When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (47 page)

A little after eight that same evening, the Ninety-second Congress adjourned. A few weeks later, Nixon beat McGovern in a landslide, earning 37 percent of the Jewish vote, almost double that of 1968. The president saw this as a mandate to continue along the path he had laid out in his first term. Jackson was determined to stand in his way.

When the new session began, so did the real battle for the bill. Richard Perle worked on it every day. But he wasn't alone. Sprinkled among some of the key legislators were young, motivated Jewish aides like himself, people personally invested in issues like Israel and Soviet Jewry who were now in a position to do something about it. Senator Abraham Ribicoff's foreign affairs expert Morris Amitay spoke fluent Hebrew, had family living in Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee, and was constantly pushing Ribicoff, the only Jewish Democrat in the Senate, to support arms deals for the Jewish State. Perle was already motivated by his Cold Warrior outlook, and Amitay made him see the tribal reasons for supporting a bill that would help fellow Jews. Interviewed at the time for a book about Jewish political power and assuming he was speaking off the record, Amitay revealed how the background of these high-placed staffers made a difference:

There are now a lot of guys at the working level up here who happen to be Jewish, who are willing to make a little bit of extra effort and to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness, and this is what has made this thing go very effectively in the last couple of years. These are all guys who are in a position to make the decisions in these areas for the senators. You don't need that many to get something done in the Senate. All you need is a certain commitment to get something done, if guys are willing to put time into that instead of a million other things they have to do, if they're willing to make a couple of calls, if they're willing to become involved, you can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.

From the beginning, Perle and Amitay had worked together closely. Once the battle moved to the House, they gained a third partner: Mark Talisman, legislative aide to Charles Vanik, a congressman from Cleveland whose district auspiciously included Lou Rosenblum's neighborhood. With many Soviet-bloc refugees among his constituents, Vanik championed the bill early on, introducing a version in the House in October 1972 before the end of the congressional session and giving his name to what would be known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment.

While the administration seemed to be ignoring Jackson's challenge, assuming it was simply posturing from an ambitious senator, the staffers were busy working out a plan for pushing the bill through the lower house of Congress. They decided to individually pressure every single House member. It might not take too much to convince them. It wasn't only the Jewish community that supported the bill; labor had signed on as well. George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, was even more opposed to détente than Jackson, especially when it came to trade. The labor movement would not stand for a trade deal that would turn the Soviets into competitors. Following the election, Meany got in touch with Jackson and pledged the backing of the unions. It would take an extremely secure—or foolish—politician to oppose a bill backed by both Jews and labor.

Still, the job of convincing individual House members was a big one. By Mark Talisman's count, sixty would support the bill because of the Jews in their districts, and sixty more would join because they were anti-Communists. But that left many others who needed special handling. Talisman spent ten days in January calling all 435 representatives' offices, sometimes speaking with members dozens of times before they added their names to the growing list of cosponsors. He tried to tailor his pitch and dispense with the generic "Dear Colleague" letter. Different approaches worked for different members. Some were moved by Holocaust guilt. Others were upset that Nixon had not consulted with Congress before signing the trade pact. The Jewish community helped make Perle's and Talisman's jobs easier. The grassroots force of the Union of Councils combined with the authoritativeness of the National Conference added effective pressure. Both groups directed their members to flood their respective House representatives with phone calls and letters. Perle met frequently with Lou Rosenblum. Yaakov Birnbaum often called him late at night. Jerry Goodman at the National Conference had to fight accusations by older Jewish leaders that his office had become merely an arm of Jackson's office.

At the local level, activists tried to humanize the issue for local representatives. They presented the stories of individual Jews. In many cases they got congresspeople on the phone with refuseniks. Conversations like this one—organized by the Minnesota Action Committee for Soviet Jewry—between Congressman Albert Quie of Minnesota and Boris Einbinder, a young Moscow activist, were very common:

CONGRESSMAN ALBERT QUIE:
Hello, Professor Einbinder.
BORIS EINBINDER:
Yes, it is me.
AQ:
Hello, hello.
BE:
Hello, yes.
AQ
: Yes, this is Congressman Quie from Minnesota. How are you?
BE
: All right. Pardon me, I don't know who you are.
AQ
: Q-U-I-E ... I am a member of Congress in the United States.
BE
: Yes, I see. Have we spoken before?
AQ
: I have not spoken to you before, but I have talked to friends of yours, and am interested in you and wondering how you were and how's your health?

Einbinder explained how he had just been detained in prison for fifteen days for participating in a demonstration. Congressman Quie listened raptly and after the conversation promised the small Minneapolis Soviet Jewry group that he would do whatever he could to support the amendment.

Through this kind of informal and concerted lobbying, the Washington group—as the collection of Jewish staffers led by Perle was soon known—signed up many of the cosponsors, including Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Grassroots Jewish power had never been mobilized so strategically before. Morris Amitay talked at the time about how the Washington group deployed their secret weapon:

If we get a senator from an industrial state, a state with a sizeable Jewish population, and he doesn't come out [for the Jackson Amendment], we don't let him get away with it. That's when we call for outside help.... What you have in this country is a fantastic, untapped reservoir of Jews who are in influential positions who were never asked to help. And now it's just a matter of finding them and asking them to help. There are so many Jewish organizations, so many Jewish people sitting out in small towns in Iowa and in Oregon, and there are rabbis with congregations, who are just dying to get a call saying, "We need help with somebody. Can you help?" They understand the issue immediately — you're dealing with very sophisticated people.

With Mills onboard, the bill seemed unstoppable, and suddenly both the White House and the Soviets were taking notice. Nixon had allowed Republican senators to support it because he didn't think the amendment would amount to anything. Talisman's clandestine vote collecting had masked how much progress was being made. When Mills made the announcement that he and 259 House members were supporting the amendment, the White House was truly surprised. Within a few weeks, another thirty more would join.

Henry Kissinger now woke up to the threat. The Jewish secretary of state—the highest post a Jew had ever achieved in government—was now in the seemingly uncomfortable position of standing up to a bill that the Jewish community had rallied behind in force. But Kissinger, an enigmatic man in many ways whose ideological allegiances were sometimes as hard to pin down as his gravelly, German-accented voice was to understand, was not one to feel the tribal pull. If anything was consistent about his worldview, it was a cold pragmatism that put stability above all else and eschewed the emotional forces that were driving American Jews. Though he took pains not to delve into it too deeply—in public at least—his identity as a refugee who had barely escaped the Holocaust had a lot to do with his adoption of realpolitik. Most Jews of his generation had drawn one lesson from the war—that they would never again abandon their brethren. Out of the upheaval that had intruded on his young life, Kissinger had drawn a different lesson, one that would guide him as he entered this battle and make him impervious to the appeals of his fellow Jews.

Kissinger had grown up in the small Bavarian town of Fürth, the son of a teacher, a comfortable middle-class upbringing as part of a segregated but not yet despised Jewish minority. He was ten when the Nazis came to power. Within five years, in 1938, his family had fled to America, where he began his rise, which took him from the German-Jewish enclave of Washington Heights to City College, the U.S. Army, Harvard, and eventually to the White House. When still at an impressionable age, though, he had observed firsthand the fickleness of democratic institutions, how easily Weimar Germany had crumbled and how no one stood up against the ensuing chaos. It was this experience above all that had seared his consciousness and made him forever wary of democracy's ability to sustain itself on its own. Experienced hands needed to guide foreign policy and keep it from being dictated by passion. The role of a diplomat—like his great hero Metternich—was to maintain a balance of power in the world, keeping at bay the forces that threatened peace and stability. This also meant being realistic: human rights and ethical considerations could be compromised when dealing with other states. He observed with dismay and annoyance the zeal of those intent on making a giant cause out of Soviet Jewry and obstructing détente. It's not that he didn't care about Soviet Jews—he thought that behind-the-scenes dealmaking could ease their problems—only that he thought that they distracted from a more significant calculation: how to make the Soviet-American relationship less adversarial, more consistent and predictable. For this goal, which he saw as his mission in government, he was going to find himself opposed to most American Jews, who were guided by different imperatives.

When Kissinger, that paragon of Jewish accomplishment, began pressing congresspeople to turn against Jackson, he was effectively trying to persuade mostly non-Jewish lawmakers to ignore the demands of their Jewish constituents.

On March 1, Nixon met with the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, and Rabin. The president tried to convince her that the administration's tactic of "quiet diplomacy" was more effective than the proposed amendment would be and asked her to lean on the Jewish community to stop supporting the bill. "The problem is that the members of Congress say they are guided by the Jewish organizations here. The future of détente with the Soviet Union is liable to be foiled by the Congress. Personally I can get better results for you," Nixon told her. Kissinger, who was standing nearby, tried to drive home the point: "Don't let the Jewish leadership here put pressure on the Congress." Golda Meir replied: "You must understand my situation. I cannot tell Jews in the United States not to concern themselves with their brethren in the Soviet Union!" Kissinger's pressure tactics were useless. Israel had decided early on to stay out of the fight publicly; it did not want to be caught between two branches of the American government or to be accused of stirring up Cold War tension. It was hard for Kissinger to believe, but the only ones with the power to stop this snowball were the formerly docile leaders of the Jewish community.

The Kremlin was also getting the picture. Nixon made sure of this by sending treasury secretary George Shultz to Moscow in early March to give Brezhnev a lesson on the American political system, specifically about how easily the legislature could upset the objectives of the executive branch. In a Politburo meeting on March 20, the effects of this tutorial were clear. Not only did Brezhnev understand the political dynamic in the United States, he also acknowledged the power of the activists. With a June summit in Washington fast approaching—a follow-up to Nixon's 1972 trip to Moscow—he showed his irritation. "When you read the materials, and I read everything, then you see that, all the same, the official visit to the U.S. has been seriously impeded by the issue of Zionism," Brezhnev told the Politburo. "In the last few months, hysteria has been whipped up around the so-called education tax on individuals emigrating abroad. I have thought a lot about what to do." He then got angry at Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, for not following the order Brezhnev had given him at the last Politburo session to "stop collecting the taxes, that is, without repealing the law, let out a group of 500 Jews who have no relation to either secret work or to party organizations. Even if some middle-aged people fall into the group, say from Birobidzhan, let them out. They will talk about it and everyone will know."

Andropov apologized and pointed out that a few people had indeed left without being charged. But Brezhnev just got more worked up. He started rattling off statistics about how many educated Jews had emigrated and how many thousands of rubles they had paid to get out. "This is why the Zionists are yelling," he said. "Jackson relies on this, and Kissinger comes to Dobrynin and says, 'We understand that this is an internal matter and we can't interfere. We also have laws.' At the same time he says: 'Help us out somehow. Nixon can push through the [trade] legislation. He's working with the senators.'" Then Brezhnev asked whether all this headache was worth the money collected so far from the education tax: "Why do we need that million?"

"There's no need to repeal the law," he reiterated. "We agreed not to change the law. But at this particular time, when the Zionists have incited a campaign around the Jackson Amendment and around the bill granting us [most favored nation] status, we need to let them out."