When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (46 page)

In no time, Perle became an indispensable part of Jackson's close-knit foreign policy team, known in Washington as the Bunker because of the cramped, windowless office where its members worked. Running the shop was Dorothy Fosdick, a chief adviser to Jackson for decades and a character in her own right. At five foot one and with a fiery streak, Fosdick was called Bubbe (Yiddish for "grandmother") by the other staffers. She was a longtime Cold Warrior who was, improbably, the daughter of a famously pacifist preacher of Manhattan's Riverside Church, Harry Emerson Fosdick. In the 1940s, she was the first woman to hold a senior position in the State Department, helping to administer the Marshall Plan. She later worked on setting up the United Nations; while advising Adlai Stevenson on his 1952 presidential campaign, she became his lover. From 1954 on, she was Jackson's chief foreign policy adviser, and the two, like Jackson and Perle, shared an absolutely identical political perspective.

Perle and the Bunker didn't have much trouble coming up with a response to the diploma tax. The outlines of a good, aggressive idea were already circulating. Kissinger's détente was based on the concept of linkage, a game of self-interested tit for tat in which the superpowers helped each other in those areas where their geopolitical goals overlapped. The Soviets wanted credit to buy American goods. The United States wanted to de-escalate in Vietnam. On this foundation, Kissinger wove his web. But what if linkage could be used in another way, to force the Soviets to change their behavior? It was obvious during that summer of 1972 that the Kremlin was hungry for trade. Why not make the granting of most-favored-nation status and credit contingent on the elimination of the diploma tax and an increase in emigration? Congress had often used its power of the purse to influence foreign policy—that was one of its few real tools—but such a move would be a bold challenge to the president's agenda. It would demand that the Soviet Union alter its internal domestic policies if it wanted anything from the United States. The Cold War had never been fought this way.

Such a daring proposition needed a powerful base of support. This was Perle's greatest challenge. When he looked out at the American Jewish community, he saw a small but noisy grassroots Soviet Jewry movement. These people would make good foot soldiers in any legislative campaign. But he needed more. The entire Jewish establishment would have to be involved. And here there was reason for hope. In the past year, whether because of the headline-grabbing moves of Kahane, the surge of protests on the streets of New York, the widening network of local Soviet Jewry councils united by Lou Rosenblum, or the increased prodding from the Israelis, the Jewish establishment had finally decided to get serious. In the spring of 1971, the coalition of national groups that made up the flimsy ad hoc American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry reconstituted itself into an independent umbrella organization that finally had a budget and a staff. In August 1971, the newly named National Conference on Soviet Jewry started operating with $250,000 and an enthusiastic executive director, Jerry Goodman, who had been working intermittently on Soviet Jewry issues for almost a decade. To be its first chairman, the National Conference chose Richard Maass, an affable and respected foreign policy expert who was conciliatory toward the grassroots activists. Shortly before Maass became chairman, Yaakov Birnbaum invited him to a two-day seminar at Yeshiva University. Maass went and listened to angry students rail against the paralysis of the establishment. But rather than respond defensively, he promised greater engagement.

Another change was the emergence of a federation of New York-based Jewish organizations. Run by Malcolm Hoenlein, a former Student Struggle activist from Philadelphia, the group borrowed heavily from Birnbaum's protest style—the large rallies, the religious tropes, the focus on individual refuseniks and prisoners. The Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry became an important bridge between the energy and irreverence of the activists and the resources and breadth of the establishment.

These new groups, however, had yet to make an impact. Jewish leaders had been trying since the start of Nixon's presidency to get him to agree to a meeting, incessantly bugging Leonard Garment, Nixon's liaison to the Jewish community. Only after the Leningrad hijacking did Nixon pay some attention to the problem. One chairman of the American Conference on Soviet Jewry wrote the State Department in 1970 demanding it take a harder line on the repression of refuseniks, and he received this response, which summarized the government's view, virtually unchanged since the early 1960s: "You will understand, of course, that we must choose the forum and the occasion thoughtfully so that our efforts cannot be dismissed as merely 'cold war propaganda.'"

The frustration and restlessness could be felt in the weeks following Nixon's 1972 summit. In a letter to Max Fisher, a rich Republican supporter with deep ties to the administration, the National Conference chairman Richard Maass wrote, "Since the president's trip to Moscow, there seems to be a stiffening of Soviet response to the activities of those Jews who are trying to obtain exit permits, including additional arrests, firings and anti-Semitic propaganda, while at the same time the rate of emigration continues at a high level." Maass went on to say that "many Jews here look at the negative factors as evidence that the President 'did nothing' for Soviet Jews while in Moscow and at the same time tend to ignore the favorable implications of increased emigration." He closed his letter reiterating his "strong feeling" that a meeting with the president was necessary.

Perle decided to capitalize on this frustration. On September 26, a month after the announcement of the diploma tax, the members of the National Conference held an emergency summit at the B'nai B'rith building in Washington. Something more than the usual statement of concern (followed by letters, demonstrations, and petitions) was in order. Most of the participants had spent the past few weeks staving off the appalled anger of their communities and executives boards. During this time, Perle had been working with sympathetic legislative aides to hammer out the details of an amendment to whatever trade bill would emerge from the Soviet-American trade negotiations, an amendment that would link benefits to behavior. The Jewish community was never going to be more receptive than at this moment. They needed a forceful response, and Jackson had one to offer. Perle arranged for the senator to address the gathering.

Jackson arrived with a copy of his proposed bill and immediately energized the room. He asked for more than their support; he asked to be their leader, a surrogate father, capable of harnessing their political power in ways they had never experienced. "The time has come to place our highest human values ahead of the trade dollar," he told them. "You know what you can do? I'll give you some marching orders. Get behind my amendment. And let's stand firm." There was a powerful logic to his idea, a moral clarity that was difficult to dispute—even if it was rooted in political ambition as much as in principle. Why should the Soviets get what they wanted without first making a real sacrifice? Jackson hit all the right notes, even invoking the Holocaust, and he received a standing ovation when he finished his twenty-minute speech. There was an undercurrent of shame motivating these local and national leaders. Here was a non-Jewish lawmaker proposing to go further and push harder for Jews than they themselves had been willing to do. After Jackson's speech, Perle stayed behind to try to influence the debate.

A few months earlier, Richard Maass had sent a memo to Jerry Goodman, the National Conference's executive director, saying that they should avoid upsetting détente, and specifically the planned trade agreement. "I am mindful that we do not seek to limit expanding trade—especially if President Nixon in Moscow favors large scale expansion," Maass had written. Yet Jackson was proposing to do just that. But rather than give in to their usual cautiousness, after a debate that lasted until three in the morning, the National Conference finally decided unanimously to support the principle of the senator's amendment. The demand from the community was just too great to ignore, and they would look out of touch if Jackson went ahead without them. But the members were not naive about the consequences. It would be a direct affront to the Nixon administration. This quickly became clear after Richard Maass announced that the National Conference was going to back Jackson's initiative. Maass expressed anger and disappointment in the administration in a way that at least one newspaper, the
Los Angeles Times,
characterized as "unusually strong for leaders of what is sometimes called the 'Jewish Establishment.'"

Two days after the vote, following a meeting with some Jewish leaders in New York, Nixon made his dismissal of Jackson's proposal very clear. The president's spokesman said that Nixon "does not intend to politicize this issue." And furthermore, "the Soviet Union is well aware of the United States' view on this matter. Nothing will be served by extensive public debate or extensive public confrontation on this issue in the next six weeks." Six weeks, of course, was the time remaining before the presidential election.

Jackson tried to gather as many Senate cosponsors for the bill as possible before the Ninety-second Congress adjourned. The victory would be largely symbolic, since there was no time for a vote. But in some ways this made the task easier. Senators needed only to agree to the amendment in principle. The support of the Jewish establishment helped immensely. Most states had at least a small Jewish population bombarding senators' offices with phone calls and letters. Backing the bill would cost the senators very little, but opposing it would mean risking the ire of these possibly influential Jews. On top of this, no politician wanted to be accused of appeasing the Soviets.

Jackson was quickly adding names to his list of cosponsors, and by Saturday, September 30, he had reached thirty-two. Then he achieved two major victories. First, he managed to get the support of Senators Jacob Javits and Hubert Humphrey, both of whom had been working on more moderate versions of Jackson's proposal. Javits, the Republican, thought the bill was "unnecessarily irritating" to the Nixon administration. But the National Conference's support of Jackson just a few days before had won both men over. And once they capitulated, a few influential liberals, such as Edward Kennedy and Edmund Muskie, joined as well.

Even more significant progress was made that Saturday afternoon in the Rose Garden of the White House. Jackson was attending the signing of the SALT agreement, whose passage he'd almost prevented. Nixon did not feel seriously threatened by Jackson's latest ploy. He didn't think the senator could pull it off. But with only a month until the election, the president knew that a public conversation about the Soviet Union and its emigration policies could cost him a few Jewish and anti-Communist votes. A confidential White House memo had just been leaked describing how disastrous Nixon's Moscow visit had been for the refuseniks—"they expressed the opinion that the United States seemed more interested in selling corn than in protesting human rights and individual freedom" was how the feelings of the Jewish activists were summed up. On an awkward forty-five-minute walk through the garden with Nixon, Jackson proposed a deal. If Nixon would release those Republican senators who wanted to support the amendment, Jackson would not push for a vote in the weeks before the election, in effect promising not to make Soviet Jewry into a political liability. The two shook hands, and within days, eight Nixon loyalists added their names to Jackson's list.

Amazingly, when Jackson stood up in the Senate on October 4 to introduce his bill, he had the commitment of seventy-two senators. Even though he was still dealing in symbolism rather than actual legislation, he knew he was well on his way. It would not be easy for these senators to retract in January the support they had promised in October. Jackson laid out his plan. No "non-market economy country," by which he meant no Communist state, could get most-favored-nation (MFN) status or any credits, credit guarantees, or investment guarantees. Only by removing all restrictions on emigration and eliminating any but the most nominal exit fees for leaving the country could this condition be waived. If a waiver was granted, the president would have to report semiannually to Congress on whether the country was keeping its word. In a press conference following the introduction of the bill, Jackson said that the Soviet diploma tax had been the impetus but that assuring basic human rights was the main motive. Nothing in the proposed bill referred specifically to Jews; Jackson simply pointed to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the first time since the declaration's ratification in 1948 that it would serve as the foundation of a proposed law. If he was motivated by his own presidential ambition, Jackson hid it well. He seemed to be acting out of pure principle. Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's ambassador to America, once recorded in his diary that the senator had told him, "Just imagine. If Norway had instituted a law similar to the one now in force in the Soviet Union for Jews, my father would not have been able to emigrate to the United States, and I would not be an American citizen now."

On October 18, two weeks after the bill's introduction, Nixon signed a trade agreement with the Soviets that eventually became the Trade Reform Act; Jackson would attach his amendment to this. The Soviets committed to paying back $722 million of the $11 billion they still owed America for the war materiel given to them to fight the Nazis, and in exchange, Nixon promised to provide the Soviets MFN status and authorize the Export-Import Bank of the United States to extend credit for purchases of American goods. As it was described in the papers the next day, a gallon of vodka was five dollars but with MFN status it would cost only a dollar fifty. After announcing the deal, William Rogers, the secretary of state, faced the inevitable question during his press conference: "Mr. Secretary, two-thirds of the Senate have put themselves on record as opposing ending discrimination against Russia unless they end discrimination against certain persons wishing to leave. How are you handling that problem?" Rogers answered, "I have had several meetings with the Jewish leaders in the country and I think there is a general feeling that the conduct of the Administration, what we are doing in the field of quiet diplomacy, holds the greatest promise of success and, after all, that is what we are all interested in, so I have nothing further to say on that today."