When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (48 page)

Strangely, Brezhnev then went even further, wondering in a bizarre ramble why more couldn't be done to appease the "Zionists." But his ideas betrayed how little he understood about the Soviet Jewish condition: "Why not give them some little theater with 500 seats for a Jewish variety show that will work under our censorship with a repertoire under our supervision. Let Auntie Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there. I'm not proposing this, I'm just talking. And what if we open a school? I see it like this: we could open one school in Moscow and call it Jewish. The program would be the same as in other schools. But the national language, Yiddish, would be taught there."

He chided himself for this "impudent thought," but it was clear he wanted his colleagues to think more creatively about the "Jewish question." Aleksei Kosygin, the premier, agreed with him. "Of course, we need to think, because we are creating the Jewish problem for ourselves." Brezhnev concurred. "Zionism," he said, "is making us stupid."

The same day, foreign reporters and an American television crew were invited to film Jews being called to Moscow's OVIR office and told that their fees had been waived. American newspapers reported that over the course of two days, March 19 and March 20, forty-four Soviet Jews were given permission to leave without having to pay the tax. "Soviet Waives Its Exit Tax for Five Leaving for Israel," the
New York Times
reported on its front page. Writing in, of all places, the Israeli newspaper
Yediot Aharonot
on the day following the Politburo meeting, the journalist and not-so-secret KGB agent Victor Louis, Andropov's messenger for disseminating information in the Western media, reported that the tax would no longer be enforced. Just as Brezhnev had ordered, it would remain on the books but for all intents and purposes would be ignored. "It seems that the Soviet citizens who have decided to emigrate from the Soviet Union have won a victory in the six month war against the education tax."

Jackson considered himself vindicated. The Soviets would abandon their policies if the price was right. But this new development caused the American Jewish leadership to reassess their support of Jackson. What was the ultimate goal of this campaign? Was Jackson merely trying to eliminate the diploma tax or did he have a more extreme objective in mind? For those who had simply wanted to see the debilitating tax done away with, the Kremlin's move was enough. But Jackson and Perle made it clear that they had no intention of backing down on the amendment. On March 22, 1973, Jackson told the New York Press Club: "Now, I have heard it said that the Soviets are going to keep the ransom tax on the statute books but they won't apply it in practice. I say that we are going to put the Jackson amendment on the statute books but in the hope that it won't apply to the Soviet Union because they will be in compliance with the free emigration provision."

The extent to which Jackson was getting ahead of some of his Jewish supporters was apparent in a memo written by a clearly agitated Bert Gold, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. He described what had happened on a recent visit to Jackson's office. He ran into Perle, whom he depicted as "a brash, opinionated, frequently arrogant young man." Gold made the mistake of wondering out loud if Brezhnev's willingness to drop the tax might preclude the need for the Jackson amendment.

No sooner did I even finish the first question when he fell upon me like 16 tons of bricks, suggesting that the very asking of the question suggested a selling-out, a back-tracking, etc., etc. I calmly (for a while, calmly, anyway) suggested that if guys like us can't discuss such things and try to evaluate what the effect might be, then we are not helping our joint cause. But it didn't work. He kept asserting that whatever the rumors, whatever the
facts,
the amendment is going to be adopted, etc. When I then said that it just might happen that the Jackson amendment
might
achieve its ends even without having actually to be adopted—
if
it should turn out to be true that the Soviets were willing to change their practices—he got absolutely hysterical, and raised his voice with declamations that stopped everybody from working and they all listened to the rest of the conversation.

"What the hell have you done in the last couple of days to get support for the amendment?" Perle shouted then. Gold wrote: "I stood up and said I simply won't take that kind of crap, I had nothing to explain to him, our record was too clear to need any justification. At which point, Perle's superior, Dorothy Fosdick, rose from her chair, and screamed at me: 'Now you just get out of here! Get out! Nobody is going to insult Dick Perle or any member of my staff.' After a minute or so of hesitation, I left, of course. Her parting words were that she'd report me to Scoop."

Jackson's staff wanted the Jewish community behind them, but they didn't want to deal with people like Gold who argued that "flexibility and moderation" might be a better strategy. Now that the initial impetus for the bill—the diploma tax—seemed to be no longer an issue, doubts from certain leaders would grow. And the brashness that everyone had come to associate with Perle would flash often and brightly.

Henry Kissinger thought he had all the proof he needed to convince the senators to back off: two letters from the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin definitively affirming that the diploma tax would be suspended. On April 18, Nixon invited Jackson, Ribicoff, Javits, and three other, more accommodating senators to meet with him at the White House. The president opened harshly, practically berating Jackson. His amendment would not only obliterate future Soviet-American trade but also jeopardize Brezhnev's upcoming trip to Washington. Kissinger dramatically pulled out Dobrynin's two communications and read them to the assembled senators. Jackson listened carefully and then told Nixon, "Mr. President, if you believe that, you're being hoodwinked." Ribicoff added that "there's nothing new in this. We have known about the suspensions for several weeks. But that in no way diminishes the need for passage of the Jackson amendment." The meeting ended. This was the senators' final word. As Jackson put it in a one-sentence press release following the meeting, "I am standing firm on my amendment, period."

With the senators unmovable, Nixon and Kissinger resorted to plan B: strip Jackson of his Jewish support. If the two men had really understood the popularity of the amendment, they would have realized the futility of this tactic. But they didn't. Nixon imagined threats could work, yelling that "a storm will hit American Jews if they are intransigent." Instead of employing scare tactics, Henry Kissinger preferred a combination of flattery and pressure. And there were two prominent Jewish leaders in particular who were ripe for influencing: Max Fisher and Jacob Stein.

A retired multimillionaire who had devoted his life to Jewish philanthropy and the Republican Party, Fisher was a strange kind of Jew, anti-intellectual and plainspoken. The son of a storeowner, he had grown up in the decidedly un-Jewish Salem, Ohio, and went on to Ohio State University on a football scholarship. When he graduated, he joined his father's new venture, a small oil-reclaiming business in Detroit. In a few years, he turned it into one of the biggest gas station chains in the Midwest; it was worth $40 million when he sold it, in 1959, and he invested most of that money in lucrative real estate. Fisher's affinity for the GOP led to his becoming the financial chairman for Michigan governor George Romney's presidential run in 1968. When Nixon beat Romney in the primaries, Fisher joined the national campaign and was responsible—as the new administration saw it—for lifting the Jewish Republican vote from Barry Goldwater's dismal 10 percent to Nixon's 17 and then 37 percent. Fisher had a tendency to imply that he was speaking for the whole community, and he became a sort of unofficial Jewish adviser to the president, given incredible access. His sidekick was Jacob Stein, a millionaire who had made his money developing shopping malls in Long Island and had recently become the head of the Presidents Conference, the powerful umbrella organization charged with preserving a united voice on Israel. He was less doctrinaire than Fisher but still had deep ties to the Nixon administration that he didn't want to jeopardize.

Kissinger assumed that Fisher and Stein were his way into the Jewish community, so the day following the meeting with the senators, April 19, he invited them and a dozen other Jewish leaders to the White House to meet with the president. It was a historic event—an American president had finally chosen to make time for Soviet Jewry. The great lesson—one the activists hoped the establishment was learning—was that this had come about only as a result of Jewish opposition. Kissinger again passed around the Dobrynin letters. "You're now back to August 1972," Kissinger said, referring to the month the diploma tax was instituted. The effect on them was entirely different than the effect on the senators. It was disorienting. They were being openly courted by the president. Nixon acknowledged the weakness of his position, saying that if Jackson's bill were voted on that day, "I know the amendment would go through like that," and he snapped his fingers. He then pleaded with them not to help Jackson destroy détente. His policies were important; they would bring peace and ultimately help the Soviet Jews. "You gentlemen have more faith in your senators than you do in me," Nixon excoriated them. "And that is a mistake. You'll save more Jews my way. Protest all you want. The Kremlin won't listen." Fisher and Stein were certainly receptive. Others were less so, but they had a hard time challenging Nixon, especially when he repeated his commitment to helping Soviet Jews and waved the Soviet memos around, tangible proof that the Russians had indeed conceded. After seventy minutes the meeting was over and the participants left the White House, with some now converted. One approached William Safire, the president's speechwriter, on his way out and, referring to Nixon, whispered, "This may be the only thing I trust him about."

Following the meeting, the leaders gathered in Max Fisher's office to put together a press release. Fisher managed to control the deliberations, which in the end produced a vague three-paragraph statement praising the president's support of Soviet Jewry and, strangely, neglecting to mention anything about Jackson or his amendment. It was a glaring omission, and it suggested that the community was abandoning the senator. As the
New York Times
reported the next day, it was apparent that a "struggle for the support of the Jewish community was under way between Mr. Nixon and Senator Henry M. Jackson." The paper added that the "overwhelming Congressional backing" for the amendment "could fade away if the Jewish leaders begin withdrawing their support."

Richard Perle went crazy when he read the statement. He knew how popular the amendment had become among the grass roots. And so he used all his resources, drawing on his contacts in the Union of Councils and Student Struggle, pleading with them to voice their disapproval of the diminishing support for Jackson. Suddenly, Fisher and Stein had an insurrection on their hands. Richard Maass and Jerry Goodman, the heads of the National Conference, could hardly contain the anger. Constituent members of the National Conference independently restated their support for Jackson and the amendment. The biggest defection came when Richard Perle called Malcolm Hoenlein, the head of the large New York Soviet Jewry umbrella group. Hoenlein felt he had to reflect the desires of his constituency, and even though he was nominally under the authority of the National Conference, he issued a statement in the name of the seventy-four local organizations that he represented reaffirming their backing of the Jackson amendment. This was the entire Jewish community of New York. Two million people. And it could not be ignored. Neither could Lou Rosenblum's Union of Councils, two dozen groups spread all over the country, or Student Struggle, both of which immediately emphasized their unwavering support for Jackson.

Rosenblum made sure Soviet Jewish activists in Moscow would have a say in the debate. After all, he figured, it was their fate being discussed. Over a crackling line, he spoke with Kyrill Henkin, a refusenik whose command of English had made him a spokesman of sorts. Rosenblum explained that Jewish leaders had turned their backs on the community's wishes: "They had their own interests at heart or they sought to advance their own position. You understand?" It wasn't clear if Henkin understood exactly what his American friend wanted. But when Rosenblum called back, Henkin was ready with an emotional statement signed by a hundred refuseniks, including Volodya Slepak, and aimed, as he put it, at "the leaders of Jewish organizations of the United States": "Remember—the history of our people has known many terrible mistakes. Do not give in to soothing deceit. Remember—your smallest hesitation may cause irreparable tragic results. Remember—your firmness and steadfastness are our only hope. Now, as never before, our fate depends on you. Can you retreat at such a moment?"

The conflict came to a head on April 30 during a meeting of the Presidents Conference (there was a tacit agreement that any big policy decisions would be approved by the umbrella group). Stein and Fisher made their last stand. Stein, chairman of the Presidents Conference, argued that opposing the president so openly would undermine the link to the White House. It would exacerbate the Cold War and alienate Nixon, who perhaps was the only one capable of achieving any real progress through quiet diplomacy. A few people supported his position. But the past week had turned most of the participants combative and angry, and soon a statement was produced that articulated the position of American Jews: though they had "appreciation" for the "initiatives of President Nixon," the Jackson amendment had "contributed" to the "effort to alleviate the plight of Soviet Jewry and we continue our support for this legislation."