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Newly Declassified Telcons Show Conflict during Ford Years over Arms Control, Dtente,
Leaks, Angola
Kissinger Urged President to Tell Rumsfeld to "Get with It" on SALT, Pondered to Scowcroft
Whether "We Should Let Angola Go," and Disparaged Ford for "Popping Off" Publicly against
Nixon
New Telcons are Subset of 800 Telcons Held up by State Department for Seven Years
Washington, DC, January
24, 2014 A recently
declassified transcript of a
telephone conversation
(telcon) between Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger and
President Gerald Ford in
December 1975 indicates
tensions between Kissinger
and Donald Rumsfeld's
Defense Department over the
SALT II arms control agreement. Telling Ford that "we have [a] SALT agreement
within our grasp," Kissinger said "We can smash our opponents" [See document 6].
Describing elements of the agreement concerning air-launched and ship-launched
cruise missiles (ALCMs and SLCMs), Kissinger worried that Rumsfeld was
"beginning to dig into his people" and asked Ford to tell him that "you want them to
get with it." Kissinger expected that a successful SALT II agreement would lead to
a summit with the Soviet leadership putting dtente on a firmer footing and
embellish Ford's and Kissinger's standing.
While Kissinger was confident that a SALT II agreement would clear the way for a
U.S-Soviet summit, Ford was not going to "smash" opposition to SALT. With the
Cuban role in the Angolan conflict already complicating relations with Moscow and
Ford's presidential campaign for 1976 in progress, he was reluctant to rile the
Defense Department over SALT, much less invite criticism from the Republican
right. Those concerns stalled any progress on dtente; as Ambassador Raymond
Garthoff later put it, 1976 was a "turning point in American-Soviet relations"
because the Ford White House decided to "shelve" dtente until after the elections.
The record of the Ford-Kissinger telephone conversation and other recently
declassified telcon transcripts from State Department files show an aggravated
Henry Kissinger facing opposition to policies of dtente and strategic arms control
that were virtually unchallenged during the Nixon years. These telcons show
Kissinger losing his authority at the White House, trying to protect U.S.-Soviet
dtente from conservative attacks while waging Cold War in the Third World, trying
to crack down on leaks, and maintaining ties with the disgraced former President
Richard Nixon.
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A major defeat was over Angola policy. In early January 1976, after the leak of a
CIA covert operation which Congress refused to fund, Kissinger became regretful,
suggesting to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft that "maybe we should let
Angola go. Maybe we just should not have started that operation" [See document
9]. Scowcroft declared that it was the "right" thing to do, but he could not argue
when Kissinger said "the defeat they are inflicting on us is worse." Kissinger saw
U.S. credibility at risk when Washington was powerless to act against a Soviet ally
in Southern Africa supported by Cuban troops.
The released telephone conversations also include the following discussions:
Running for election in 1976 Ford wanted the disgraced ex-president
Richard Nixon to keep his distance. When it became known that Nixon was
planning a visit to China, Ford said in an interview that the trip was "probably
harmful" to his campaign. This upset Kissinger and Scowcroft, with Kissinger
saying "What possessed the President to pop off again" [See document 12].
"It makes him look weak to say Nixon can hurt him." Ford was already under
attack from the Republican right and Kissinger worried that Ford's
defensiveness would hurt his position: some advisers worried that if Ford
"does not get out ahead soon in foreign policy I [Kissinger] will be destroyed."
Having lost his post as national security adviser during the 1975
"Halloween Massacre," Kissinger did not like reminders, such as a White
House statement that he no longer chaired National Security Council
committees (as he had since 1969). "It sure isn't helpful," Kissinger
complained to Scowcroft [See document 10].
Reflecting a perpetual annoyance with unauthorized disclosures,
Kissinger purged several senior staffers from the State Department's Bureau
of African Affairs in December 1975, after U.S. aid to opposition groups in
Angola leaked to the press. Kissinger told Scowcroft that "It will be at least a
new cast of characters that leaks on Angola" [Seedocument 7].
Internal political differences over the meaning of dtente surfaced during
a Scowcroft-Kissinger discussion, in August 1975, over the draft of a speech
for White House aide Robert Hartman. According to the draft "dtente is a
relationship among mortal enemies." Kissinger saw the language as an
"outrage"; it was "totally stupid" because it "fans the fire of the anti-dtentists."
Hartman "has to make up his mind if he is going to be positive or not" [See
document 10].
A protracted and wholly unnecessary appeals review process delayed the release
of these documents for seven years. In 2007, in response to a FOIA request filed in
2001, the State Department denied over 800 telcons on "executive privilege" and
FOIA (b) (5) pre-decisional grounds. The first group of telcons released under
appeal, over 100 of them, are of Kissinger's conversations with government and
former officials during the Ford Administration, including President Ford,
Scowcroft, Rumsfeld, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, Treasury Secretary
William Simon, and former President Richard Nixon, among others. They cover a
variety of policy issues, including the SALT process, economic relations with the
Soviet Union, and Congressional investigations of the CIA.
As interesting as the telcons are, they contain no information that ought to have
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Background
The telcons of Henry A. Kissinger have a long and checkered history.[1] When
Kissinger was national security adviser and secretary of state, he had detailed
records of his telephone conversations routinely prepared. This practice, known
only to a few insiders, began when Kissinger became Richard Nixon's national
security adviser in January 1969. When he left the U.S. government in January
1977, Kissinger kept the telcons under his personal control by depositing them and
other papers at the Library of Congress (where they would be exempt from the
Freedom of Information Act). In 1981 the U.S. Supreme Court denied a Freedom of
Information lawsuit against Kissinger on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked legal
standing to make the request in the first place. Only the federal government was in
a legal position to recover the telcons from Kissinger's papers.
The status of the telcons remained contested but unresolved for years. According
to Kissinger's deed of gift, his papers at the Library of Congress would not be
available to researchers until five years after his death. Yet he was alive and well
decades after his years in government and historians were keenly interested in the
telcons for research on the Nixon and Ford administrations. The National Security
Archive began to resolve the problem in February 2001, when at its request
lawyers from the Mayer Brown law firm prepared a draft complaint which they
circulated to the National Archives and the State Department. The complaint
charged that Kissinger had unlawfully removed federal records from U.S.
government control and that the two agencies had failed to recover them as
required by federal records laws. Concerned about the possibility of protracted
litigation that the Bush administration could lose, State Department legal adviser
William Howard Taft IV asked Kissinger to return copies of the telcons to the
National Archives and the State Department. Unless Kissinger wanted a legal
battle with an administration that he supported, he had little choice.
Once the State Department received copies of the telcons covering Kissinger's
Secretary of State years, in August 2001 the National Security Archive filed a FOIA
request for them (the telcons from 1969-1974 were processed by the National
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Archives for release in the Nixon presidential records). Over the next six years the
Department of State broke up the thousands of telcon records into 12 separate
tranches and coordinated their release with a variety of offices and agencies. Over
4,500 telcons were released in their entirety or in excised form. The excised telcons
were appealed and the State Department adjudicated processing of many of them
fairly quickly.
The most surprising development was the State Department's decision,
communicated to the Archive in June 2007, to deny over 800 telcons in their
entirety because they "consist of pre-decisional deliberative process material
and/or privileged presidential communications." Exempted by this decision were
hundreds of conversations between Kissinger and President Gerald Ford and other
White House and cabinet officials from that period. This decision was made during
the George W. Bush administration, in which Kissinger had some influence; given
his long-standing efforts to control the record of his years in government, it is likely
that Kissinger preferred that the telcons remain under wraps.
The National Security Archive immediately appealed the decision arguing that the
State Department's use of the executive privilege and the pre-decisional
information claims was invalid. The appeal letter cited existing case law, e.g. Nixon
v Freeman, which held that after ten years or so, the presidential communications
privilege "begins to wear away to the point that the public interest in open access to
historical information strongly outweighs any claim of confidentiality." Therefore, "it
follows that there can be no legitimate claim of privilege, much less confidentiality
of communications, for the decades-old documents at issue in this appeal."
In January 2009, just after the inauguration of President Obama, the Archive
reminded the State Department about the pending appeal, asking that it take into
account the President's memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act which
directs all agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure" and to apply this
presumption "to all decisions involving FOIA." According to the president's
memorandum, the government "should not keep information confidential merely
because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and
failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears." The
Archive reasoned that because that guidance "effectively nullifies any concerns
about executive privilege or the disclosure of pre-decisional information, the
argument for full release of the Kissinger telcons becomes even stronger."
The State Department did not respond to the Archive's letter with an affirmative
decision and in April 2011, the Archive sent Mr. Blake Roberts at the White House
General Counsel's office a plea to expedite processing of the appeal. Citing
Obama's January 2009 memorandum, the Archive claimed that the "spirit of this
order suggests a more objective approach that would reject making any assertions
about applying executive privilege to 35-year old State Department records." The
Archive wondered "whether the Office of General Counsel has accepted the
poorly-considered decision made during the Bush administration." If the General
Counsel rejected the Bush administration's logic, "the documents at issue in this
appeal could be released."
Finally, thanks to the recent due diligence of the State Department's Information
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Programs Services (IPS) office, the Department has released several batches of
hitherto exempted documents. But hundreds more remain under review and it could
take years before all of the telcons see the light of day. Admittedly, processing 800
documents is not easy, but it is unfortunate for historians and students of national
security policy that the Bush administration's initial poorly conceived decision took
so long to correct.
THE DOCUMENTS
Note on the documents: All but 2 of the telcons published today are from a 20
November 2013 release by the State Department of the documents that had been
withheld under (b) (5) or executive privilege grounds. Documents 1 and 3 below,
however, are from a separate release on 3 July 2013 of telcons that the
Department had denied in their entirety in 2005, on either privacy or national
security grounds.
Document 1: Robert Bernstein-Kissinger, 28 August 1974
That Henry Kissinger would write his memoirs after eventually leaving government
was widely assumed; the question of who would publish them was on the minds of
some editors and publishers for years. Even a rumor that Kissinger was talking to a
publisher made some executives "nervous" as Random House president Robert
Bernstein acknowledged during a late August 1974 conversation. Newsweek
magazine had reported talks with publishers but Kissinger declared that it was "an
outrageous lie" and he would not "entertain offers" nor allow anyone to negotiate on
his behalf while he was in office.
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Kissinger and Eagleburger agreed that he should go along with that because it
would be "unseemly to fight with them to take the damn thing back." Eagleburger
said he would make sure that the medal was not sent back.
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relations," even though the Soviets had reaffirmed dtente, the Ford administration
"shelve[d]" it and SALT until after the election.[3]
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NOTES
[1] For background on the Kissinger telcons, see "The Kissinger Telcons," 26 May
2004 http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/index.htm, and "The
Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts," 23 December 2008,
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB263/index.htm
[2] Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States Gerald R. Ford Containing
the Public Messages, Speeches and Statements of the President 1975, Book II
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 1043-1044.
[3] Raymond L. Garthoff, Dtente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations
from Nixon to Reagan, 2nd Edition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994).
594-604. For discussions of SALT options at the 21 January 1976 NSC meeting
(held in Kissinger's absence), Kissinger's outraged reaction, and Ford's decision
for "deferral," see U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXIII (Washington, D.C., Department of State,
documents 119, 120 , 130, and 131.
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[4] For background on Angola policy, see John Prados, Safe for Democracy; The
Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 439-455, and Garthoff,
Dtente and Confrontation, 556-593.
[5] Jussi Hanhimaki, Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign
Policy (Oxford, 2004), 426-427; Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (Simon &
Shuster, 1992), 669-672.
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