When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (50 page)

Kissinger returned from his trip. And at a party at the Israeli embassy a few days later, just before he was to leave on his honeymoon with Nancy Maginnes Kissinger, his new wife, he pulled Jackson aside and told him what had happened. Jackson didn't think it was much of an offer and neither did his Senate cosponsors Javits and Ribicoff. When they all met again with Kissinger at the end of April, they told him he would have to do better. The dynamic of the next few months was established. Kissinger became the go-between, eliciting offers from the Kremlin, bringing them back to Jackson, and then returning with counteroffers. Much would rest on whether Kissinger was dealing in good faith.

The negotiations were overshadowed by Nixon's slow demise. In May, transcripts of the president's White House tapes were released. Nixon apparently used the expression
Jew boy
with some regularity. Meanwhile, the secretary of state was shuttling around the world, occupied with the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. But he was also negotiating with Gromyko and bringing the information back to Jackson. The Soviets had increased their offer to forty-five thousand visas a year and promised to issue a statement saying that harassment was "inconsistent with Soviet law." But just as Kissinger was making progress, Nixon emerged with a scathing critique of Jackson, which he delivered at Annapolis during the graduation ceremony of the U.S. Naval Academy. "Eloquent appeals are now being made for the United States, through its foreign policy, to transform the internal as well as the international behavior of other countries, especially the Soviet Union." But, he said, "our primary concern must be to help influence the international conduct of nations in the world arena. We would not welcome the intervention of other countries in our domestic affairs, and we cannot expect them to be cooperative when we seek to intervene in theirs."

Nixon and Kissinger took another trip to Moscow that summer, a strange summit, given the inevitability of impeachment. The Soviets had a hard time taking Nixon or his promises seriously, and Congress debated whether to prevent him from making any commitments. Jackson and the Jewish leaders were frustrated by the slow pace. In fact, to listen to Brezhnev as he raised one of many glasses of vodka on Nixon's first night in Moscow, it was unclear whether there was any compromise in the works at all. Expressing his desire for further trade relations, Brezhnev said, "Experience shows that progress along this path requires effort—sometimes quite a bit of it. The relaxation of tensions in Soviet-American relations, as in international relations generally, comes up against rather active resistance." Smiling in the direction of Nixon, Brezhnev added, "There is no need for me to dwell on this subject since our American guests know better and in more detail than we about those who oppose international détente, who favor whipping up the arms race and returning to the methods and mores of the cold war." These were the words of a man on the defensive reassuring another man on the defensive. But they highlighted the extent to which Jackson and his ideas had become an insurmountable obstacle for both of them.

On Friday morning, August 9, at Andrews Air Force Base, Nixon lifted both his arms above his head, hunched his shoulders, and made a V-for-victory sign with both hands before being whisked away from Washington forever. Only then did Jackson's amendment begin to pick up steam. Gerald Ford, the new president, had been a longtime member of Congress and was close to the legislative body; three days after being sworn in, he promised a "good marriage" with the branch of government that had become so antagonistic to Nixon. From the start, he was much more amenable to compromising with Jackson. Back in May when he was still vice president, Ford had met with Jewish leaders, and he'd left them with a positive impression. Jerry Goodman wrote in a memo that "he expressed wonderment that two reasonable people like Henry Kissinger and Henry Jackson could not somehow work out the situation.... It was suggested that he, Mr. Ford, might try his hand at getting the two Henrys together."

The Soviets knew that Ford was a different type of political animal. They were suddenly motivated to make deeper sacrifices in order to salvage the trade bill. On August 14, Ford met with Dobrynin and told the Soviet ambassador that he was sympathetic to the emigration argument and that no trade bill would pass until the Soviets accepted some form of the Jackson amendment. The next day, Jackson, Ribicoff, and Javits had breakfast with Ford at the White House. (It was the first time that a president had gotten directly involved in the negotiations—Nixon had always left this job to Kissinger.) They all reiterated the formula. The amendment would pass as it was. The strict trade restrictions would be left in. The onus would now be on the Soviets. If they stuck to the promises they had made—an immediate increase in emigration to the agreed-upon number and an end to all harassment—then a waiver would be granted. It would be the president's job to ensure that they were keeping up their end of the bargain. If they didn't—if the Soviets fell short by even one person—then Ford would be forbidden to use his waiver. Jackson was giddy after the meeting, telling the press corps that "the President's direct intervention in this matter, which is a new development, has given it new momentum, new movement..." Asked whether he would demand something in writing from the Soviets, Jackson said: "That is up to the President, he is the one who will have to guarantee, and what arrangements he makes with the Russians, that will be a matter for him. But he has assured us that whatever is worked out that he will see that guarantees are there, period. And we will rely on his integrity for those assurances, and we have faith in that integrity."

All through late August and early September, Perle worked on writing the waiver language into the bill and formulating the letters that would constitute the heart of the deal. On the evening of September 6, Kissinger, Jackson, and Dobrynin agreed the letters would be exchanged two weeks from then, when Gromyko visited Washington. And they agreed on a number: sixty thousand exit visas—a compromise between the forty-five thousand offered by the Soviets and the seventy-five to a hundred thousand proposed by Jackson. Perle had worried that if the number was too low, the Soviets could let Jews who lived outside the major cities emigrate—like those Jews from Georgia—and still avoid giving exit visas to the scientists and doctors of Moscow and Leningrad. With a number as high as sixty thousand, Perle was satisfied there would be a real change.

On September 20, Ford held back-to-back meetings with Jackson and Gromyko. Leaving the Oval Office after his appointment, the senator ran into the Soviet foreign minister in the waiting area. Jackson, who knew he was viewed by the Kremlin as a villain, wanted to ease the tension with a bit of humor. He put his fingers up to his head to make the horns of a devil. Gromyko, a grim man who years before had earned the Washington moniker Comrade Nyet, looked puzzled. His translator tried to explain while Jackson stood there awkwardly, but Gromyko remained bewildered. Their exchanges with the president went more smoothly, and by the end of the day, the details were agreed upon by all.

It still took another month before it could be voted on by the Senate. The nature of the deal—involving a convoluted exchange of letters in which Kissinger vouched for the Soviet promises on behalf of the executive branch, and Jackson laid out Congress's conditions—lent itself to confusion and misinterpretation. At one point Kissinger refused to sign. He and Jackson even stopped speaking. Only the Jewish community's pressure—now they were pushing the senator who had for so long been dragging them along—forced Jackson back to the negotiating table.

Finally, on October 18, Jackson, Javits, and Vanik met with Kissinger and Ford at the White House, and the secretary and the senator signed the letters. Two years had passed since Nixon had sent Congress his trade bill. Jackson had managed to obstruct a piece of legislation that he considered too advantageous to the Soviets and add an amendment that forced the Russians to change their policies if they wanted to benefit from détente. It was Jackson's moment of triumph.

Ford and Jackson decided to make the letters public. The night before the signing, Perle and Amitay had mimeographed copies, and now they ran around the briefing room, their fingers still stained with the purple ink, distributing them to journalists. "We have reached what I think is an historic understanding in the area of human rights. I think it is a monumental accomplishment considering that so many said it could never be accomplished," Jackson happily told the reporters to the repeated flash of cameras. "Let me just say that what we started out with two years ago we have accomplished," Jackson continued. "I am not going to comment on what the Russians have done. I can only say that there has been a complete turnaround here on the basic points that are contained in the two letters." There was no moderating his sense of victory, and the normally staid senator got far ahead of himself and any Soviet promise when he said "I anticipate that it should go beyond sixty thousand based on the number of applications, which we know exceed one hundred and thirty thousand."

Jackson and Perle were not the only ones basking in their success. The Jewish community could hardly believe what it had accomplished. Haskel Lookstein, the rabbi of an influential and affluent Upper East Side synagogue, captured the mood of elation and accomplishment in a letter to the executive director of the National Conference: "I doubt whether we have seen anything in our own lives which had greater historical importance than the agreement concluded on Friday. Perhaps the Six-Day War ranks with it, but I am not sure it ranks above it."

The victory would be hollow. The Kremlin was not about to have its emigration policy dictated by the Jews of the United States. Perhaps under the impression that the arrangement would remain secret, they were humiliated by Jackson's very public gloating. When Kissinger spent three days in Moscow in late October, he received earfuls of hurt pride and anger at every meeting. "The Soviets felt deeply wounded by the implication that they had knuckled under to the American demands affecting their internal affairs," Kissinger told the press. To make sure the full extent of the Soviets' dissatisfaction was clear, Gromyko handed Kissinger a letter before he left, a document that basically negated any deal over the amendment. The promises Jackson claimed had been made, wrote Gromyko, "create[d] a distorted picture of our position as well as of what we told the American side in this matter..." He then went on to reject the assurances previously given regarding the departure of "Soviet citizens": "Some figures are even being quoted as to the supposed number of such citizens, and there is talk of an anticipated increase in that number as compared with previous years.... We resolutely decline such an interpretation."

Kissinger kept the Gromyko letter a secret. He showed it to Ford and his top aides but not to anyone in Congress. Asked later about this concealment, he said he had simply forgotten about it. But he had every reason to withhold the letter since passage of the trade bill depended entirely on his ability to convince Congress that the Russians had promised to change their ways. Two years later, in a 1976 speech to the National Conference, Jackson referred to Kissinger's action as "among the shabbiest deceits ever perpetrated by a Secretary of State on the Congress of the United States." It was a "deplorable breach of good faith." Jackson never overcame the feeling that if he had known about the strong Soviet opposition, he might have altered something in his amendment, made a strategic change of some sort to preserve its effectiveness.

But it wasn't until December 13, the morning of the Senate vote, that Jackson became aware of the Soviets' position. TASS printed Gromyko's letter, the first time since the Cuban missile crisis that the Kremlin had made diplomatic records public. Not only did the full text appear but an adjoining article said that "leading circles in the USSR" (a euphemism for Brezhnev) found the conditions set forth in the exchange of letters totally unacceptable. At that moment, with the trade bill and the amendment only hours away from passing, neither Jackson nor Kissinger wanted to make any rash moves. Jackson told the press, "We should keep our cool." He hoped that the Gromyko letter had been released for domestic consumption only, in order to save face.

Predictably, the amendment and the new waiver provision passed by an overwhelming 88 to 0. Then the entire Trade Reform Act, the Jackson amendment included, passed by a vote of 77 to 4. A conference committee reconciled the House and Senate versions, and the final version was adopted on December 18, two days before Congress was to adjourn, and sent to Ford's desk. Equally predictably, the Soviets came out against the new law and what it demanded of them. Following the Gromyko letter, the Soviet press went on the attack;
Pravda
blamed the "advocates of tension" in Congress for trying to "undermine the very foundation of détente." It ran a political cartoon in which a fat capitalist wrote the words
interference in internal affairs
on a large ball and chain that was attached to a truck labeled
international trade.

The Kremlin was angrier than anyone in Congress suspected. And not only because of Jackson's grandstanding in the wake of his victory; another piece of legislation was about to rob the Kremlin of what it most coveted. The Stevenson amendment had been conceived by Adlai E. Stevenson III, an Illinois congressman, great-grandson of the one-time vice president and son of the two-time Democratic presidential nominee. It set a $300 million limit on the amount of credit that could be issued to the Soviets, and of that, there was a ceiling of $40 million for projects involving exploration for gas and oil. As Kissinger would later say, this amount was "peanuts in Soviet terms." They had already received half a billion from the Export-Import Bank of the United States since 1972. The bill stipulated that these restrictions could be waived only if it was deemed in the "national interest." It was shot down in the House, but Stevenson had managed to sneak his amendment into the Senate's version of the Export-Import Bank bill—legislation that renewed the life of the institution charged with issuing credit to foreign countries—and it looked like it might actually pass.