Disarmament Sketches

Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law

Thomas Graham, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780295801575
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Thomas Graham Jr. played a role in the negotiation of every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement signed by the United States during the past thirty years. As a U.S. government lawyer and diplomat, he helped to shape, negotiate, and secure U.S. ratification of such cornerstones of international security as SALT, START, and the ABM, INF, and CFE treaties as well as conventions prohibiting biological and chemical weapons. Graham's memoir offers a history of the key negotiations which have substantially reduced the threat of nuclear war. His is a personal account of bureaucratic battles over arms control in six administrations, navigating among the White House, Congress, cabinet secretaries, and agencies with overlapping responsibilities and often competing interests. No comparable text brings together detailed analyses of so many pivotal documents in the history of the Cold War; it offers abundant primary source material for historians, international lawyers, and arms control specialists around the world. Disarmament Sketches also charts the rise and fall of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the only U.S. government agency with primary responsibility for arms control policy, and lays out an agenda for continuing progress in reducing weapons stockpiles around the globe. Throughout his career, Graham has worked tirelessly to reverse the nuclear arms race and to persuade leaders around the world to make their nations safer by renouncing and reducing their weapons of mass destruction.

CHAPTER ONE POLITICS, LOUISVILLE AND WASHINGTON, D.C.

I come from a political family. My great-uncle, Robert Connor, was lieutenant governor of Wisconsin under Governor Robert LaFollette and chairman of the Republican Party in Wisconsin for many years. I remember once asking my grandmother, “Granny, are you a Democrat or a Republican?” Elizabeth Malcolm Connor Graham looked at me with scorn and replied, “I was forty before I saw a Democrat!”

My grandmother’s sister was the grandmother of Melvin Laird, President Nixon’s secretary of defense. I always especially admired Mel and his political career. He was a great secretary of defense and an outstanding politician in the best sense of that word. Early in his congressional career, while serving as ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, he was referred to as “the Richelieu of the cheese belt,” his congressional district being in central Wisconsin. This important part of my heritage is deeply Republican, but progressive Republican. My guiding light with respect to political views since 1968 has been Mel Laird. I used the term “progressive Republican” to indicate that part of the political spectrum which used to be called “eastern establishment Republicans.” Many of the present-day heirs to this tradition are sometimes referred to as “moderate” Republicans. This is the tradition to which I adhere. It means being an internationalist and being conservative with respect to some social issues and liberal with respect to others. Personally, I am pro-choice on abortion, but I support the death penalty; I became opposed to the Vietnam War, but I strongly objected to the campus protests.

My grandfather, Thomas Jackson Graham (named after Stonewall by my great-grandfather, a major in the Union Army, First Indiana Volunteers), was a Presbyterian minister who moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1920 to take over the Warren Memorial Presbyterian Church, the largest Presbyterian church in the city at that time. My father was at Princeton then and, inspired by Woodrow Wilson, decided to break with his Republican upbringing and become a Democrat. He remained an active Democrat all his life and was a mover and shaker in Louisville, serving as the party treasurer of the Jefferson County (Louisville) Democratic Party organization for thirty years and as chairman of the Sinking Fund (a part-time assignment with the civic organization that managed the city’s long-term investments) for fifteen years. He finally was kicked out as treasurer in 1966 because he joined the reelection campaign of Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper, one of his longtime friends, whose first statewide campaign he had helped finance in 1946.

My father stood for mayor of Louisville in 1948—much against my mother’s wishes. The incumbent, Marion E. Taylor, had died after just a year in office. The twelve-man Board of Aldermen was charged with electing a successor to serve out the remainder of the four-year term. A vigorous contest ensued between my father and Charles Farnesly, an interesting and eccentric man. (After his political career, Farnesly ran an organization named the Lost Cause Press and he drove, as I recall, a 1919 Rolls-Royce automobile.) On the day of the vote, one of my father’s supporters was sick and did not attend, and the result was a 5–5 tie (the chairman only voted in case of a tie). The chairman, Daniel Byck, a neighbor of ours, voted for Mr. Farnesly, much to the relief of my mother, who never liked politics. Charles Farnesly went on to serve seven years as mayor and a term or two in Congress, while my father returned to his investment business and part-time political career.

My father and mother gave me a golden childhood. It was sufficiently joyous that an old family retainer once said to me when I was a teenager, “Mister Tom, your childhood has been so happy that you are sure to have some bad when you grow up.” I have always remembered that—it has both good and bad connotations. Louisville when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, while not perfect, was itself a rather golden place. It was reasonably prosperous, a tight-knit neighborly community, crime was nonexistent, and divorce was virtually unknown. Although alcoholism was a huge problem (particularly among business leaders—alcohol was the tranquilizer, the sedative of that place in those times), drugs were not present at all. And politics was fun.

I went with my father to the 1952 Democratic Convention in Chicago, accompanied by Wilson Wyatt, who among many other things was our family lawyer. Wyatt became Adlai Stevenson’s campaign manager and Governor Stevenson was a classmate of my father’s at Princeton, so at the age of eighteen I felt myself very much in the middle of things. Alban Barkely, longtime Kentucky senator and vice president under President Harry S. Truman, was the candidate of the Kentucky delegation, but it was clear early on that he had no chance for the nomination, in part because of his age. Senator Richard Russell was a favorite of my father’s, but I remember traveling by cab from the train station to our hotel in Chicago and seeing a placard being held by a man near the hotel which said, “Russell unfair to labor,” and my father saying, “probably a lot of people have that view.” Apparently many of the delegates did.

My father arranged for me to attend three other Democratic national conventions in various capacities in 1960, 1964, and 1968. In the summer of 1960, my classmate from Harvard Law School George Daly and I finished our second year with a driving tour around the West that included four days at the convention in Los Angeles. We had gallery seats, which were briefly challenged by Wendell Ford, then head of the Kentucky Young Democrats, later governor and longtime senator. My best memory of that convention was Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy’s nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson, to the effect of, as I recall: “Let the prophet not be without honor in his own country.” Because of its eloquence, it made as strong an impression upon me as any political speech that I have since heard.

In 1964 my father joined the so-called President’s Club, which gave members certain privileges in exchange for a contribution of, I believe, $5,000 to the Democratic Party. Among the privileges were two free-floating passes to sit on the floor with the delegates at the national convention anywhere one could find a seat, which he gave to me. That convention was, of course, simply a ratification of President Lyndon Johnson and his vice presidential selection, Hubert Humphrey. The only real excitement was the ouster of the official, segregationist delegation from Mississippi and its replacement on the floor by an alternate delegation called the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. As I remember, this result was effected by a media campaign and pressure put on the convention leadership by African-American Democratic leaders from the North. I was seated on the floor with the Kentucky delegation when this happened. I turned around to watch the Mississippi Freedom Democrats file in to their seats—in the lead was someone who looked like none other than Stuart Lampe, a student at Harvard from Ghana whom I had met at law school. He went on to join the staff of the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington, where I understood he was living in 1964. This suggested to me that the Freedom Democrats were perhaps not all grassroots Mississippians, but rather their delegation may have contained an outsider or two.

The other special memory that I have from that convention is of a huge billboard along the boardwalk—the convention was in Atlantic City that year—dominated by a picture of Senator Barry Goldwater with the caption, “In your heart you know he’s right.” With the perspective of thirty-six years, having in mind what the Johnson administration did in Vietnam (campaigning on the basis of “Asian boys to fight Asian wars” while at that same time secretly conducting a huge American build-up in Vietnam), the left-wing extremism on college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the later rise of the radical right, perhaps he was right and in our hearts we should have known it. My father came to know Barry Goldwater through the League of Cities/Conference of Mayors organization—Senator Goldwater at the time was on the Phoenix City Council and my father was chairman of the Sinking Fund in Louisville. In his later years, my father referred to himself as a Goldwater Democrat. When I was young, I thought of myself as a liberal, but I remember the shock in 1962 when I picked up a copy of Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and found that I agreed with almost all of it.

Having grown up in Louisville, the Kentucky Derby has always been important to me. In 2001, I attended my forty-first Derby and that made thirty-five out of the last thirty-seven. One of my standard frivolities is to remark that some people have Christmas, some people have Yom Kippur, some people have Ramadan, I have Derby Day. My father was on the Board of Directors of Churchill Downs for thirty years and, among other things, designed the official silver Derby Julep Cup. He and my mother—almost always a winner on the Derby—took me for the first time when I was thirteen; Citation was the horse that year. To me, the Derby is a time to relate to tradition, be with one’s family, and have a wonderful time. I was always a shy person, with some but limited ambition. Going to the Derby as an early teenager brought me out a bit.

In high school, I by chance found myself asked to join the very old and prestigious Louisville high school fraternity called the Athenaeum Literary Association (ALA), which dated back to 1862. (Many of Louisville’s business and civic leaders had gone to my high school and had been members of the ALA over the decades.) By an even greater chance I was elected president of the ALA in my senior year of high school. Several of my closest lifelong friendships came from my membership in the organization. Becoming a member and then president gave me some self-confidence and ambition.

My high school, Louisville Male High School, while being perhaps one of Louisville’s oldest and most venerable institutions, was everything the name implied. It was an all-male, all-white public high school, but one of very high academic standards. Being all-male and public, it was somewhat unusual, and families that had moved to Louisville recently, as opposed to old-line types, began a campaign to make Male co-educational in the 1940s. This touched off perhaps the greatest political battle of that era in Louisville’s history; bitter campaigns for School Board membership ensued, friendships broke up. By one camp it was seen as a direct assault on one of Louisville’s sacred institutions, by the other as essential reform to move away from prehistoric practices. Eventually, the co-education side won and my class (1951) was the last to graduate without girls. By contrast, the racial integration of Louisville public schools after the 1954 Supreme Court decision was accomplished promptly and without incident in 1956. The foolishness of segregation reminds me of one of the many wise sayings of Harry Golden, the editor in the 1950s of a newspaper in North Carolina called the Carolina Israelite—a voice of reason in those times. He wrote, as I recall: “No white Southerner objects to standing next to a Negro, only sitting next to one, so the solution to the integration problem is simply to move the chairs out of the schools.” Thankfully, Louisville was spared much of the tumult of this issue.

However, even after public school integration, Louisville remained to a degree a segregated city. There was considerable resistance to Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to integrate Louisville’s restaurants and lunchrooms more than a decade later. After the co-education battle was over and public school integration was accomplished, my father decided that perhaps he could make a contribution to the improvement of the racial situation. For three successive School Board elections he managed and financed the campaigns of the Rev. Daniel Hewlett, a black minister, for a seat on the School Board. Each election campaign his numbers went up to the pleasure of those observing this, but he never quite made it. My father also, to my very great pride and admiration, arranged in 1950 for Jackie Robinson to receive an award from the city of Louisville recognizing his contribution to baseball. (Robinson had been booed in Louisville in 1946 during the Triple A Little World Series between Louisville and Montreal—his first season in organized baseball.) Never was I prouder of my father—I had seen Jackie Robinson play in the famous 1947 World Series.

Early on at Princeton, I became interested in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Students had the option of doing their last two years of study and senior thesis within this school at Princeton. One advantage was that a Woodrow Wilson School major could take courses in any university department. With some effort (history, politics, and economics were the prerequisites; the first two were not difficult for me, but the third definitely was) I managed to be accepted. I decided that the politics of foreign policy was what interested me most and I resolved to become a diplomat. Professor Gordon Craig’s course on diplomatic history from 1919 to 1939 made quite an impact on me. I still remember his tale of how Mussolini had a plan to place giant fans atop the Alps to blow the Central European cloud cover down over Italy and thereby make the Italians unhappy and gloomy and, as a result, as warlike as the Germans. During SALT II, I enjoyed telling this story to Soviet generals, who were unconvinced that it would have changed anything. My senior thesis was on American attitudes toward Soviet power, 1937–47, represented by editorials in The Nation and The Wall Street Journal, along with Gallup polls calibrated against the events of this period. A copy still sits on my coffee table at home today.

When I was a senior at Princeton, I applied to and was accepted at Harvard Law School, but I elected to go to L’Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris for a year between college and law school. While at school in Paris I traveled to the eastern Mediterranean, including Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt in the spring of 1956. In Egypt I had myself photographed in a dark business suit sitting on a camel in front of the Sphinx. When I came home that summer my father, with his usual energy, had the Louisville Courier Journal do a story on me, which ran in their magazine section. The piece was entitled “Internationalist” and included the photo of me sitting on the camel. Although nothing in my resume up to that time could justify such an ambition, the article cites me as saying that I hoped for a career with the State Department or a U.S.–Middle East oil company. My year in Paris necessitated another application to Harvard, which was also successful. However, the Louisville Draft Board intervened, and in 1956 I was off to the Army for two years, voiding that acceptance as well. The Draft Board had not drafted anyone in fifteen months—the Korean War was over and Vietnam was some years into the future—but the president of the Draft Board was a political opponent of my father’s and I was between deferments and, therefore, vulnerable.

I found my life as a recruit in the Army in those days to be somewhat less than satisfying and definitely ambition creating, but, in retrospect I am pleased that I served. It had an important effect upon me, one that was wholly beneficial. Nevertheless, I did feel time on my hands. My two-year term in the Army was set to end in September 1958, in time for me to enter law school with the class of 1961. I applied to Harvard Law a third time in the spring of 1958 and was successful once more. I also learned that the Army had a program at that time whereby an enlistment could be ended three months early if the applicant could demonstrate that failure to receive such an early out would delay his education by a year or more. But how to do this when my term in the Army ended approximately as the fall term at Harvard was beginning? Then I learned that Harvard Summer School was offering a special program that summer in Middle Eastern languages. Thus I applied for early release on the grounds that I intended to seek a career as a lawyer for a Middle East oil company (as the article had said) and wanted to study Islamic law while at Harvard Law School.

The Army accepted my application, even though Harvard Law School at that time did not offer a course in Islamic law, and in June of 1958, I left active duty in the Army and entered Harvard Summer School. Classical Arabic was my choice of study as it is the written language of the entire Arab world. It was a difficult course requiring study from early in the morning until late at night every day for most of the balance of the summer. Looking back this might seem to be a faintly ridiculous thing to have done, but it did spark a lifelong interest in and sympathy for the problems of the Middle East. I entered Harvard Law School on time in September, and when I reached the head of the registration line the clerk looked at my card and then at me and said, “At last!”

While at Harvard Law School, I signed up for then Harvard University professor Henry Kissinger’s seminar on defense policy and administration, which was most interesting. We were required to read his book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Once a week the fifty of us in the seminar gathered around a large table to listen to Kissinger expound and interrogate his weekly guest, which included the likes of former French Premier Mendés-France, retired Lieutenant General James Gavin, and the great French defense intellectual Raymond Aron. This course had been introduced to the law school curriculum some years before by a Harvard Law School professor named Barton Leach and later turned over to Kissinger. The theory was that most lawyers at some point in their careers likely would have to deal with the Department of Defense, but universities teach nothing about it.

I also took a particularly interesting course taught by Louis Sohn, one of the great men of the profession of teaching law. In the United States he is virtually a history of public international law. As I understand it, he was required to retire from Harvard Law School upon reaching the age of sixty-five. He then proceeded to the University of San Francisco, where he taught until required to retire at seventy-five. Next he went to the University of Georgia Law School, where he was allowed to teach until the age of eighty-five. He then taught at George Washington University Law School for ten years and at age ninety-five was given emeritus status. Someone asked him once upon a time how he remained so healthy. His reply was, “I never stop working all the time.” He is on the Board of Directors of my current organization, the Lawyers Alliance for World Security (LAWS) and I have the pleasure of working with him still. I heard him say during a 1999 debate sponsored by LAWS on Kosovo and international law, “Don’t tell me what the United Nations Charter says. I wrote it.”

I enjoyed Louis’s course in the spring of 1960 very much. It was a Christmas tradition that the Lincoln’s Inn Society, a venerable club—largely social—at Harvard Law School, give a dinner for the faculty, at which a musical show lampooning the professors was a feature. There were of course favorite professors to make fun of, and I noticed in my first two years that no one wrote a song about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 Politics, Louisville and Washington, D.C.
• 2 Chemical and Biological Weapons
• 3 SALT I
• 4 SALT II, Part One: The Nixon-Ford Years
• 5 SALT II, Part Two: The Carter Years
• 6 The Reagan Revolution and the INF and START Treaties
• 7 The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
• 8 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty
• 9 Survival of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
• 10 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
• 11 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
• 12 NPT Aftermath and the End of ACDA
• Epilogue
• Conclusions
• Glossary
• Index