Special Section: THE SOVIET RIDDLE

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"The riddle of relations with the other nuclear superpower has been a persistent preoccupation for postwar American foreign policy," Kissinger writes. And, difficult as it was to deal with the Soviets, the new Administration had no real choice but to give summitry with Moscow a reasonable try.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies.

Of course, over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

The problem with U.S.-Soviet relations is not only that there are two competing bureaucracies with their assumptions and guesses; there are also conflicting conceptions of negotiation. Americans tend to believe that each negotiation has its own logic, that its outcome depends importantly on bargaining skill, good will and facility for compromise. Critics demand greater flexibility. No position is ever final. The other side has the maximum inducement to stand rigid to discover what else we may offer.

These attributes of American negotiators had complicated our efforts in 1969. Within the Administration we had to fight a seemingly endless battle against those who wanted to fuel the momentum of negotiations with unreciprocated gestures of good will. Not a few argued, for example, that we should forgo our programs on antiballistic missiles (ABM) and multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRV) lest we doom the prospects of strategic arms limitation — though, in fact, ABM and MIRV turned out to be among our few playable cards. Similarly, we were warned that an opening to China would cause relations with the Soviet Union to regress; in fact, the opening would break a logjam on several issues with the U.S.S.R.

Our internal divisions handed the Soviet leadership an irresistible opportunity to whipsaw us. The Kremlin would stress its eagerness to begin negotiations on SALT, for example. While the White House would try to gear our response to overall Soviet conduct, the rest of our Government would find innumerable ways, from press leaks to informal hints, to let it be known that it was ready, nay eager, to start talking. Thus the better part of our first year was spent in convincing both the Soviets and our own bureaucracy that we intended to base our negotiations on a calculation of the national interest, not abstract slogans, and on strict reciprocity, not "gestures" or "signals." By the end of 1969 it seemed that the careful fencing was about to end. My talks with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin—what came to be known as the Channel—had become increasingly active, usually on Soviet initiative. We had succeeded in making it clear to the Soviets, and with a little time lag to the bureaucracy, that the President's view was the decisive one.

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