Americans would dine together that night at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence, and then sign together at the Kremlin.

“This is a very important milestone in the relations between our two countries, and I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with you gentlemen on it,” Kissinger said.

“They were really difficult and delicate matters,” Gromyko replied. “It is really a good end.”

Then he switched to English: “We are
substantially
satisfied, even more than 15 percent!” The Soviets clearly were delighted by Smirnov’s sleight of hand.

But Kissinger had snookered them all by keeping MIRVs out of the final agreement. “In his compulsive need to control events, Kissinger had deceived everybody”—including “the Secretary of State, Gerry Smith and his negotiating team in Helsinki, and even, at certain points, Nixon himself,” said George Jaeger, a senior State Department intelligence official and nuclear arms expert under Nixon.

While the SALT treaty temporarily froze the number of missile
launchers
each nation could build, it stood silent on the number of
warheads
. Unleashed, unlimited, the American nuclear warhead stockpile grew sixfold over the next decade. “Not one U.S. program was stopped by SALT,” Kissinger himself told the Verification Panel in 1974. “Indeed, several U.S. programs were accelerated [and] the warhead advantage of the U.S. doubled.” Significant cuts in the nations’ nuclear arsenals came only after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved.

“The MIRV explosion was especially devastating and discouraging,” wrote William Hyland, a CIA veteran and Kissinger’s nuclear weapons expert at the NSC. “The first strategic arms agreement actually produced a sizeable buildup in strategic weaponry.” In a rare confession of error, Kissinger later said, “I wish I had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world.”

In short, the talks had spurred the arms race they were supposed to control.

*   *   *

Nixon and Kissinger, elated and expansive, spoke with Brezhnev at his Kremlin office before dinner, seeking common ground on the question of the ever-growing conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis. They had gone to war in 1967 and the threat was “an explosive one,” the Soviet leader had said earlier in an aside to Nixon. “If we let events run their course war may start anew.”

Now Brezhnev renewed that warning. “There are in the world today many who are eager to depict the confrontation as not between Israel and Arabs but between the Soviet Union and the U.S.,” he said. “If we gloss over this … there will be a cold war and confrontation between our two nations.”

Nixon replied that if Moscow kept arming the Arabs and America kept arming Israel without working for a settlement, “there will be a war” and “it will involve us.” He said that Kissinger and Dobrynin, the masters of secret diplomacy, had to find a way to avoid that war. By September, Nixon said, “We can try to get to the nut-cutting part of the problem. I don’t know if that will translate!”

The Russian interpreter did his best. Nut cutting is turning a bull into a steer.

“The question,” said Kissinger, “is whose are being cut.”

The banter continued at dinner. Nixon invited Brezhnev to the United States. Would June 1973 be convenient? Brezhnev said he would be delighted. Nixon said Vietnam surely would be settled by then; Washington and Moscow could be closer once the war was over. Nixon harked back to the World War II alliances of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin; the president said that he and Brezhnev should always have a private channel open between them.

The grand finale at Spaso House was a flaming Baked Alaska. “The Americans really are miracle workers!” Brezhnev exclaimed. “They have found a way to set ice cream on fire!”

Richard Nixon rose at 3:00 a.m. in the Kremlin on May 29, took out a yellow legal pad, and began writing notes for a speech to a joint session of Congress that he planned to deliver in three days. What he had accomplished in his mission to Moscow was the work “not for a summit of one summer—but of many years.” He had reached out across oceans and nations to America’s enemies so that the world might “turn away from war to peace.” He wrote that “all Americans want more than anything else a world of peace.” And he asked them to trust in him to create that world.

A few hours later, Nixon and Brezhnev reviewed the communiqu
é
that would close the summit. It was a bland statement when compared with a single minute of their conversation that morning.

“How would you see it if we sent one of our highest leaders to talk to the Vietnamese?” Brezhnev asked. “We cannot absolutely guarantee complete success. But we would like to take this step to find the best solution.” He said he believed Nixon truly wanted to end the war.

The president said, “It would be very constructive to stop all the killing right now.” Nixon later said it was the most startling moment of the summit. But it did not stop the killing.

*   *   *

Nixon took a strange detour on his way home from Moscow. Rather than heading west to Washington, he flew two thousand miles south to see the shah of Iran. His stay lasted twenty-two hours and left a long and lasting scar.

The shah, installed on the Peacock Throne by a CIA coup under President Eisenhower in 1954, saw himself as the rightful inheritor of a 2,500-year-old line of Persian kings, and his nation as the only stable sovereignty between Europe and Japan. Nixon saw the shah as an ally with billions of dollars in oil revenues and an insatiable appetite for state-of-the-art American weapons.

Nixon and Kissinger sat down with the shah at his sumptuous palace on May 30 and 31. “At the conclusion of the discussion,” the State Department’s official diplomatic record reads, “the President agreed to furnish Iran with laser bombs and F-14s and F-15s,” America’s most advanced fighter jets. The deal was more complicated than that. The president had promised to provide the shah with “all available sophisticated weapons short of the atomic bomb,” as a top NSC aide wrote to Kissinger a few days later. The shah was ready to pay any sum to buy the weapons. And America’s arms manufacturers were eager to sell them to him.

Nixon fed the shah phalanxes of war planes, smart bombs, helicopters, naval destroyers—anything he desired. “That was a fateful, disastrous step, because the Shah was a megalomaniac. He had been pushing us for years to let him have all this military equipment, and we’d kept him on a short leash until then,” recalled Andrew Killgore, a State Department political consul in Tehran. The military hardware “piled up in gigantic amounts, covering mile after mile after mile, up hills and mountains, down valleys, with huge fences around it, gathering dust in the sun.”

The arms transactions became sordid; Iran’s vice minister of war, General Hassan Toufanian, would demand and receive a two-hour meeting at the Pentagon with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 1976. The general named the American military contractors who had paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes for multibillion-dollar contracts with the shah. He pointed out that Pentagon procurement officers had greased the wheels for the weapons manufacturers. Rumsfeld expressed mild dismay and sent the general away.

The shah would spend twenty-five billion dollars on American weapons after Nixon’s visit. The kickbacks and crooked contracts degraded a generation of Iranian military and government officials. And not even Iran could pump enough oil to both pay for the weapons and provide for its people. Throughout the seventies, the rich grew richer, the poor poorer, the regime more repressive, the resistance stronger. Few Americans saw it coming, but the shah’s corruption led to a world-shaking revolution in 1979. We live with its consequences today.

Shortly after Nixon left Tehran, John Connally arrived for his share of caviar. Connally had resigned as treasury secretary, effective June 12, to raise money for Nixon’s reelection. He was on a thirty-five-day world tour, mixing the business of politics with the pleasure of serving as the president’s confidant with chiefs of state. He dined privately with Nixon at San Clemente upon his return.

The American ambassador in Tehran was Joseph Farland, who had received the post as a reward for smuggling Kissinger from Pakistan into China. Farland, in a State Department oral history recorded in 2000, said that Connally made an extraordinary approach to the shah in the Saadabad Palace.

“He wanted a conversation with His Imperial Majesty,” the ambassador said. “He wanted to go by himself. That smelled of something, palace intrigue of some magnitude. I just was not going to have it and I told him so, that if he wanted a conversation with His Imperial Majesty, I was going.

“We got in the car and started down the hill and he said, ‘Would you mind closing that window between us and the chauffeur? I want to speak to you in confidence. I want you to do the following,’ which I thought was very inappropriate.”

Ambassador Farland, according to the official transcript of the oral history, then rubbed his thumb and forefingers together: the universal hand signal for bribery.

“You’re making the money motion,” Farland’s interlocutor noted.

“It was either for himself, for the political campaign, or to be divided up,” Ambassador Farland said. “It was inappropriate and, as far as I’m concerned, illegal.”

Back home, Richard Nixon was riding high. It was now clear that George McGovern would be the Democratic nominee for president, a prospect that delighted Nixon. The president decided to spend a long weekend in Key Biscayne and the Bahamas with his buddies Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, enjoying their camaraderie and cocktails.

Before he left the White House on Friday, June 16—the eve of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel—he tossed a book into his briefcase along with a sheaf of memoranda for the coming campaign. He had been meaning to read the book since the Moscow summit. It was the final volume of Winston Churchill’s history of World War II,
Triumph and Tragedy.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“We have produced a horrible tragedy”

A
T
12:45
A
.
M
. on Saturday, June 17, CREEP’s security chief, James McCord, and his crew of four Cuban Americans tiptoed into the offices of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

The air hung thick and heavy in Washington. The skies started trembling from the faraway force of Hurricane Agnes, which passed by Florida and began sweeping up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States that weekend, killing 119 people and inflicting billions of dollars in damage—at the time, the most devastating storm in American history.

The president and his men were far-flung: Nixon was in the Bahamas, and Haldeman in Key Biscayne, where both felt the hurricane’s lashing wind; Mitchell and his CREEP chieftains were in California, gathering millions at a campaign fund-raiser; John Dean was somewhere over the Pacific, flying back from a junket in the Philippines. Only Ehrlichman stood watch at the White House.

All these men told so many lies in the weeks and months ahead that it took two years of federal investigations, congressional hearings, and criminal trials to establish the essential elements of the Watergate story. But Nixon knew in a matter of days that the break-in would afflict him and his closest aides. He began trying to stop the wheels of justice from turning.

The four Cuban Americans accompanying McCord had been anticommunist activists for years: Bernard “Macho” Barker, a longtime Miami real estate agent; Eugenio Martinez, a legendary sea captain still on a CIA stipend; Virgilio Gonzales, a locksmith who ran the Missing Key Company in Miami; and Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune. All four were recruited by the CIA veteran Howard Hunt, all had played bit parts alongside Hunt in the Agency’s attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro, and all believed the Watergate job was part of the effort by the United States to stop the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.