by Ira Shapiro
Byrd went the extra mile to ensure that the debate would finish. Byrd did not have a close relationship with Weicker, and he rarely left the Capitol when the Senate was in session. But this time, Byrd startled Weicker (and the receptionist in Weicker’s office) by coming to see Weicker unannounced. He reviewed the situation with Weicker, including the fact that the legislation had been rewritten to meet some of Weicker’s objections. They met for a short time, and Byrd went back to the Capitol. Weicker made his forceful arguments against the bill but did not filibuster.
Neither did anyone else, despite the intensity of many senators’ feelings about the issue. Goldwater said of the bill that it was “probably the biggest mistake Congress has made in its history. I think future historians will register this as the beginning of the end of the free market system in America.” Within a few years, the absurdity of this prediction would be quite clear as America embarked upon a period of cowboy capitalism.
The Senate passed the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act 53–44 and sent it to conference with the House. The legislation passed without a filibuster, and it passed without a 60-vote majority. Although Democrats made up most of the majority, with Republicans most of the opponents, the vote did not break on absolutely partisan lines. Supporters of the Chrysler loan guarantee included liberal Republicans Jack Javits and Mac Mathias, but they also included Bob Dole, Ted Stevens, John Tower, and Harrison Schmitt, along with Lugar and Roth, Republicans who had played a key role. Democratic opponents included Dale Bumpers, Gary Hart, Adlai Stevenson, and Abe Ribicoff. The unprecedented issues produced some senatorial judgments that could not have been predicted.
In conference, the Senate and House split the difference on most of the key issues, including the UAW contribution, which was set at $462 million. When the legislation returned from conference, William Armstrong, the freshman conservative Republican, carried on a “mini-filibuster,” pointing to the working copy of the bill with its “chicken scratching and underlinings” as evidence of the Congress’s “unseemly haste.” But in time-honored Senate tradition, Byrd had made the legislation the last bill to be considered before the senators could leave for Christmas. Armstrong ultimately stopped talking, and the Senate approved the conference report by a vote of 43–34. Again, support for the bill fell well short of the 60 votes that would later become the standard requirement for doing anything in the Senate.
The year 1979 had been a brutal year for America, marked by a deepening recession, soaring inflation, energy shocks and gas lines, foreign competition of surprising and sudden quality, and a palpable threat to Chrysler, the U.S. auto industry, and the industrial heartland. Given those realities, most Americans did not want lectures about the workings of the free-enterprise system. They wanted evidence that the U.S. auto industry and the Midwest had an economic future. They wanted their government to take action to save jobs and keep Chrysler in business, while exacting enough pain to ensure that other companies would be very reluctant to approach the government to be bailed out. Goldwater’s dire prediction seemed far less relevant than the heart-felt words of Tsongas. Describing how his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, had been crushed by the decline of the textile industry, Tsongas declared that he “did not want to do to Detroit what others have done to my city.”
Just as it had done the previous year with New York City, the Senate struck the right balance to make legislation possible. It accomplished that in weeks, rather than months or years. It did it by majority vote, not super-majority. Chrysler survived, returned to profitability quickly, and the federal government ultimately came out ahead. No other corporation stepped forward to get the same help, administered as the same bitter medicine. The Senate had come through again, as it did on other big issues, with different senators stepping forward to take the lead, and opponents making their case strongly, but allowing the Senate to conclude the debate and reach a result. It was the way the Senate worked when it still worked.
Less than two weeks later, in a low-key White House ceremony, Jimmy Carter signed the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act of 1979 while Douglas Fraser and Lee Iaccoca looked on. After the ceremony, Fraser, who had asked to see the president, was escorted into the Oval Office. He advised Carter that despite the administration’s support for Chrysler’s rescue, the UAW would be supporting Ted Kennedy against Carter. Perhaps the rescue had taken too long; perhaps the legislation demanded too much of the UAW members. But, more likely, one of the most liberal forces in the Democratic Party had simply chosen to support the most liberal Democrat running for president. Whatever the reason, Carter must have been bitterly disappointed.
chapter 16
SALT II
DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS
IN LATE 1979, CARTER WAS STRUGGLING TO COMPLETE HIS SIGNATURE energy legislation, rescue Chrysler, and cope with the hostage situation in Tehran. Still unresolved was the fate of SALT II, a treaty that Carter fervently hoped the Senate would approve. Along with Middle East peace, nothing mattered more to Carter. Yet the Senate’s ratification remained uncertain, seemingly always just beyond his reach.
Carter had hoped to restructure the SALT II negotiations to seek deeper reductions in nuclear arms, but after the Soviet Union rebuffed his initial bold proposals, the administration essentially returned to the complex SALT II framework that had been under negotiation by the Nixon and Ford administrations. Carter certainly expected the completion of the treaty negotiations and Senate approval no later than by the end of his second year. After that, he hoped to pursue deep nuclear arms reductions separately.
However, the relationship between the superpowers was deteriorating. The administration was deeply mistrustful of Soviet activities in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. Carter continued to hammer the Soviet Union on human rights violations. His commitment to human rights was deeply felt, and it was good politics in the United States, but it enraged Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders.
By the spring of 1978, the Soviets were punishing dissidents at home, and the United States responded with economic sanctions. W. Averill Harriman, ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II and the American diplomat most respected in Moscow, advised Carter that Brezhnev was very emotional about the deterioration in the relationship, calling it the worst it had been since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia a decade before. The two countries often seemed much closer to rekindling the Cold War than reaching a SALT II treaty.
Nevertheless, despite the rising tensions, the SALT II negotiations continued to move forward, if fitfully. Carter remained deeply committed, and the Soviet Union, facing the strain of enormous defense expenditures, had incentives of its own for reaching a treaty. By the end of September 1978, with the Camp David talks behind him, Carter, pleased by an excellent meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, authorized Cyrus Vance to explore a summit meeting with Brezhnev at which the treaty would be signed.
But the road to the summit contained unforeseen potholes. Carter’s surprising decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China infuriated the Soviets, particularly when the final communiqué between Carter and Chinese Vice Minister Deng Xiaoping suggested that the two countries would cooperate in opposition to “hegemonic powers,” a term the Chinese often used to describe the Soviet Union. By February 1979, the State Department, which had previously focused its concern on whether the Senate would ratify the SALT II treaty, was worried that there would be no treaty to ratify.
Still, throughout this turbulent period, Secretary Vance and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had not given up. They met more than twenty-five times to keep the treaty alive. In February, Carter met with Dobrynin and made it clear that he still wanted a treaty. Impressed with Carter’s determination to improve U.S.-Soviet relations, Dobrynin noted that, for the first time in their meetings, Carter had not mentioned human rights.
Finally, after more than two years of negotiation against the backdrop of a turbulent relationship, Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev met in Vienna on June
15, 1979. The leaders exchanged views on the full range of issues in their relationship. Carter outlined his hopes for future limits on nuclear arms and told Brezhnev that the United States had vital interests in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula that the Soviet Union must respect. Brezhnev responded that the Soviet Union was not the source of instability in Northern Africa or the Persian Gulf and expressed unhappiness at the casual way that the United States defined remote regions of the world as being in its vital interests. Plainly, notwithstanding the treaty that had brought them together, the leaders would continue to disagree about almost everything.
Nevertheless, after resolving the last major treaty issue, related to the limitation on the Soviet production of Backfire bombers, the mood lightened and became celebratory. Carter conceded that the elegance of the dinner at the Soviet embassy surpassed that offered by the United States the previous night. Brezhnev observed that the American dinner had menus only in English, while the Soviet dinner menus were printed in both languages. Finally, on June 18, in Vienna’s famous Hofberg Palace, Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty, which they sealed with a formal embrace and a kiss.
The SALT II treaty that they signed was a far cry from the ambitious arms reduction agreement that Carter had initially hoped for. It provided for modest cuts in major delivery systems. The limits on all missiles for each side was capped at 2,400, though that number would be slightly reduced by January 1, 1981. Submarine and land-based multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) missiles would be counted in a subtotal of 1,320 on MIRV launchers; no missiles could have more than 10 warheads. The United States agreed to place no limits on Soviet heavy missiles or the Backfire bomber, a concession that would give the treaty opponents a major point to attack, even though an addendum to the agreement limited the Soviets to producing no more than 30 Backfire bombers each year. Heavy bombers were counted against the total number of launchers permitted and against the subtotal for MIRV launchers.
The arcane provisions of the agreement brought to mind a candid admission made by Sam Nunn during the Warnke debate that it was almost impossible to grasp the mind-numbingly complex details of arms control. But ultimately, the fate of SALT II would inevitably turn on more fundamental issues—namely, senators’ views of the value of arms control agreements, their assessment of Soviet intentions, and the overall state of the relationship between the superpowers.
Fundamental disagreements between the SALT II advocates and the treaty opponents remained. The treaty advocates believed that arms control agreements were essential to maintaining a positive relationship between the two superpowers and were therefore too important to be linked to other Soviet activities around the world. Moreover, they believed, as Warnke had written, that the Soviet Union would respond positively if the United States showed a willingness to get off the arms race treadmill.
The opponents believed that any arms control agreement should be conditioned on improved treatment of Soviet dissidents and a cessation of aggressive Soviet actions in the Third World. Treaty opponents were deeply mistrustful of Soviet intentions. They believed that the Soviets were working to achieve nuclear superiority to tilt the balance of power to ensure that the United States and their allies would have to stand by and accept their aggressive actions in the developing world. The opponents also had deep doubts about President Carter’s commitment to a strong defense. Carter had cancelled the B-1 bomber and the neutron bomb, increasing the fears of treaty opponents that he was allowing U.S. defenses to be weakened.
Détente between the United States and the Soviet Union had been on the skids even before Jimmy Carter became president, and the Senate and public mood toward the Soviet Union had further deteriorated during Carter’s time in office. Carter had been shocked in January, in a meeting with senators mostly presumed to be SALT II supporters, to find how hostile they were toward the Soviet Union. Abe Ribicoff said that the Soviets did not understand the Senate; Henry Bellmon said they were two-faced; Jack Javits expressed the view that the Soviets were not willing to give up anything for a SALT treaty. Others were similarly negative. Perhaps the fact that a treaty had been signed would change their views, but significant residual distrust remained. Moreover, the Senate’s consideration of the SALT II treaty would take place in the long shadow cast by the Iranian Revolution.
Treaty opponents, led by Scoop Jackson, had been gearing up for a long time, and the bleak public mood, marked by a lack of confidence in Carter and a fear of America’s declining power, ensured that the struggle to get the treaty ratified would be clearly uphill.
JIMMY CARTER LANDED AT Andrews Air Force Base on June 18, 1979. Two hours later he was addressing a joint session of Congress, urging support for the treaty he had just brought back. Carter emphasized that the SALT II treaty was not a favor that the United States was doing for the Soviet Union; it was in the national security interest of the United States. Arguing that our economic and military power surpassed that of any other nation, Carter reminded the Congress that “a nuclear war would bring horror and destruction and massive death that would dwarf all the combined wars of man’s long and bloody history.”
Understandably, Carter seemed tired. His speech received a lukewarm response. In the coming days, he would find that his Vienna triumph had generated no groundswell of public support in a country preoccupied with the price of gasoline. To the extent that Americans were thinking about foreign policy, anti-Soviet sentiment in America had risen during the past year, probably in part because Carter had harshly criticized the Soviet Union in the Horn of Africa as an atheistic nation and a strategic threat to the United States.
In the Senate, the initial signs were ominous. Alan Cranston of California, the Democratic Whip, was perhaps the most passionate Senate advocate of the SALT II treaty. Cranston had been a foreign correspondent for two years before World War II. When an abridged version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published, sanitizing Hitler’s anti-Semitism and martial intentions, Cranston published an unabridged and annotated version to make Hitler’s full message clear to the public. A committed believer in world government, Cranston authored a book on America’s failure to join the League of Nations and became president of the World Federalist Association. His path to political power came through the peace movement and the creation of the California Democratic Council, which unified the Democratic clubs throughout the state. Cranston was a practical politician and a supremely successful fund-raiser, but he was also a deeply idealistic opponent of nuclear weapons. After Carter’s address to the Congress, Cranston said that the treaty had the support of fifty-eight senators, nine short of the two-thirds needed for ratification. Cranston’s ability as a vote counter was respected, but at that moment, even fifty-eight votes felt like an optimistic count. Howard Baker, whose support had been indispensable for Carter’s foreign policy triumphs, said only that he was leaning against the treaty.
Jackson had been on the offensive against the SALT II treaty for a long time. He had already pronounced the agreement “substantially unequal and unverifiable.” Rather than categorically rejecting the agreement, Jackson said there would be a major effort by the Senate to improve the treaty “through amendments and plugging loopholes. The Senate will take seriously its mandate not only to consent but to advise.” He did not explain how the Soviet Union would react to major changes in a treaty that had been seven years in negotiation by three U.S. presidents. Amendments and reservations had worked with Panama—barely—but did not make for a promising strategy for dealing with the world’s only other superpower.
On June 12, as Carter prepared to leave for Vienna, Jackson unleashed an extraordinary blast in a major speech to the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, an organization formed by many of his closest allies to spearhead opposition to the treaty. Jackson was not an electrifying speaker, but on this occasion, his fiery message more than made up for his plodding style.
“In the seven years since the Moscow summit,” Jackson stated, �
��we have been testing the proposition that despite the lessons of history, it is possible to achieve an accommodation with a totalitarian superpower through a negotiated agreement. The danger is real that seven years of détente are becoming a decade of appeasement.” In case any listener missed the central point, Jackson went on: “It is ominously reminiscent of Great Britain in the 1930’s when one government pronouncement after another told the British public that Hitler’s Germany would never achieve military equality, let alone superiority.”
A few days later, Jackson expressed the view that “since the President has taken over in 1977, he has moved from a hard bargaining line with the Russians and on each and every meeting after the first meetings, concessions were made of a substantial nature, and that is appeasement.” By mid-June, Baker and Frank Church were talking about the necessity of adding amendments or reservations to the treaty.
Cranston observed that “if Jackson were for [the treaty], there would be no contest.” This was obvious, but the real question was whether any treaty could be approved despite Jackson’s vocal opposition. By one estimate, Jackson would ensure that thirty senators, mostly Republican, would oppose the treaty. To prevail, the Carter administration would have to win the votes of sixty-seven of the remaining seventy senators. In the best case, any path to victory in the Senate would be torturous and narrow, with numerous potential pitfalls ahead. As the Carter administration began a vigorous national public campaign for the treaty, it also focused intently on the several key senators without whose support ratification would be impossible.
