When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (49 page)

Defeated, Stein and Fisher, along with Maass, met with Kissinger the next night and informed him of the community's decision. There was nothing they could do. The issue had become too emotional for Jews. Kissinger was to travel the next day to Moscow for talks with Brezhnev, and they gave him a list of eight hundred refuseniks to discuss with the Soviet leader. Kissinger said he would see what he could do. Resigned, he told them, "Look, you go your way and I'll take my road and we'll meet in the fall," when the bill would presumably be brought up for a vote in the House.

By now, Jackson had spent a year fighting for his amendment. It had taken on larger significance for him as a stand against a misguided American foreign policy. Morality, he believed, had been sucked out of decision making. He was placing so much importance on emigration because it was a gateway right; the bigger issue was that human rights should guide American policy. As he explained that summer in a commencement address at Yeshiva University, where ten years earlier Yaakov Birnbaum had called on religious students to rally for the little-known cause of Soviet Jewry: "Of all the human rights contained in the Universal Declaration of the United Nations none is more fundamental than that in Article 13—the right to free emigration. And as we assess the developing détente there is no more basic measure than its impact on the free movement of people. The importance of free emigration stems from the fact that whatever other liberties may be denied—speech, press, religion, employment—any and all of these can be restored by emigration to the free countries of the West. Of human rights, emigration is first among equals."

The forcefulness Jackson projected also had to do with a changing political landscape. At the end of April, Nixon's attorney general and his two closest aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, had re-signed over their connection to a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (at the Watergate hotel). And the day before Jackson's speech at Yeshiva, John Dean, the former White House counsel (recently fired by the president), had admitted talking with Nixon at least thirty-five times about how to cover up the crime. Jackson saw weakness and he attacked, ripping détente apart piece by piece. "Now, the White House prefers to use 'quiet diplomacy,' and with that they dismiss the tough bargain that the Jackson amendment calls for," the senator told the Yeshiva audience. "Well, we have seen that sort of 'quiet diplomacy' before.... It got us a new wave of repression and trials following the Moscow summit. It got us the infamous education ransom. It brought about the appearance of détente and the reality of an even lower Soviet tolerance of individual liberty."

Jackson and his allies were now on the offensive. The Soviets didn't really know what to do anymore. They had abandoned the diploma tax, so they assumed the problem would go away. If they went any further—actually putting in place an emigration process or letting more Jews go—it would mean acknowledging that they were altering their system in response to American pressure. Brezhnev made it very clear that the Soviets were unwilling to do this. On the eve of his visit to Washington in mid-June, uncharacteristically, he let foreign journalists ask him questions at a Kremlin press briefing. Most of the time was spent on the Jackson amendment. Brezhnev laughed off the questions nonchalantly: "We do not have in the Soviet Union any law forbidding a Soviet citizen from leaving the Soviet Union and going to another country if that departure is justified. Now I'm sure that any nation has a law whereby it is forbidden for certain categories of people connected with national security from leaving their country. Now I don't want to assert this—I'm not all that sure—but I'm told that there is such a law in Israel, too. And I'm sure the United States has rules to that effect."

A few days later Brezhnev was in the capital meeting with members of the Senate foreign relations committee and rattling off emigration figures from a little red book he kept in his pocket. He made claims that were maddeningly false; for example, he said that 97 percent of visa requests were approved. The supporters of the Jackson amendment never got close enough to grill him. His visit didn't elicit the kind of large protests the Soviet Jewry activists had hoped for. The summit had been announced only three weeks earlier, and the National Conference, even with its tentacles in every Jewish community, couldn't manage to get more than twelve thousand people to the Washington Mall. Israel had granted a State Department request that Meir Kahane's passport be suspended so he couldn't fly to Washington and lie down in the street.

The Jewish leaders who did come across to Brezhnev on that visit were the ones who had lost all credibility on this issue with the Jewish community: Fisher and Stein. On Monday night, June 18, the two were invited to a White House state dinner for the Soviet premier. Fisher, a Republican loyalist, could hardly refuse the president's invitation. Only a few weeks earlier, at the height of the Watergate scandal, he had written Nixon a short note pledging his support: "Mr. President: With all your problems, let me say that anything I can do to [be] helpful to you, I am available to the fullest extent of my time and ability." As for Stein, he sincerely thought this might be an opportunity for some quiet diplomacy and was undeterred by the Jews who had set up pickets outside his home and yelled shrilly that he was stabbing his fellow Jews in the back by dining with a modern Hitler. When Nixon and Brezhnev walked down the receiving line in the Blue Room, the president stopped in front of Fisher and Stein and pointed out to Brezhnev that these were Jewish leaders.

During the reception, the two cornered Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, and suggested that maybe the Jewish issues could be settled quietly, between them, and without bullhorns and bombs. Gromyko passed the message on to Dobrynin, and a few weeks later, Fisher and Stein and their wives found themselves having lunch with Anatoly Dobrynin beneath a crystal chandelier at the Soviet embassy. "I do not know why right now the Jewish community is pushing for Jackson-Vanik," Dobrynin told them. "I do not understand it. The levels of emigration are going up. I, myself, have a lot of Jewish friends in the Soviet Union. I play chess with them when I go home." Dobrynin's wife, exasperated that Fisher and Stein kept bringing the conversation back to the business of liberalizing emigration, chimed in at one point, saying, "Why don't we put all our Jews on a TWA plane and send them to the United States?" "Could you do that?" Fisher answered excitedly. "We would be happy to pay their way."

By the fall of 1973, the Jackson-Vanik amendment looked unstoppable. But then fate gave Kissinger one more chance to make his case to American Jews. Egypt and Syria's attack on Israel on October 6, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, destroyed the confidence Israel had gained since the Six-Day War. Israel eventually prevailed, but only after a few incredibly tense days—Golda Meir even prepared cyanide pills for herself in case Israel had to capitulate—and only with massive American help. Five hundred and sixty-five cargo flights brought twenty-two thousand tons of materiel to counter the Soviet tanks, guns, and fighter jets that were arriving by the hour in Cairo and Damascus. Kissinger tried to use Israel's sudden dependence to his advantage. At a moment of high anxiety, with Israel circling Egypt's Third Army in a precarious checkmate, the secretary of state warned Jewish leaders that persisting with the Jackson amendment was dangerous, that it would antagonize the Soviets at a moment when their cooperation was needed to arrive at an armistice agreement. He wanted them to drop it. Not surprisingly, people like Max Fisher and Jacob Stein were receptive and tried to argue Kissinger's case. Jackson fought back hard. "The administration is always using you," he told them during a particularly tense meeting at his office. "The only way to get Soviet Jews out of the Soviet Union is to stand firm on the Jackson-Vanik amendment."

That's exactly what the Jewish community did. Even Stein and Fisher knew that they were basically a constituency of two. The only other force in Jewish life offering any opposition to the amendment was the American Jewish Congress, whose president, Arthur Hertzberg, had recently been cornered by a group of angry students. Passing the amendment in full, Hertzberg warned, "will result in the closing of the doors of Russia." A few weeks after the Yom Kippur War's end, the situation in Israel eased considerably, and American Jews were again ready to focus on the Soviet Union. Nixon was weak and preoccupied, consumed by his mounting troubles—in late November, the press revealed that the White House tapes the president had handed over contained a mysterious, unexplained eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap of buzzing white noise. Kissinger was distracted too, running the country's foreign policy on his own and shuttling constantly from Moscow to Cairo to Tel Aviv. On December 4, after requesting numerous times that the vote be delayed, Nixon finally accepted the inevitable, that the trade bill would go forward—though he warned that he would deem it "unacceptable" if it arrived with the Jackson amendment attached.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, the amendment took on renewed moral urgency. In a powerful letter of support from Moscow, Andrei Sakharov—who along with Solzhenitsyn had been facing increasing harassment by the KGB—wrote that the bill represented "a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust." To abandon it in the face of Soviet opposition would be tantamount "to total capitulation of democratic principles in the face of blackmail, deceit and violence. The consequences of such a capitulation for international confidence, détente and the entire future of mankind are difficult to predict." Sakharov's letter made it nearly impossible to vote against Jackson-Vanik. Who wanted to debate the great dissident's invocation of American principle? Liberals, who up until then had been silent partners to Jackson, suddenly spoke up loudly. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
that one must "always trust the man on the firing line." I. F. Stone reached the same conclusion in the pages of the
New York Review of Books.
So did Anthony Lewis in the
New York Times.
Sakharov's words further bound together Soviet Jewry and the human rights movement. He knew that Jews would be the biggest beneficiaries of liberalized emigration, but he did not harp on that fact. He folded their fight into a greater struggle for openness. This made it easier for a wider circle of people to support Soviet Jewry and gave the activists a larger stage from which to shout.

Finally, on December 11, a year and a half after the introduction of the Soviet diploma tax that inspired it, the Jackson-Vanik amendment came to a vote in the House. It passed overwhelmingly, 319 to 80. Then the entire trade bill, with the amendment intact, passed, 272 to 140. For American Jews, this was a victory, not just over the Nixon administration but also over their own accommodationist elements. It seemed the Jewish community was finally ready to take action. Having the leadership of a respected senator helped, but in the end they themselves had decided to take a great risk. Kissinger's argument that they would have to choose between Israel and Soviet Jews was also shown to be a ploy—on the same day the Jackson-Vanik amendment passed, the House approved $2.2 billion in aid to Israel.

Henry Jackson now had a choice. If he brought his amendment to a vote in the Senate, it would surely pass. But the Soviets would most likely balk at the demands and reject the trade bill altogether. The other option was to make a deal. Even though he was ideologically opposed to the concept of détente, he was practical. He wanted his amendment to lead to actual changes. With that in mind, Jackson decided to come up with some concrete conditions, a settlement agreement on his terms. The amendment would be made law, but if the Soviets met these requirements, they would gain an automatic waiver. As long as the president could prove to Congress through regular reports that the Russians were abiding by the conditions, they could keep their trade benefits. Jackson and Perle realized that this way they could use their leverage to actually increase Soviet Jewish emigration—which was, after all, the goal.

Kissinger was finally facing up to the inevitability of the amendment. He railed against the bill every chance he got, denouncing it as "counterproductive" to both détente and emigration and never missing an opportunity to tell Jewish and Israeli leaders that they were jeopardizing Middle East peace. But in fact he had resigned himself to its passage. Because of Watergate, all the work of détente that he and Nixon had delicately constructed over the past two years was crumbling. By early 1974, the Russians were less willing to keep cooperating. If Kissinger hoped to maintain any sort of relationship with them, he needed to demonstrate that he could deliver the trading terms they wanted. So he was open to the idea of compromise.

To start with, Jackson and Perle aimed high. In addition to ending all harassment of applicants, the Soviets had to grant a minimum of one hundred thousand visas a year. On March 6, in a meeting at the State Department, Jackson presented Kissinger with his terms. Like a bargainer in a bazaar, though, he told the secretary that first he wanted to know what the Soviets were willing to offer. As it turned out, Kissinger was scheduled to be in Moscow later that month. He was doubtful they would accept the notion of a deal, but he agreed to feel them out. A week later, Perle had a list of five principles the Soviets needed to agree to if negotiations were to continue.

To Kissinger's great surprise, Brezhnev and Gromyko were willing to talk. At some point during the twenty hours of conversation at the Kremlin, they said they could commit to keeping emigration at 1973 levels (about thirty-five thousand a year). This wasn't any great concession, but it did signify progress. No longer were the Soviet leaders protesting in public and private that they would never stand for meddling in their internal affairs ("Would you agree to making United States trade with the USSR dependent on the solution of the racial problem in the United States?" an angry Soviet official had once asked). It seemed that they understood that Jackson and the Jewish community had the power to deny them what they wanted. Brezhnev would finally have to appease the "Zionists" by doing more than just organizing a Jewish variety show for them.