With the chart in hand, I met with Kissinger and not too subtly suggested that he open the flow of information to the Pentagon. He knew well that information was power. Kissinger seemed, or more likely acted, surprised by the statistics and vowed to improve the situation. Still, there never was the free exchange of information that I sought. It was a sign that even our good personal relationship had its limits.
I knew I had to do all I could to persuade Congress and the public that the United States had to bolster its military capabilities if we were to deter the Soviets in the years ahead. We needed to ensure peace not only by being strong, but by being perceived as strong by those who would do harm to our country and our allies. I was all for fiscal responsibility, but in this case I was certain that an increase in the U.S. defense budget had to be the administration’s highest priority. This effort was controversial in some circles—even within the White House and Pentagon.6 As I campaigned to increase defense investment, there was a consensus within the Democratic-controlled Congress that the proposed defense budget would be cut by $5 billion to $6 billion, or about 5 or 6 percent.7
During my first weeks at the Pentagon, I met with Andy Marshall, the Defense Department’s Director of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank, which examined the relative strengths of the United States and the Soviet Union.* Marshall demonstrated that the Soviet Union had been gaining ground relative to the United States. America had been slipping toward a position of rough equivalence. The projections of future trend lines did not bode well for the United States.
I compiled the data into a booklet called Defense Perspectives that provided an easy to understand set of statistics, charts, and graphs—numbers of personnel, tanks, helicopters, submarines, ships, and the like. The data told an important story: While the United States and the USSR were still roughly equivalent in their respective capabilities, the trend lines were clearly adverse to America, and if our respective levels of investment were to continue, we would drop below the band of rough equivalence.9
In addition to the Defense Perspectives booklet, I organized briefings, which I led along with John Hughes, a respected, long-serving intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Hughes had briefed President Kennedy and his national security team during the Cuban Missile Crisis.* He prepared classified overhead photography from U.S. satellites and other sources that showed in vivid, powerful pictures the Soviet military buildup. The Hughes presentations—at varying degrees of classification, depending on the audience—gave an impressive visual texture to the data we had assembled.10
Beginning in early 1976, I began to host early evening briefings for small groups of senators and congressmen in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, directly across from the Oval Office. We called them “smokers” back in those days, since many of us still smoked cigars or pipes. Our invitations to the White House for a private, classified briefing were well received. Attendance was excellent. President Ford and other senior national security officials would drop by, giving the briefings added weight and a sense of unanimity within the administration.11
After one of the briefings, Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, a Democrat and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, walked out impressed. An opponent of increasing military investment, he muttered, “I can see I’ll have to invent a new set of arguments.”12
We conducted unclassified briefings for a variety of influential Americans—labor leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, and public policy experts with national security backgrounds. I knew that more opinion leaders needed to know the facts about the Soviets’ military capabilities if I was to successfully convince them of the imperative for more investment in our military.*
Moscow began to take notice of our efforts. The Soviets condemned my briefings as “disgraceful.” In the fall of 1976, after the Senate moved toward increasing the defense budget, I received an intelligence cable from American officials in Moscow that cited a report in the Soviet government’s news service that condemned me “for justifying the US military build-up on the basis of the ‘hackneyed myth about the ‘Soviet threat’…despite repeated Soviet assurances that the USSR threatens no one, does not increase its defense expenditures from year to year and seeks instead a reduction of all nations’ defense budgets.”13
The record is now clear that the Soviets lied about their defense budget. The Soviet government was attempting to achieve strategic military superiority over the United States at the expense of the nonmilitary sectors of its economy. The Soviets were successful in this approach for a period of time, but they now were rattled by having their buildup revealed to the world. The Soviets’ strong and disingenuous reaction was powerful evidence to me that we were on the right track.
I could feel we were gaining traction. The Ford administration proposed an increase in the defense budget for fiscal year 1977, and Congress appeared to be moving in our direction. While the increase was modest, it was a marked change from the earlier series of decreases, and it was the first increase in real terms in the U.S. defense budget in almost a decade.14 It was a reassuring achievement, especially for an administration that was under fire from all sides in an election year, and with the Congress controlled by the opposition party. The powerful facts we had marshaled and presented proved to be persuasive. Had President Ford been reelected, I have no doubt that our defense buildup would have continued. As it happened, however, after four years of the Carter administration’s inattention, it was left to Ronald Reagan to increase defense investments appreciably.
My situation as a new secretary at the Department of Defense was made more complicated because of the approaching presidential primary and general election campaign. I felt that a secretary of defense should not involve himself in domestic politics. That was easier said than done in a gripping and contentious primary challenge that hinged on national security issues.
Ronald Reagan declared his candidacy against the President two days after I was confirmed. Having become acquainted with California Governor Reagan when I was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, I knew his campaign was not to be dismissed lightly. He was an effective executive, had an impressive talent for communication, an able staff led by Ed Meese and Judge Bill Clark, and was developing a growing list of influential supporters around the country.
At first, Reagan avoided direct attacks on Ford, focusing instead on the administration’s policies and, more specifically, on Henry Kissinger.15 Reagan took direct aim at the administration’s foreign policy by forcefully redefining “détente” as an American concession to, and accommodation of, the expansionist Soviet Union. As Reagan mounted his offensive, the term “détente” was becoming poisonous. To conservative critics the term encapsulated American fecklessness and a sense that America was a declining power in the world.
Well into the primary campaign, the President stubbornly kept using the term even when he knew it was hurting him politically. Ford eventually realized that his spirited defense of détente was not worth the damage it was causing his election chances. “[L]et me say very specifically that we are going to forget the use of the word détente,” he said. “The word is inconsequential. What happens in the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, what happens in the negotiations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States—those are the things that are of consequence.”16
The primary election season did not start out well for Governor Reagan. Written off by the Eastern establishment and short on funds, Reagan lost most of the early primaries. The Californian seemed to be headed for his last stand in the March 1976 North Carolina primary. Reagan seized on what initially had seemed a relatively obscure issue: the negotiations to turn over the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government. Reagan said, “[W]e bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and…we going to keep it!”17 The line drew loud applause, perhaps because it represented a reassertion of American will that many felt had gone missing since the fall of S
aigon. The North Carolina results—Reagan beat the sitting president of his own party by six points—startled the political pundits and the Ford campaign team. And it soon put me in an awkward position.
Building on his success, the California governor fashioned yet another issue that resonated with many Americans who felt the United States was slipping into a position of weakness. In the face of the Soviet threat, Reagan said, “The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it’s dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best.”18 What Reagan could not have known was that he had zeroed in on the issue at the center of an ongoing internal debate Kissinger and I had been having in front of Ford.
Six days after Reagan’s victory in North Carolina, I met with the President and Kissinger in the Oval Office to discuss this very issue. Kissinger disagreed with any public admission of the unpleasant facts I was marshaling; namely, that after nearly three decades in the Cold War, the U.S. military capability trend lines relative to the capabilities of the Soviet Union were adverse to us, and the Soviets’ overall capability was now roughly equivalent to ours. Absent a clear and sustained shift in our defense investment, the trend lines, favorable to the Soviets, would put them in a position of superiority in the years ahead.
“The impression that we are slipping is creating a bad impression around the world,” Kissinger avowed. I also wondered at the time if he took Reagan’s criticism personally, since he had presided over most national security issues for the past seven years.19
“But it’s true,” I rebutted.
“Then we have to define our goals,” Henry said. “It is inevitable that our margin since ’60 has slipped. Are we trying to maintain the same margin as we had in 1960 or to maintain adequate forces?”
“We have been slipping since the ’60s from superiority to equivalence,” I countered. “And if we don’t stop, we’ll be behind.”
I believed Reagan’s incendiary claim that America was the “number two” power was not yet technically correct, but it was clear to me that absent increases in our overall defense investment, his assertion would eventually become true.
Kissinger’s immediate goals and mine were in conflict here. Kissinger wanted the perception of American superiority to aid his negotiating positions and to reassure our allies, and for the strong diplomatic position it would provide as he worked on arms agreements with the Soviets. In contrast, I needed us to acknowledge the truth of the U.S. decline in our relative capability so that the American people and Congress would support the increases in defense investments necessary to reverse the adverse trends.
President Ford listened intently to our back-and-forth discussion. This was the type of spirited, open exchange that was healthy and needed, and which had been missing on foreign and defense policies in the past.
“I don’t think [I] should say we are slipping,” Ford finally decided. “I can say we need to redouble our efforts. I don’t want to say we are getting behind. I’ll say we have a challenge, we have rough equivalence and we’ve got to keep up.” The President also decided to criticize the Democratic Congress for its reductions in defense spending.
“I think the posture to take is that Reagan doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he’s irresponsible,” Kissinger advised.20
Even though Kissinger was bothered by the California governor’s unrelenting attacks, I thought Reagan was making a critically important point. The only thing irresponsible would be to dismiss it.
Kissinger and I also found ourselves in different corners on his negotiations with the Soviets over a second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).* The debates over the arms-control agreement sometimes made me feel, as I later described it, “like the skunk at the garden party.”21 Ford hoped to sign a second treaty before the end of his term and, I suspected, before the presidential election in November.
I was concerned that the Soviet Union had not proven to be true to its word in previous negotiations. The Soviets were not forthcoming about the level of their defense expenditures. They also appeared to have been violating at least the spirit of the first SALT by concealing missile silos and other military infrastructure. All of this was to say nothing of their aggressive activities on several continents that threatened international peace and security and seemed designed to undermine American interests.
I was certainly comfortable delaying a new treaty if a satisfactory resolution to my concerns could not be reached. This of course had the effect of making me the administration’s hawk, and positioning me as out of step with Kissinger and his allies, Rockefeller and Scowcroft. My reluctance to sign on to Kissinger’s positions in obtaining an agreement without the Department of Defense’s support proved frustrating for him. Kissinger was used to the Pentagon’s opposition to his proposals, but they had not been much of a problem for him in the past given the tepid relationship between Ford and Schlesinger. He was unhappy that I was putting doubts into the President’s mind, and he accused me of using delaying tactics to scuttle his negotiations with the Soviets. “Rumsfeld was skillful at deflecting every controversial issue into some bureaucratic bog or other,” Kissinger noted later, giving more weight to what he considered my bureaucratic skills than the substantive merit of my arguments.22 He thought that was a criticism of me. I felt it was a compliment when it came to the risk of an arms control agreement that, in my view, was not in our country’s best interest.
The discussions within the administration over SALT were even more difficult for me in light of my relationship with Rockefeller. At one meeting in mid-February 1976, we listened to a long presentation by Kissinger on the status of the SALT negotiations, which Rockefeller responded to by banging the table in approval.
When I laid out the Department of Defense’s position, Rockefeller kept interrupting me. He had a well-developed practice of trying to throw people off with bullying tactics. Now that he was a lame-duck vice president, he was even more caustic. A couple of times, as I was speaking, he snapped, “Don, what’s your point?”
Exasperated, I finally said, “Mr. Vice President, I’ve been listening for one hour and fifteen minutes, and I am proceeding in my own way to lay out my points.” And I continued to do so. Rockefeller’s behavior laid bare the tensions over the hoped-for deal with the Soviets favored by the liberal wing of the party, for which Rockefeller was the poster boy.
A key, if controversial, issue in the debates over SALT was the fate of America’s cruise missiles.* Cruise missiles varied in ranges, could be armed with nuclear or conventional warheads, and could be launched from land, sea, or air. Their unusual flexibility made them particularly attractive as a weapons system. It also made them a serious complicating factor in negotiations to limit the size of our nuclear arsenal.
America had a measurable lead in cruise missile technology. The Soviets would have to expend large amounts of their resources to keep up with us, so the Soviets wanted us to promise to curtail our cruise missile development in a SALT II treaty. An agreement could have been achieved if Ford had been willing to acquiesce to these demands. Kissinger and Rockefeller, and others eager to sign a treaty with the Soviets, were ready to agree to that. I was uncomfortable agreeing to limit an advantage, the exact nature of which, at that time, we could not predict.23
In one meeting Kissinger tried to blame the Joint Chiefs for intransigence on the cruise missile issue. They were not the impediment, I told him—I was.24 I urged the President to delay any treaty that required restricting our cruise missile technologies as part of the deal. The Defense Department needed more time to assess the merits of the treaty’s specific provisions before agreeing to them.
That Kissinger and I had differing views on the arms treaty with the Soviets posed a problem for Ford. The President needed support from the conservative wing of his party and a few hawks in the Democratic Party, like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state, to get a treaty ratified in the Senate. If the Joint Chiefs testified against the treaty or the Secretary of Defense
resigned because he could not support it, its prospects for ratification would be dim.
Ford made clear to me that he was unhappy with our position in the Defense Department. Undeterred, Ford approached the Soviets with a proposal to continue negotiations while pushing the final status of cruise missiles for a separate discussion at a later date. Brezhnev rejected Ford’s suggestion outright, calling it a “step backward.” The Soviet leader wrote in March 1976 that “someone is deliberately trying to put roadblocks on the way to reaching an agreement.”25 I had little doubt who the Soviet leader meant by “someone.” The U.S.-initiated talks collapsed.
American public opinion leaned heavily in favor of arms reductions. Those who didn’t support agreements with the Soviets tended to be characterized in the press as advocates of confrontation with the Communist empire. Paradoxically, I thought Soviet aggression and confrontation could become more likely if we passed a SALT II treaty that conceded too much. The Soviets might be emboldened by our weakness.
In 1979, two years after he had left office, Gerald Ford came to visit me in Chicago. I drove to the airport to pick him up. He was bringing Joyce and me one of the golden retriever puppies from his dog, Misty. He also had just completed his memoir, A Time to Heal. Sitting in the backseat of the car on the way to my house, Ford handed me an autographed copy of his book.
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