IN FEBRUARY OF '77, SENATOR JACKSON HAD A BREAKFAST MEETING WITH PRESIDENT CARTER, ANTICIPATING THE STRATEGIC ARMS NEGOTIATING POSTURE. AFTER THAT, YOU WROTE A LONG MEMO TO PRESIDENT CARTER. WHAT WERE YOUR AND SENATOR JACKSON'S CONCERNS?

Senator Jackson was concerned that the path we were negotiating now, which was inherited from the previous administration would lead to the kind of agreement that in fact we wound up with in SALT II, that is, an agreement that protected significant Soviet advantages, with respect, for example, to heavy missiles, that failed to achieve significant reductions in strategic forces, for which he had been arguing for many years. So he strongly advised President Carter, in a memorandum, to abandon the policy line of the Carter, of the previous administration, and press the Soviets for significant reductions in strategic forces and an equal ceiling on both sides.

WAS HE INTERESTED IN JUST THE SOVIETS REDUCING THEIR FORCES, THEIR HEAVY MISSILES, OR MUTUAL REDUCTION?

Well, the United, the United States had no heavy missiles. We were prepared to make reductions; we insisted that they make reductions, and we insisted that the agreed-upon reduced levels should be equal for both sides.

YOU WEREN'T SEEKING SUPERIORITY FOR THE UNITED STATES.

No, I think as a practical matter superiority for the United States is not only impossible to define, it is surely impossible to negotiate: the Soviets are not about to permit the United States superiority, nor should we be prepared to allow that for the Soviet Union.

JACKSON SAID AT THE TIME THAT THE TIME THAT VANCE AND WARNKE WENT TO MOSCOW IN MARCH OF '77, THAT THE PROPOSAL THEY WERE CARRYING WAS, "A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION." WHAT DID HE MEAN BY THAT?

Jackson liked the early Carter proposal, or at least liked elements of it, because it did move in the direction of significant reductions and it would have led to equal ceilings on both sides. He was bitterly disappointed at the rapidity with which Carter and Vance abandoned that proposal. I think it was only under consideration for six weeks or so in Moscow; the Russians said they wouldn't accept it and we accepted their rejection and then returned to the negotiating track that had been set by the previous administration, and that was a profound disappointment for Scoop.

IS THAT WHEN HE WENT INTO OPPOSITION ON SALT II?

From the moment that the Carter administration abandoned its proposals, made by Secretary Vance in Moscow Senator Jackson believed that he would influence the conduct of the negotiations only by monitoring them extremely closely, by holding hearings on a regular basis, by forcing the administration to share its views, its philosophy, its judgments about tactics and the nature of the strategic balance all of which would serve either to influence the administration, or failing that, to build some firebreaks that would turn out to be important in the ratification debate that would eventually take place.

WE TALKED TO MARSHALL SHULMAN AND HE SAID THAT THE PROPOSAL THAT VANCE AND WARNKE CARRIED TO MOSCOW IN MARCH WAS VERY ONE-SIDED, THERE WERE NO US CONCESSIONS, AND HE WONDERED ABOUT, HE SPECULATED ABOUT THE MOTIVATION OF SCOOP, IF IT WASN'T DESIGNED TO KILL THE ARMS TALKS, BECAUSE HE KNEW THE SOVIETS COULDN'T ACCEPT IT. DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?

Well, I have never agreed with Marshall Shulman's judgment about how to deal with the Soviet Union. I think it's been altogether too supplicatory. If, Marshall's policies would hand massive advantages to the Soviet Union and ask virtually nothing in return. A negotiation is a negotiation; you table a position and you work toward a reconciliation of conflicting views. One of the mistakes in the conduct of negotiations by a number of American administrations has been to put forward proposals that are rather close to the minimum final outcome that's acceptable to the United States, while the Soviets put forward proposals that are heavily weighted in their favor. And if you then end up dividing the difference between our proposal and theirs, you've concluded an agreement that fundamentally favors the Soviet side. So I think Marshall Shulman's view of the tactics in 1977 is simply wrong.

PAUL WARNKE SAID THAT HE DIDN'T FEEL THAT YOU, OR PERHAPS SCOOP, BUT HE MENTIONED YOU IN PARTICULAR, FELT THAT WE COULD DO BUSINESS WITH THE SOVIETS. IS THAT RIGHT?

Well, I think this is a trivial and annoying slander, to suggest that because I hold a different view of what constitutes a sound agreement those views should be dismissed with the simple accusation that I don't believe in any agreement. Paul Warnke isn't alone in making this suggestion there's never a shred of evidence to back that up. The counterpart of that argument would be to say that Mr. Warnke and others who share his view would sign any agreement whether it was in the interest of the United States or not, and I've never said that about him and I don't ex... I don't expect that those who hold a different view of what constitutes a good agreement should reduce the argument to that kind of ad hominem attack, questioning motives.

WHY DID SENATOR JACKSON OPPOSE THE NOMINATION OF PAUL WARNKE AS CHIEF NEGOTIATOR?

Well, Senator Jackson was opposed to the idea that a single individual should be both a negotiator with operational responsibility, and one of the formulators of the policy. For the same reason that one hires a lawyer to go out and represent one but he is not necessarily the same fellow who's making the corporate decisions. He thought those two responsibilities should be separate and distinct, so he voted for Warnke for one job and against him for the other. But frankly, he examined the Warnke record very carefully, and interrogated Paul Warnke closely at the hearings, and came to the conclusion that Mr. Warnke, in order to gain the approval of the Senate, was prepared to characterize his previous views in a way that made them unrecognizable. And that bothered Scoop.

IN HIS SPEECH TO THE COALITION FOR A DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY ON JUNE 12TH, 1979, JACKSON CALLED THE SALT TREATY "APPEASEMENT." WHY DID HE FEEL THAT WAY? THIS WAS BEFORE CARTER HAD SIGNED IT, AND AFTER IT HAD BEEN AGREED.

Well, Scoop was acutely conscious of the ease with which in the process of negotiation, one abandons one's negotiating objectives. And for him the great lesson of the appeasement of the 1930s was precisely that one could sit down and negotiate, and in order to get an agreement abandon those things that were most important about the negotiation. And I believe he concluded, as the SALT II agreement was shaping up, that the administration's principal objectives had been abandoned along the way. The deep cuts proposed early when Secretary of State Vance went to Moscow were gone. The agreement now provided for significant increases, the agreement permitted a fifth generation of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, it failed to reduce the Soviet advantage in heavy missiles, which was enormous, it failed to narrow the gap in ballistic-missile throw weight between us, in short it met very few of the criteria that the administration had set for itself. Something that Scoop Jackson knew at that time, that he chose not to share with the public, was that he had in his possession a letter from Jimmy Carter, handwritten, in which then-president Carter outlined his twelve objectives for SALT II, and Scoop knew that he had barely realized half of those. It was a confidential correspondence, and he chose not to use it, even at the height of the ratification debate. But he knew that Carter had failed to achieve the objectives he had set for himself.

IF THE SOVIETS SET TWELVE OBJECTIVES AND ACHIEVED HALF, AND WE SET TWELVE OBJECTIVES AND ACHIEVED HALF, ISN'T THAT WHAT BARGAINING IS ABOUT? YOU CAN'T GET EVERYTHING YOU WANT.

Well, this goes back to the question of whether the proposals put forward are relatively balanced in the first place. If the Soviets have twelve objectives, all of which are heavily weighted in favor of the Soviet Union, and we have twelve objectives, more or less divided, in order to constitute a balanced and reasonably fair proposal, then it is not a good outcome if each side achieves six, and especially depending on which six it is.

BUT HE REALLY THOUGHT THAT CARTER'S CONDUCT IN NEGOTIATING THIS WAS ANALOGOUS TO CHAMBERLAIN'S APPEASEMENT OF HITLER?

Well, I don't remember the exact words that Scoop used, and obviously the situations are very different. But Chamberlain, at Munich believed that he was concluding an agreement that would stabilize the relationship between Germany and the United Kingdom and avert a war, which was a well intentioned, although, as history has shown, fundamentally wrong policy. There was no moral judgment entailed in this, it was a question of how effectively we had, the administration had represented the interests of the United States. And in the sense that it involved the abandonment of the principal objectives of the negotiation, I think Scoop thought appeasement was not an inappropriate term.

AND THE PRINCIPAL OBJECTIVE, FROM SCOOP'S POINT OF VIEW, WAS GETTING RID OF HEAVY MISSILES.

For Scoop Jackson, the principal objective of the SALT II agreement was significantly lower levels, and equality in all relevant measures at the lower levels.

OF THE HEAVY MISSILES.

Across the board obviously the...

START THAT AGAIN, PLEASE.

Scoop wanted equality across the board, not simply with respect to heavy missiles, although there the inequality was perhaps most glaring. But with respect to throw weight, with respect to warheads with respect to the freedom to deploy short- and medium-range systems and so forth, and this was a treaty that was defective in those respects. And moreover, and about this Scoop was not only troubled but he was remarkably prescient almost clairvoyant; he saw in the SALT II treaty a variety of ambiguities, uncertainties, loopholes, that if exploited by the Soviet Union would have the effect of profoundly changing the rights and obligations of the parties under the treaty. And that is exactly what has happened, on issue after issue the Soviets have gone ahead and done things that it was alleged, in the course of the presentation of the treaty to the Congress, the Soviets would not be able to do under the treaty. And in virtually every instance, the subsequent administrations had to report to the Congress that the loopholes and ambiguities were such that the Soviets were in fact permitted to undertake those actions.

THE CDM SPEECH WAS JUNE 12TH. CARTER ANNOUNCED HIS DECISION TO DEPLOY THE MX ON JUNE 16TH. WAS IT PART OF JACKSON'S MOTIVATIONS TO GET THE MX?

I can't recall whether MX was prominent in his thinking.

CARTER DID DECIDE TO DEPLOY THE MX JUST BEFORE HE WENT TO VIENNA FOR THE SUMMIT, AND YET SCOOP WAS STILL OPPOSED TO SALT. WHY? IF THE MX WOULD SOLVE THE VULNERABILITY OF OUR LAND-BASED MISSILE PROBLEM, WHY WOULDN'T HE GO ALONG WITH SALT?

Well, Scoop was not persuaded that the MX would solve the vulnerability of our, of our land-based missiles, and he was rather doubtful about the deployment scheme that Carter had in mind, and I think he was ultimately proven right that deployment scheme could not be put into effect. But his complaint with the SALT II treaty was very carefully laid out in the report of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treaty, which concluded by a vote of 10 to nothing, with seven abstentions, that the treaty was not in the national security interest of the United States. And it cited a number of specific flaws, the imbalance in heavy missiles in particular, the protocol that limited the right of the United States to deploy systems in Europe problems of verification, problems of ambiguity, and loopholes that would almost certainly be exploited subsequently. The failure to stop the next generation of Soviet ballistic missiles, and so forth, virtually all of the things that turned out to be true. But perhaps most of all, he was disappointed that the agreement provided for an increase in the number of weapons on the Soviet side, and permitted an increase on the US side as well, and in anticipating that increase would take place, he was exactly right. The Soviets have added more than four thousand warheads to their strategic forces, under the SALT II treaty and since the SALT II treaty was signed.

NOT AN INCREASE IN LAUNCHERS, BUT AN INCREASE IN WEAPONS.

An increase in the number of warheads that can be delivered against the United States, the number is even larger if you include warheads that can be delivered against our allies.

DO YOU THINK THERE WAS ANY POSSIBILITY THAT SALT WOULD HAVE PASSED THE SENATE, THAT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN RATIFIED?

I don't believe that the SALT II treaty could have been ratified even before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The votes simply weren't there, and if they had been there the administration would have moved the treaty to the floor for a vote there was no parliamentary impediment to a vote no one was threatening a filibuster. But recall that the Armed Services Committee had voted overwhelmingly against the treaty; the Foreign Relations Committee had voted to approve it by a single vote. So the two relevant committees together by a majority, had opposed ratification of the treaty, and I don't believe that a two-thirds majority could have been mustered for that treaty.

DID SCOOP JACKSON FEEL CLOSER TO THE VIEWS OF PRESIDENT CARTER, OR TO THE VIEWS OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE PRESENT DANGER, IN TERMS OF DEALING WITH THE SOVIETS AND NUCLEAR POSTURE?

Oh, I think it's clear that Scoop Jackson was much closer to the views of the Committee on the Present Danger than he was to Jimmy Carter's pre-Afghanistan views. Now there was some reason to believe that President Carter experienced a an epiphany when the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, and from that point on took a much tougher view of the Soviets. I'm not altogether convinced of that, but there was, he himself certainly said that his mind had been changed by Soviet behavior.

DID HE SPEAK OUT OR HAVE STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT THE SOVIET INTENTIONS IN AFRICA IN 1978, IN ETHIOPIA AND SOUTH YEMEN? THE COMMITTEE ON THE PRESENT DANGER HAD THE GRAND DESIGN THEORY AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT DIDN'T. WHERE DID HE STAND ON THAT DEBATE?

I think Scoop frequently compared Soviet foreign policy to a hotel burglar, who walks down the corridor trying all the doors, and if he finds an open door in he goes. And if he finds the doors locked then he doesn't commit a crime that day. Scoop's view was that if you if you kept your defenses in good repair, you could deal with the Soviet Union, that they exploited weakness when they found it, but they were not adventurists, they were not aggressive where they could expect to be countered. So Scoop wanted to keep our strength up together with our allies, in the conviction that would lead to a much more harmonious relationship between us.

DID HE BUY PIPES' NOTION OF A GRAND DESIGN?

I don't think Scoop did believe in a grand design. I think he believed there was a great deal of energy some of it with historic origins. He used to, he used to cite the collaboration be... between Peter the Great and the Bey of Egypt (?) in 1788 as an indication, when the Soviets were in Egypt in the 1970s, as an indication of how persistent certain themes were in imperial Soviet policy, imperial Russian policy, and together with that imperial perspective, and remember, we are talking about what was once the Duchy of Muscovy, and now encompasses the better part of the Eurasian landmass, an expansionist power if ever there was one. Scoop believed that imperial energy was if anything, augmented by Marxist, and in particular Leninist ideal... Leninist ideology. But he believed that you could nevertheless if you were strong, and if you had clear objectives you could deal effectively with the Soviets, and there was no master plan for world conquest, there was an energy that would seek its own level.

YOU'VE PROBABLY ANSWERED THIS TEN TIMES. I'M NOT GOING TO PUSH IT BUT... HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THE SOVIETS? WHAT WAS YOUR VIEW OR WHAT WAS SCOOP'S VIEW? HOW DID THEY DIFFER FROM THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S VIEW? THE CARTER STATE DEPARTMENT.

Scoop's view of how to deal with the soviets had a number of ingredients that one rarely finds in professional diplomacy. And the first was candor and straightforwardness; he thought it terribly important to say exactly what one meant to the Soviets, and not to be diplomatic, and not to dance around the issues. Second, he thought it was important to be fair, but firm. He was convinced it was wrong to back the Soviets into a corner, and it was wrong to put the Soviets in a position where they had to choose between concluding an agreement or some visible humiliation. He was never interested in delivering a defeat to the Soviet Union, but I suppose most of all he was convinced that you had to have a very clear view of your objectives, and whatever else you did, you had to be prepared to walk away from the table, rather than conclude an agreement that didn't meet those minimum objectives, and he was appalled at the negotiations in which the objectives were lowered with virtually every encounter so that in the end the agreement reached bore no relationship to the purposes that had caused us to embark on the discussions in the first place.

YOU SAY THAT HE DIDN'T BELIEVE THE MX WOULD SOLVE THE VULNERABILITY PROBLEM. WAS THIS BECAUSE HE WAS CONCERNED THAT THE BASING MODE WOULDN'T BE POLITICALLY ACCEPTABLE IN THE UNITED STATES? I BELIEVE THAT NITZE THOUGHT THAT IT WOULDN'T BE ACCEPTABLE UNDER THE SALT AGREEMENT.

Scoop Jackson had reservations about the MX that was proposed by the Carter administration, partly because he thought this, the construction of thousands of garages in the desert would probably never be approved politically. He was concerned that the design of the system had been encumbered, and the costs greatly increased in order to make it consistent with a sense of what was verifiable under an arms-control agreement, and that this was a pointless and absurd diversion, since the Soviets were never going to agree that a scheme of the sort that Carter had in mind was verifiable no matter how hard we tried to persuade them otherwise. And of course he objected to a situation in which we concluded arms-control agreements that permitted the Soviet threat to our security to grow, and then were compelled to build additional weapons ourselves in order to restore the balance that he thought could better be achieved by agreements that reduced the threat.

BUT IF YOU DON'T HAVE SALT, YOU KILL IT AND THEN YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO. YOU CAN'T NEGOTIATE AWAY THEIR ADVANTAGE IN HEAVY MISSILES. OUR MISSILES ARE VULNERABLE THERE'S NO SCHEME THAT WE CAN COME UP WITH THAT WILL MAKE THEM INVULNERABLE, SO YOU'RE WORSE OFF.

Well, Scoop never believed that you couldn't negotiate a balanced agreement with the Soviet Union. It always depended on what the alternatives were as they saw them. And so he was, he did not share the view that the Soviets would never diminish their advantage in heavy missiles, and I think that subsequent negotiations, beyond the Carter administration, have indicated that the Soviets are indeed prepared to accept a diminution of their advantage in heavy missiles, so you can't obtain at the bargaining table something you don't even ask for, or something that you asked for with near indifference, and abandon at the first sign that it might not be immediately agreeable to the other side. It was a question of how tenaciously you negotiated.

GOING BACK TO MOSCOW, YOU THINK THAT THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE GONE TO THEIR FALL BACK POSITION SO SOON. AS SOON AS GROMYKO SAID NO, THEY SAID OKAY, HOW ABOUT VLADIVOSTOK?

No, the great mistake...

START AGAIN, PLEASE.

The great mistake that the Carter, the new Carter administration made early in 1977, was in abandoning its negotiating position almost immediately when it encountered objections from Gromyko. That is not the way to negotiate with the Soviets, they never make concessions easily, and they never make them early in a negotiation, and from that moment, I think, the Soviets believed that they had the psychological advantage in the conduct of those negotiations. And so at the end of the day, the SALT II treaty failed to achieve Carter's most important ambitions, as he himself understood them, and constituted an agreement that the Senate Armed Services Committee voted was not in the national security interest of the United States. But the fatal, the fatal mistake was made at the very beginning.

ON DECEMBER 15TH, '79, SEVENTEEN MEMBERS OF THE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE SIGNED A LETTER TO CARTER SAYING THEY MIGHT BACK THE TREATY IF THERE WERE SOME CHANGES MADE IN THE OVERALL DEFENSE POSTURE. JACKSON DIDN'T SIGN IT. WHY DIDN'T HE? WHY DID HE SEPARATE HIMSELF OUT FROM SEVENTEEN OTHER MEMBERS?

Well, it was not seventeen other members of the Armed Services Committee, because there were only seventeen members of the committee. It must have been seventeen senators.

ANYWAY...

Scoop thought the SALT II treaty should not be ratified, and the view that you would swallow hard and ratify a marginal treaty if the administration put more money into defense, which was a view that Sam Nunn and some others took the lead in proposing, was not Scoop's view. He thought a bad treaty ought not to be ratified. He believed that we needed to invest more in defense, because through the decade of the 1970s there was a decline in real terms in American defense spending that had left us deficient in almost every category, principally conventional levels. And so he was very much in favor of the kinds of increases that were being advocated by the seventeen signers of that letter.

CARTER JACKED UP THE DEFENSE BUDGET FIVE BILLION DOLLARS, DIDN'T HE, AT THE END?

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and in a futile effort to obtain approval for the SALT II treaty, Carter put additional funds into the, into the defense budget, that's right. But the only really impressive Carter defense budget was his last one, and in particular the projections of what he would do in his second term, and he never got the second term. Those projections have often been more fanciful than real.

DO YOU THINK IT WAS A WEAKENED PRESIDENT BECAUSE OF THE HOSTAGE CRISIS AND THE INFLATION DUE TO THE OIL EMBARGO, AND THE CUBAN BRIGADE FIASCO, THAT KILLED SALT? NOT NECESSARILY IN JACKSON'S MIND, HE MAY NEVER HAVE VOTED FOR IT.

I believe there was very broad public support for an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union, and a halfway decent treaty would have been approved, despite the weaknesses of the administration. But it was, in fact, at that point, a weak administration, weakened by the Iran hostage crisis, weakened by Carter's uncommunicativeness and his relative unpopularity in the country, and a variety of other problems. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was clearly the coup de grace, but I believe that even before that treaty couldn't have been ratified, but a halfway decent treaty could have been ratified, a treaty supported by Scoop Jackson and a Howard Baker and others who were influential in the Senate, would have been readily ratified.

CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THEY HAD RATIFIED THE TREATY IN THE FALL AND THE SOVIETS HAD GONE INTO AFGHANISTAN? WHAT WOULD THAT HAVE DONE TO FUTURE NEGOTIATIONS? WOULD THE SENATE HAVE BEEN IRATE?

Well, the length of Senate indignation is measurable, and it isn't that long. It would not be the first time; you have the invasion of Czechoslovakia right after Glassboro you have the Yom Kippur War shortly after the 1972 agreement. The Soviets, in fact, will do what they think it is in their interest to do, independent of whether there exist agreements between us, and if that comes as a shock to the Senate, then we have some very naive senators.