Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [124]
I was certainly comfortable delaying a new treaty if a satisfactory resolution to my concerns could not be reached. This of course had the effect of making me the administration’s hawk, and positioning me as out of step with Kissinger and his allies, Rockefeller and Scowcroft. My reluctance to sign on to Kissinger’s positions in obtaining an agreement without the Department of Defense’s support proved frustrating for him. Kissinger was used to the Pentagon’s opposition to his proposals, but they had not been much of a problem for him in the past given the tepid relationship between Ford and Schlesinger. He was unhappy that I was putting doubts into the President’s mind, and he accused me of using delaying tactics to scuttle his negotiations with the Soviets. “Rumsfeld was skillful at deflecting every controversial issue into some bureaucratic bog or other,” Kissinger noted later, giving more weight to what he considered my bureaucratic skills than the substantive merit of my arguments.22 He thought that was a criticism of me. I felt it was a compliment when it came to the risk of an arms control agreement that, in my view, was not in our country’s best interest.
The discussions within the administration over SALT were even more difficult for me in light of my relationship with Rockefeller. At one meeting in mid-February 1976, we listened to a long presentation by Kissinger on the status of the SALT negotiations, which Rockefeller responded to by banging the table in approval.
When I laid out the Department of Defense’s position, Rockefeller kept interrupting me. He had a well-developed practice of trying to throw people off with bullying tactics. Now that he was a lame-duck vice president, he was even more caustic. A couple of times, as I was speaking, he snapped, “Don, what’s your point?”
Exasperated, I finally said, “Mr. Vice President, I’ve been listening for one hour and fifteen minutes, and I am proceeding in my own way to lay out my points.” And I continued to do so. Rockefeller’s behavior laid bare the tensions over the hoped-for deal with the Soviets favored by the liberal wing of the party, for which Rockefeller was the poster boy.
A key, if controversial, issue in the debates over SALT was the fate of America’s cruise missiles.* Cruise missiles varied in ranges, could be armed with nuclear or conventional warheads, and could be launched from land, sea, or air. Their unusual flexibility made them particularly attractive as a weapons system. It also made them a serious complicating factor in negotiations to limit the size of our nuclear arsenal.
America had a measurable lead in cruise missile technology. The Soviets would have to expend large amounts of their resources to keep up with us, so the Soviets wanted us to promise to curtail our cruise missile development in a SALT II treaty. An agreement could have been achieved if Ford had been willing to acquiesce to these demands. Kissinger and Rockefeller, and others eager to sign a treaty with the Soviets, were ready to agree to that. I was uncomfortable agreeing to limit an advantage, the exact nature of which, at that time, we could not predict.23
In one meeting Kissinger tried to blame the Joint Chiefs for intransigence on the cruise missile issue. They were not the impediment, I told him—I was.24 I urged the President to delay any treaty that required restricting our cruise missile technologies as part of the deal. The Defense Department needed more time to assess the merits of the treaty’s specific provisions before agreeing to them.
That Kissinger and I had differing views on the arms treaty with the Soviets posed a problem for Ford. The President needed support from the conservative wing of his party and a few hawks in the Democratic Party, like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state, to get a treaty ratified in the Senate.