The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  Months of study had led Robert Byrd to favor the treaty. John Culver, one of the leading SALT II advocates, recalled with amazement visiting Byrd’s office and seeing the volumes of SALT hearings that Byrd had pored through and highlighted. Byrd had also been impressed, on a trip to Europe, that the European allies regarded SALT II as essential to peace and stability in Europe. At Carter’s request, Byrd had visited the Soviet Union to explain to Soviet Premier Brezhnev the role that the Senate would play in the process of treaty ratification. Byrd’s commitment was strong, and he stood prepared to do everything necessary to get Senate approval, just as he had on the Panama Canal treaties.

  As always, the list of key senators started with Baker. He had demonstrated his statesmanship during the Panama Canal fight; he was also one of a handful of senators who had been on the winning side of every major battle during the Carter years. The White House thought Baker might be willing to play a constructive role, but his price appeared to be high. He had noted that “the Senate will give its advice before it gives its consent.” The White House would have been dismayed to know that Baker had received a considerable amount of his SALT briefing materials from Jackson’s staff. “His office worked for several months to give me the best information,” Baker recalled. “Scoop’s staff was far superior to anything else we had seen.” Jackson had approached Baker about joining him in formulating amendments, but Baker had declined, indicating that he would work with other Republicans or proceed on his own. Neither possibility boded well for the Carter administration.

  Sam Nunn was the undecided Senate Democrat whose support was most pivotal for the administration. Young, thoughtful, and respected, Nunn was a protégé of Richard Russell and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Carl Vinson. He hoped to extend Georgia’s powerful influence on national defense issues. Nunn had spent months studying the treaty and related defense issues; he wanted to be a major player on the issue and, if possible, to help the Democratic president from his state.

  Nunn had just been reelected by a comfortable margin, so he was in no danger politically, although going against Jackson would not be easy. Nunn seemed willing to consider voting for the treaty if Carter would call for a significant increase in the defense budget, and Carter cared enough about winning Nunn’s support for the treaty to endorse the MX mobile missile system and consider a 5 percent increase in the defense budget. Carter agreed to the MX missile with great reluctance. “It was nauseating to confront the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons of all kinds,” he wrote in his diary on June 4. Zbigniew Brzezinski had persuaded him that the green light for the MX was the only hope for gaining Senate approval of the treaty. The maneuver, however, risked forfeiting the support of leading Senate advocates of arms control.

  George McGovern, a steadfast leader on such issues, already felt that SALT II did not go far enough in bringing about real reductions in the nuclear arsenals. Back on March 2, McGovern, along with pro-SALT senators Mark Hatfield and Bill Proxmire, had warned Carter that his emphasis on a defense buildup was undermining the purpose of the SALT II treaty. McGovern certainly would not favor the treaty if the price for its passage was an increased defense budget and a potential new arms race. “I don’t think [the treaty] is worth fighting for,” McGovern said. “I think we should just scrap it.”

  Despite the daunting challenges, the Carter administration kept plugging away, lobbying senators and working to build grassroots support around the country. By early August, prospects seemed to have brightened somewhat. With major press attention on the Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Baker proved unable to mount a strong case against the treaty and seemed to withdraw from the debate. Jackson’s arguments had become more predictable than persuasive. Although he remained the most formidable opponent of the treaty, many senators found his perpetual distrust of the Soviet Union too extreme. Conservatives began to worry that SALT negotiations had gone on so long that the public was not engaged in the issue, which would make a vote for the treaty much easier politically than a vote for the Panama Canal treaties.

  The American public may not have been focused on the treaty, but inside the Senate, the intensity was mounting. Byrd believed that the debate on SALT II would be every bit as consequential as the debate on the Panama Canal treaties had been, and he prepared with his customary thoroughness. Byrd and Cranston received significant support from Gary Hart and John Culver, two strong arms control advocates who had sought to serve on the Armed Services Committee because they believed that it should not be dominated by defense hardliners. Culver had a fierce temper and was one of the few senators willing to take on Jackson. He was particularly angry at Jackson’s staff members, who he believed were leaking confidential information in order to tilt the public debate against the treaty. Culver prodded John Stennis, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to hold a committee meeting to stop the leaks, and when it occurred, the meeting was unusually angry and personal. The stakes were getting very high, and the pressures were building.

  Frank Church’s strong leadership in the Panama Canal fight had won him few friends in Idaho, where he was facing a strong challenge from Republican Congressman Steve Symms. He was a natural supporter of the SALT II treaty, to the point that it was impossible to conceive of Church opposing the treaty, or the treaty being ratified without Church. At the same time, he understood his precarious political situation as the 1980 election drew nearer, and he was looking for ways to demonstrate his commitment to a strong defense and tough foreign policy. In fact, Church was trying to walk much the same tightrope that Carter was walking. Events would soon show he was working without a net.

  In late August, Church’s committee staff came to him with the startling news that a brigade of Soviet troops had been found in Cuba. Richard Stone, another committee member, had first surfaced the issue of the Soviet brigade without much fanfare. Church, however, seized the opportunity to take a tough stand. After calling Secretary Vance to forewarn him, Church announced that if the brigade were not removed, the Senate would not approve the SALT II treaty. “The United States cannot permit the island to become a Russian military base, 90 miles from our shores,” Church declared at a hastily called press conference in Boise, Idaho, on August 30. “The President must make it clear that we draw the line at Soviet penetration of Latin America.”

  Church’s high-profile position put Jimmy Carter in a nearly impossible position, but the Carter administration’s response proved to be a comedy of errors. Carter first pronounced the brigade “unacceptable” and then amended his position to say that “the brigade is certainly no reason to return to the Cold War.” Secretary Vance stated on September 5 that the brigade did not represent an increase in the Soviet presence in Cuba; in fact, it soon became clear that an equivalent number of troops had been in Cuba since 1962.

  Struggling to salvage the treaty that he had worked so hard for, Vance implored Dobrynin to give him some help:Vance: “Anatoly, can’t you get them to move some ships around—to move some troops a little bit—so that we could say that it was now acceptable?”

  Dobrynin: “You know after the Cuban missile crisis; there is no way we are going to do that sort of thing; it would be too humiliating.”

  But, at the same time, while trying to defuse the crisis, the administration moved to prove its toughness toward the Soviet Union. On September 7, the White House announced that the U.S. government would go ahead with the full-scale deployment of a new ICBM missile—the MX.

  Byrd and Cranston, working tirelessly to build support for the treaty, were irate about the administration’s handling of the Cuban missile brigade, which they regarded, in Byrd’s words, as a “pseudo-crisis.” On September 23, Byrd went to the White House to tell the president that the White House had to tamp down the brigade issue if the SALT II treaty was to be saved. It was “inappropriate for a mighty nation to go into delirium,” Byrd said, “over 2,300 Soviet troops that had neither airlift nor sealift capability to leave Cuba.” Byrd urged th
at the White House and congressional leaders cool their rhetoric. In fact, completely uncharacteristically, Byrd urged that there be no more consultation with the Hill on this issue, because it only tended to hype it further.

  After meeting with Byrd, on the advice of White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, Carter convened a group of fifteen “wise men,” led by Clark Clifford, to review the situation and report back to him. After grilling representatives of the intelligence community, Clifford and his group concluded that the brigade had in fact been in Cuba since 1962. The issue had only flared up because the intelligence community had somehow lost track of the brigade, and it had now resurfaced.

  On October 1, Carter addressed the nation in an effort to put the issue behind him. He stated that he had received assurance from the Soviet Union that the combat brigade did not pose a threat to the United States or Latin America. In his view, the brigade issue was not a reason to return to the days of the Cold War. But continuing to juggle the views of his feuding advisers, Carter still tried to have it both ways, telling the nation that he was not ready to rely completely on the Soviet assurances. Consequently, he was ordering increased surveillance of Cuba and establishing a permanent, full-time Caribbean task force that would increase U.S. ability to respond rapidly to encroachments in the region. It was amateur hour, from start to finish.

  Carter would never forgive Church for his willingness to exploit the presence of the Soviet brigade in Cuba in order to make himself look tough to his Idaho constituents. It also disillusioned some of Church’s liberal admirers. But the SALT II treaty had been hanging by a thread for a long time. Skepticism about the negotiations process, suspicions about Soviet intentions and actions after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, deep concern about Carter’s commitment to a strong defense, and a darkening international picture presented an impossible combination. On November 9, the dovish Foreign Relations Committee reported the treaty favorably by an unimpressive 9–6 vote. Despite Carter’s support on December 12 for Sam Nunn’s enormous 5.6 percent increase in the defense budget for 1980, on December 20, the Armed Services Committee voted 10–0, with seven abstentions, that the SALT II treaty, “as it now stands, is not in the national security interest of the United States.”

  In fact, the SALT II treaty was dead weeks before the committee votes took place. On November 1, Howard Baker announced his candidacy for president in the Senate Caucus Room where the Watergate Committee hearings had made him famous. Baker said that voters should judge him by his ability to defeat the SALT treaty: “If we defeat the treaty, we will be saying: we intend to be the masters of our own fate again. And we have the confidence to negotiate a new SALT treaty that is safe for this country under a new president who will be safe for this country.” Since no one had come up with a scenario by which the Senate would ratify the treaty without Baker’s support, his announcement sounded the death knell for SALT II.

  Back in June, in an appearance at the National Press Club, Baker had indicated a willingness to serve as a broker between Carter and the Senate hawks, if Carter was willing to bend. However, shortly after Carter returned from Vienna, Baker had announced that he would support the treaty only if significant changes were made—including a requirement that the Soviets dismantle all the SS-9 and SS-18 missile launchers, something the Soviets would never accept. Baker’s signals had been increasingly clear: he would not support SALT II. Carter respected Baker so much that he continued to harbor the belief that the “good Baker” who had saved the Panama Canal treaties would do for his arms control treaty what Dirksen had done for Kennedy’s Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. World events would soon reveal this fantasy to be an illusion; in fact, just about everything was different in 1979 than it had been in 1963.

  ON DECEMBER 27, THE Soviet Union launched a sudden invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike the brigade in Cuba, this Soviet invasion was sufficient reason to return to the Cold War. The two superpowers promptly did so.

  Jimmy Carter finally accepted the inevitable. On January 3, he asked Majority Leader Byrd to defer action on the SALT II treaty. Carter would later describe the “failure to ratify the SALT II treaty and secure even more far-reaching agreements on nuclear arms control” as “the most profound disappointment of my presidency.”

  The Senate, which had given Carter a great victory in the Panama Canal treaties, had become the graveyard of his dreams for controlling and reducing nuclear arms. On the Panama Canal treaties, the Senate insisted on important reservations, but had generally deferred to Carter’s leadership. Although the issue presented huge political problems for many senators, most of them recognized that a new relationship with Panama was in the national interest and grudgingly admired Carter for taking on a long-standing problem that had become our most severe challenge in the hemisphere.

  SALT II was a very different matter. There was less inclination to defer to the president, particularly after he got off to a rocky and inconsistent start in dealing with the Soviets. Jackson regarded himself, with some justification, as one of the world’s leading experts on defense issues. He undoubtedly disliked and distrusted Carter, but personal animus was not the principal thing driving him. No one doubted that Jackson would have battled Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger just as fiercely if they had brought the SALT II treaty to the Senate. Younger Democrats on the key committees, such as Nunn and John Glenn, remained unconvinced about the merits of the treaty. A number of arms control supporters, led by McGovern, threatened to jump ship if the price of the treaty was a massive increase in defense expenditures. And no road to Senate ratification existed without Baker, who had decided quite early not to support it.

  Ironically, Carter had intuited the situation at the end of 1977. His diary includes this entry: “My sense is that the Republican hierarchy has decided to go along with us on Panama and fight us on SALT.”

  SALT II had never generated great excitement outside the Beltway, and its demise was barely noticed by the general public. The American people were instead focused on the plight of the hostages in Iran, brought home to them nightly by Ted Koppel, in the news show that would become Nightline. The anger and frustration that Americans felt was almost palpable. But the public and its political leaders gave Carter strong support as he tried to resolve this unprecedented situation. The public applauded Carter for shutting off Iranian oil imports and for freezing Iranian assets that were in U.S. banks. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that Carter was handling the crisis with “great competence, steadiness, and assuredness.” Baker offered Carter his “unwavering” support. During the first few weeks of the crisis, Carter was given virtually a free hand to deal with the crisis. Senators said that Carter was helped by Khomeini’s “irrationality.” One senator stated: “there’s not a damned thing you can do when you’re dealing with a crazy man.”

  The year ended on an ironic note. Panama agreed to admit the shah at our request. Senators who had supported the controversial treaties expressed delight, saying it vindicated their votes. “This is the first great friendship dividend to flow from the Panama Canal treaty,” Church enthused. Opponents of the treaty—John Tower, Pete Domenici, Jim McClure, and Jesse Helms—said they still didn’t like it.

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  chapter 17

  A TOUGH POLITICAL CLIMATE

  1979 HAD STARTED WITH THE RETURN OF THE AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI and the Iranian Revolution and proceeded with the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, surging oil prices, gasoline shortages, and the precipitous drop of the U.S. economy. The year ended with U.S. embassy personnel being held hostage in Iran and the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan. A year that had started with the bright promise of peace between Israel and Egypt had turned out to be one of the worst in memory.

  Now, 1980 had begun—an election year. Every two years, one-third of the Senate seats are contested. This year, out of the thirty-four Senate seats in play, the Democrats held twenty-four. Two Democratic incumbents, Abe Ribicoff and Adlai Stevenson, were retiring; twenty-two Democratic incumbents woul
d be running. In contrast, only ten Republican seats were in play. For the Democrats, the numbers were bad, and the political climate was even worse.

  Gaylord Nelson was one of the Democratic incumbents seeking reelection. Part of the vaunted class of 1962, Nelson had cruised to victory in 1968 and 1974, winning 62 percent of the vote each time. As one reporter noted, Nelson had “a lifelong tendency to loaf or joke his way through the campaign.” Nelson had always anticipated that the political environment had to be more difficult than it had been in 1974, when the Republicans had suffered through Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. How much more difficult could not have been anticipated.

  In January, Nelson received a memo from his pollster, Peter Hart. An old-fashioned politician, Nelson didn’t much believe in the importance of polls. Nevertheless, his staff convinced him to commission an initial “benchmark” poll. Hart and his associates polled 617 Wisconsin voters in depth, conducting fifty-five-minute interviews with each.

  The news was not good. “There is a widespread feeling throughout the Wisconsin electorate that this nation is in deep and serious trouble,” Hart’s report began. “About two-thirds of the voters (64%) are of this opinion. This pessimism is more acute among the elderly than among younger voters.”

  Hart had asked what trends in America constituted a “serious threat to the American way of life.” The largest number (37 percent) suggested “moral threats which cut right through the social fabric.” This view was shared by younger and older voters alike. They cited “a lack of morality and religion and the breakdown of family structure. They are afraid that people have become too selfish and greedy, that the people are apathetic and just don’t care.” Hart concluded that their sentiments “suggest a re-emergence of the more traditional approach to life and a turning away from the more publicized free-wheeling attitudes of the 1960’s and 70s.”