Détente

The Chance to End the Cold War

Richard Crowder

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350147959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Between 1968 and 1975, there was a subtle thawing of relations between East and West, for which Brezhnev coined the name Détente, and – perhaps – a chance to end the Cold War. The leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, hoped to forge a new relationship between East and West. Yet, the greatest changes of the era took place outside the sphere of international diplomacy. The 1960s brought social collision across the world, from the anti-war protests in America to the student demonstrations on the streets of Paris, and Mao Zedong's Red Guards in China. A new generation, whom advertising executives dubbed the baby-boomers, brought new attitudes to towards sex, gender, race, the environment and religion. In this book, Richard Crowder explores the years of Détente, and introduces us to the key players of the era, whose stories form the narrative of this book.

Chapter 1

SEEING GLORY

(January–December 1969)

It was a bright, autumnal New York morning. Henry Kissinger arrived at the Hotel Pierre, on the Upper East Side. The time was just before ten o’clock, on Monday 25 November 1968. He crossed the ornate lobby and took an elevator to the thirty-ninth floor. First opened in 1930, the 41-storey hotel enjoyed views across Central Park and downtown Manhattan. The building was crowned by a distinctive penthouse, with arched windows and pillars modelled on the Royal Chapel at the Palace of Versailles. Kissinger had come to the transition headquarters for the president-elect of the United States.

Almost three weeks before, Richard Nixon had won the presidency. Nixon fought a disciplined campaign, targeting the largest states and projecting an image of calm control at staged rallies. His Democrat opponent, Hubert Humphrey, was behind in the polls following the convention in Chicago. Nixon held his lead through the first half of the autumn. But Vietnam nearly cost him the race. In late October, Johnson declared a halt to bombing of the north. When Hanoi seemed ready to engage in peace talks, a wave of relief swept the nation and Humphrey edged ahead in the polls.

The election took place on Tuesday 5 November. Nixon spent that night at the Waldorf Towers, a few blocks south of the Pierre, joined by his wife Pat and two daughters, Julie and Tricia. Earlier, the mood aboard the aircraft which brought him back from his last campaign event in Los Angeles had been sombre, pensive. Speech-writer Pat Buchanan thought the race lost.¹ As results from individual states came in, Nixon started with a lead on Humphrey. Then, by midnight, his opponent had moved ahead in the popular vote. But, through the early hours, the lead tipped back. In the end, Nixon beat Humphrey by a margin of just 500,000. In the Electoral College, with ballots from each state, his margin was more decisive. Nixon had won by 301, against 191 for Humphrey.

For the president-elect, it had been a long journey. Richard Milhous Nixon was born on 9 January 1913, in California, the son of Quaker smallholders. He was a determined, intense child, who drove himself through the local high school, and on to study law at Duke University. ‘He seemed so lonely, and so solemn,’ recalled a former girlfriend. ‘Sometimes I think I never really knew him, and I was as close to him as anyone.’²

After war service in the Pacific, Nixon threw himself into politics. He was elected to Congress in 1946, among the same intake as John F. Kennedy. As freshmen on Capitol Hill, the two men shared an office. Nixon scored early fame in the investigation of Alger Hiss, a State Department diplomat suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. Four years after arriving in Washington, Nixon was elected to the Senate. Then, in 1953, he joined the administration of Dwight Eisenhower as vice president. For eight years, he travelled the world as deputy-in-command. In 1959, Nixon visited Moscow, and found himself in an impromptu debate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, at a mock-up kitchen in the American exhibition centre. The exchange dramatized a clash between capitalism and communism.

The following year, in 1960, Nixon ran for the presidency. His opponent was Kennedy. The Democrat scored a very narrow victory in the popular vote, of just over 100,000, but a decisive margin in the Electoral College. Kennedy managed to project a youthful, vibrant image, which left Nixon looking outclassed. In a first televised debate between candidates, Nixon appeared haggard and perspiring on screen, while Kennedy was fresh.

At the age of 47, Nixon’s career seemed over. He tried running for the governorship of California, but his heart was not in holding state office, and he lost. ‘This,’ he told journalists afterwards, ‘is my last press conference.’ Nixon travelled, wrote and practised law.

As the decade went on, the former vice president found himself drawn back into politics. In 1964, the Republicans selected a right-wing candidate, Barry Goldwater, who lost badly against incumbent Lyndon Johnson. Nixon offered a more centrist alternative for 1968 – with a record of being tough on communism, but open to the social policies of Eisenhower and Johnson. He assembled a new team, built around his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, a former lawyer from Seattle. They developed a new campaign strategy. In 1960, Nixon had tried to visit every state, and exhausted himself. In 1968, the candidate would concentrate on projecting himself through television, mastering what Haldeman called the ‘news cycle’. As America became further mired in Vietnam and racial tensions, Nixon cast himself as a leader of experience who could reunite the nation. Commentator Theodore White was struck that this relaunched candidate seemed more able to listen, to understand himself and others.³ ‘I always felt that a man cannot seek the presidency and get it simply because he wants it,’ he told journalists at the Republican Convention in Miami. ‘I think that he can seek the presidency and obtain it only when the presidency requires what he may have to offer.’⁴

Kissinger waited in a large room, at the end of the suite where Nixon had established his transition team. He did not know what the president-elect wanted to discuss. Aged 45, Kissinger was the son of Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany. The family had arrived in New York in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War. Kissinger served in the US Army, including as part of the occupation force which remained in Germany after the war. Following demobilization, he had studied at Harvard University. Kissinger thrived in academia. His mind generated original ideas and expressed them in clear, compelling language. He gained tenure, and built a career as a public intellectual on foreign policy, specializing in nuclear weapons and the statecraft of nineteenth-century Europe.

During the 1960s, Kissinger edged his way onto the political scene. He was briefly attached to the Kennedy White House, in an advisory capacity. Subsequently, he was linked to Nelson Rockefeller, scion of the wealthy New York family, who sought the Republican nomination against Goldwater and then Nixon.

Nixon and Kissinger had only met once before, at a party in New York. Nixon had read Kissinger’s influential book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and made reference to it. Written in 1957, the study argued that statesmen should be prepared to contemplate the limited use of nuclear weapons, in a calculated exchange of force. Experts were sceptical, but the provocative argument launched the academic as a public figure.

The president-elect walked in. He sat on a sofa, while Kissinger took an armchair. Behind them, the view looked down onto Fifth Avenue.

Neither man was much interested in small talk. Nixon launched into a description of what he hoped to achieve in foreign policy. In the early stages of his career, Nixon had built a reputation as a hardline opponent of communism. But during the years out of office his views had evolved. ‘We live in a new world,’ he told an audience of business and political elite at the annual gathering of the Bohemian Grove summer camp in 1967. ‘The new generation has neither the old fears nor the old guilts of the old generation.’ It was, he later recalled, the speech which gave him the greatest satisfaction in his political career.⁵ Now, with Kissinger, he elaborated his ideas. America has an opportunity to influence the global balance of power. She needed to end the war in Vietnam, but from a position of strength that would allow her to recalibrate relationships with European allies, the Soviets, and with communist China.

As he watched, Kissinger was struck by Nixon’s physical movements. His gestures seemed oddly out of sync with the ideas running through his head, and expressed in his low, gravelly voice. Following the candidate at the Republican Convention in Miami, journalist Norman Mailer had been struck by the same phenomenon.⁶ It was, Kissinger recalled, as if ‘two different impulses were behind speech and gesture’.

The conversation moved on to structures in government. Nixon said that he was suspicious of the State Department. He wanted a strong foreign policy, driven from the White House. Kissinger agreed. His brief exposure to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had left him convinced that a more disciplined, centralized effort was required, built around the National Security Adviser’s staff.

Nixon discreetly reached for a buzzer. Bob Haldeman entered the room. The chief of staff was tall, with a neat crew cut. He clutched a yellow notepad. Nixon instructed him to establish a secure phone line to Kissinger’s office at Harvard. Haldeman wrote down the order.

The men rose to their feet. The meeting was over. Haldeman escorted Kissinger from the suite, stopping for a few moments in his own office. His role, he explained to the academic, was to prevent ‘end-runs’, where uncoordinated advice reached the president without squaring with relevant staff members first.

Kissinger shook hands, and left. He was due back at Harvard that afternoon, to teach a seminar. It wasn’t clear what, if anything, Nixon and his team wanted.

The next day, Kissinger received ...