"Once upon a time there lived two neighbors.
One of them bought a shotgun.
Ah ha!' thought the other.
'All right. I'll buy myself a bigger gun!
'What could this mean?' thought the first neighbor.
'I'll buy myself something bigger!'"
By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union
seemed likely to match America's nuclear arsenal.
The two superpowers faced a choice
slow down their competition - the process that would be called détente -
or continue an arms race that could end in all-out war.
1969. A new American president came to power.
Richard Nixon had new ideas about how to make the Cold War less dangerous.
He was ready to accept the Soviet Union as America's nuclear equal.
"When President Nixon came into office,
the conventional wisdom
of all...
the...
media
and the people who thought of themselves as intellectuals was
that he was a warmonger
and that they had to moderate him.
And we were under enormous pressure to start negotiations on trade,
on SALT, on a whole complex of things."
"This was not a foreign policy politician,
particularly in his early years.
He had gained notoriety and power, as you know,
on the wave of the great Red scare,
the great McCarthy period in American politics.
He also knew - and this was very important - the bureaucracy
He knew that often the most difficult belligerent powers
with which he had to deal were not
the Soviet Union or China but the Department of State,
the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense
those belligerents arrayed along the Potomac."
Although Nixon wanted to revise America's Cold War strategy,
his first priority was to get American troops out of the war in Vietnam.
By 1969, this war had cost the lives of 30,000 GIs
and there was still no end.
"When I became secretary of defense,
there were 550,000 men on the ground in Vietnam,
another 1,200,000 in Asia, in the Navy and the Air Force supporting
...this operation. It was a big war."
America's ally, President Thieu of South Vietnam,
met Nixon on Midway Island.
Nixon told Thieu he planned to pull out American troops
and hand over the ground war to the South Vietnamese.
'Vietnamization' was the term that I coined in order to...
get people thinking about the responsibilities
that the Vietnamese had there."
"So we came in and said, 'That's fine, as long as, you know, you leave behind
a well-trained South Vietnamese army
and equip us so that we could take care of our own destiny."
In July 1969, the first American troops were pulled out.
"... the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne ..."
"Both Nixon and Kissinger knew what it was doing to our society,
the controversy, the distractions,
the financial cost, the cost - the terrible human toll
in terms of lives lost and wounded, not only of Americans
but Vietnamese and others.
And also the distractions from other foreign policy initiatives.
It´s one reason that Nixon and Kissinger wanted to open up with China
and to improve relations with Russia:
partly to try to bring pressure on the Vietnamese
to negotiate a settlement,
partly to show a dramatic
forward movement in our foreign policy, that we were not crippled
and paralyzed by the Vietnam War."
But Hanoi put on its own pressure with a new offensive in the South.
American generals proposed bombing
North Vietnam's bases in neutral Cambodia.
Nixon agreed to the bombing
but insisted the raids in Cambodia be kept secret.
"Bomb doors open at 30 PG!
Coming up at 30 PG!"
"I see it coming up." "Roger!"
"Stand by to release - ready, ready, now!"
"Bombs away!"
"Impact time - ready, ready, now!"
"I was all for bombing the sanctuaries in Cambodia
but I could not...
tell the president of the United States, the secretary of state
or the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger,
that I could keep it secret.
And I thought it would be a very bad thing if that came out at a later time.
And I knew it would
because we had 12,000 people that had all that information
and you just can't keep secrets."
Laird was right. Anti-war demonstrators protested.
"U.S. out of Vietnam! U.S. out of Vietnam!"
"James Hutton, Illinois!"
"Dennis Hyland, Colorado!"
They called out the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam.
"Richard Nixon could look out the window of the White House and see
a mob of people marching in the street
protesting the war in Vietnam, for instance.
He could take a 3-by-5 card
out of his pocket and take a look.
And the polls showed him
with the confidence of 70-75 percent of the American people
And he'd say, 'I'm not going to let those people in the street
make foreign policy for this country."
"And so tonight - to you,
the great silent majority of my fellow Americans -
I ask for your support.
I pledged in my campaign for the presidency
to end the war in a way that we could win the peace.
I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.
The more support I can have
from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed.
For the more divided we are at home
the less likely the enemy is to negotiate."
"Nixon believed, I think correctly,
that the opposition to the war
was mostly about the draft and the casualties
and not about the American presence there.
Americans didn't care if we were bombing Hanoi
they didn't care if there were American airplanes around.
What they didn't like was the fact that young American men
were being drafted, sent to Vietnam and being killed."
The bombing of the communist bases in Cambodia was no miracle cure.
one zero zero meters away from it now! I'll get you from there!"
American GIs still came under attack in South Vietnam.
"Right, who's wounded? All right, give me some cover!
OK, can you move him?
OK, try and bring him back here! Remember to stop the bleeding!
You gotta stop?!"
Nixon now ordered a ground assault into Cambodia.
"Anybody out here?"
"Do you feel the people are united behind you, Mr. President?"
"Er, as far as the people are concerned, I have no judgment on that.
Er, all that I can say is that I know that I did what I believe was right
and what really matters is...
as far as the people are concerned is whether it comes out right.
If it comes out right, that's what really matters."
"Leave this area immediately! Leave this area immediately!"
Nixon's invasion of Cambodia produced violent protests on American campuses.
At Kent State University, National Guardsmen shot four students dead.
"Every year in the early spring and in the late autumn,
the Soviet army gets its new recruits.
The forces are inconceivable without strong,
agile men possessing stamina.
These are fighting men."
Fighting men alone could not guarantee security.
Soviet leaders wanted arms agreements
that recognized their nuclear parity with America.
They also wanted American understanding in their quarrel with China.
The Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev
championed relaxation of Cold War tension with America
the policy that would be called détente.
He was on his way to the very top of Soviet power.
"Brezhnev was a sincere person in many ways.
He had been through the great Patriotic War from beginning to end.
He returned with the very strong conviction
that he had to do his best to prevent war.
This was illustrated every time he went to a collective farm, or factory.
He would ask people 'How are things?'
they would complain but then they would say,
'Well, we can put up with it as long as there is no war."
"Every leader in any country has the need to express his character
and to leave his mark in history.
He wanted to become the leader of the Soviet government.
One of the ways he had of strengthening his position
was making foreign policy his priority."
"American-Soviet relations were always at the center of our diplomacy.
I would say that, basically, whether the West believed it or not,
our attitude was to have a more constructive
relationship with the United States."
In Europe, the Cold War showed itself most painfully
in the Iron Curtain that divided the two Germanys.
West Germany's new Chancellor, the Social Democrat Willy Brandt,
had his own ideas for improving relations with the Soviet bloc.
The Germans called it Ostpolitik.
"The main thing that got the ball rolling
was the decision of the chancellor to call East Germany a state.
This was a fundamental change in our position,
which led to fierce criticism from the opposition.
In Moscow, people were all ears."
"In our opinion, there were more sober voices among the Social Democrats,
those who would seek common points of interests with us
not similarities in our outlook but similarities in our interests.
I would like to stress the difference.
If we found points in common which would preserve a balance of interests,
this could lead relations between the Soviet Union
and West Germany out of a dead end."
Willy Brandt became the first West German chancellor to visit East Germany.
Brandt's visit was a triumph.
To ordinary East Germans, he seemed to bring hope of change.
But the Americans were worried.
"My first reaction to Ostpolitik
was concern that it would lead to German nationalism,
that if Germany operated on its own vis-a-vis the East,
it would emphasize its own national concerns,
if not immediately then over a period of time."
"The response we got from Nixon and Kissinger
was one of doubt and suspicion.
Had we thought about everything?
I had informed Kissinger shortly before we got into office
what we planned to do.
He asked a lot of questions.
We reached the point where I said, "I am not here to consult
but to inform."
This was a tone unheard of in Washington."
"While the danger that we feared was real,
the best way to avert it was not to fight it
and then be accused of being the cause of permanent German partition,
but rather to help guide it in a direction
that was compatible with allied policy.
And so we established another back-channel to
Brandt through his associate Egon Bahr
and to the Soviets via Dobrynin and Falin.
And we insisted that before anything
could be concluded with respect to Germany,
absolute assurances had to exist with respect to our position in Berlin."
Brandt's next destination was Moscow.
He hoped to remove Russia's fear of its old German enemy.
Brandt was willing to recognize Europe's postwar borders
and the division between East and West.
"The Moscow accords were the key to our bilateral treaty system with the East.
The Federal Republic ceased to be an excuse
for the Soviet Union to keep the Eastern bloc in line.
The treaty was a signal from Moscow that there was a readiness for change."
Willy Brandt flew to another old German enemy.
Brandt had come to recognize Poland's western border
carved out of territory seized from Nazi Germany in 1945.
The German chancellor visited the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Words failed him;
he knelt at the memorial to Jewish fighters who resisted the Nazis.
"Brandt was a stroke of luck for German history.
For the Americans he symbolized reliability
he had proved himself the defender of Berlin
against the menace of the East.
And for the East, he was a resistance fighter
against the Nazis - without any doubt."
In a divided Germany,
these steps towards détente brought welcome cracks in the Berlin Wall.
Families and friends separated by the Wall could see each other once again.
"OK, fine, fine, we'll call you later!"
The architects of America's new approach to the Cold War were Richard Nixon
and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
"Henry was very temperamental, very bright, very territorial, very insecure.
You could say the same thing about Richard Nixon.
And they complemented one another a lot of the time.
At the same time they were rivals.
They fought with one another.
They fought... not with one another but behind one another's backs
they were devious."
The two men preferred to work in secret.
Through secret back channels,
they set up summit meetings in Beijing and Moscow.
"We have a variety of independent sources."
"I know, I know! None of them reliable."
"None of them totally reliable."
"That's right!"
Nixon and Kissinger wanted the summits in China and the Soviet Union
to help America get out of Vietnam.
They also hoped to bring China into their diplomatic game.
"The principal reason for seeking a rapprochement with China was to...
restore fluidity to the overall international situation.
If there are five players and you can't deal with one of them,
this produces rigidity. Secondly,
we wanted to demonstrate to the American public
that Vietnam was an aberration,
that we had ideas for the construction of peace on a global scale."
Soviet leaders were alarmed after Kissinger
and then Nixon returned jubilant from China.
"Not only have we completed a week of intensive talks at the highest levels,
we have set up a procedure
whereby we can continue to have discussions in the future.
We have demonstrated that nations with very deep and fundamental differences
can learn to discuss those differences calmly, rationally and frankly
without compromising their principles."
"It was a great scare for our leaders
who decided that an anti-Soviet coalition was being formed,
which included not only America and NATO but also China.
We felt we were being surrounded."
"The Moscow reaction was
that a summit which we had tried to achieve before the trip to China,
and in which they had been stone-walling us and trying to use it to
well, to put it kindly - blackmail us into
untoward concessions, or concessions we thought were untoward,
suddenly they agreed to the summit
and it unfroze our relationship."
In March 1972, North Vietnam launched a new offensive in the South.
Nixon responded with more air attacks.
Would the Soviets receive Nixon in Moscow
while his planes were bombing their North Vietnamese ally?
"The general debate that took place
in the White House situation room - and I was in many of these - was:
which is more important - the Vietnam front or the Moscow front?
And Nixon was the only important person that I can recall
who said, 'We can have both.
I'm willing to lose the Moscow summit but I predict
the Russians will go ahead even if we bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong.'"
"Nixon and Henry Kissinger played sort of good cop/bad cop
with the Russians particularly.
Kissinger would see Anatoly Dobrynin, the Russian ambassador,
frequently and I mean like almost daily.
And his line was - 'Look, I work for this crazy man.
There's no telling what he might do.
So, Anatoly, you and I as reasonable men
must work together to an accommodation between our countries."
Kissinger was uncertain whether Moscow would allow the summit to go ahead.
"I went to see Kissinger.
He was nervous but tried to hide it.
He said jokingly, 'OK, let's have a bet!'
because he knew I had a piece of paper with the official Soviet reply.
He said, 'Let's bet whether I can guess the answer!'
So we bet a crate of champagne.
I asked him, 'So what do you think the Soviet answer is?'
He was convinced that the summit had been postponed to a later date.
In fact, the official Soviet reply was: the summit is going ahead as planned."
May 22, 1972
Richard Nixon became the first serving American president
to be received in the Kremlin.
The summit reached agreements to limit offensive and defensive nuclear weapons,
and it laid the foundation of détente.
For Brezhnev and Nixon,
this was the most dramatic proof yet
of the new relationship between their two countries.
But first the Soviets had to make their point on Vietnam.
"President Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, myself and one other officer,
four of us, went out to Brezhnev's country dacha.
And there we saw Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny
and the national security adviser on their side - four on four.
We sat for three hours in the dacha,
in which each of the Russian leaders took an hour
to blast the United States for its Vietnam policy,
absolutely attacking Nixon and the United States.
Nixon knew what they were doing,
namely, they were writing a transcript to send to Hanoi.
So he listened patiently, didn't get overly argumentative,
basically just took it.
After three and a half hours of Soviet diatribe,
sort of a tag-team match among the Soviet leaders,
we then went upstairs for dinner
and the entire mood changed.
Brezhnev broke out the vodka.
There was singing and jokes and toasts.
"And then later that evening, Kissinger went back
- I believe with Gromyko -
and did some more negotiating on arms control."
"The atmosphere was very good, even friendly.
We were quite aggressive in view of Nixon's actions on Vietnam,
but we made sure it didn't overshadow the summit,
because the issues that Nixon was going to raise
had already been agreed through the confidential channel.
These were very important nuclear issues.
All the members of the Politburo knew
that the text of the treaty had already been agreed.
Nixon knew that too from Kissinger.
So if we gave in to our emotions
we would ruin everything that had already been achieved."
"The President of the United States!"
The American Congress gave Nixon a hero's welcome.
"Last Friday in Moscow we witnessed the beginning
of the end of that era which began in 1945.
We took the first step toward a new era
of mutually agreed restraint and arms limitation
between the two principal nuclear powers.
With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations.
We have begun to check the wasteful and dangerous spiral of nuclear arms
which has dominated relations between our two countries for a generation.
We have begun to reduce the level of fear
by reducing the causes of fear,
for our two peoples and for all peoples in the world."
Two weeks after Nixon's return from Moscow,
five men working for his re-election campaign were arrested
for breaking into the Washington headquarters of the Democratic Party.
It was the start of a major scandal - Watergate.
As election day approached, Kissinger returned
from one of his many negotiating rounds with the North Vietnamese.
He told Nixon he at last had a deal on Vietnam.
"The North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho
presented to Dr. Kissinger
a draft agreement on restoring peace and ending the war in Vietnam.
And the first thing he said when he presented that document to Dr. Kissinger
was, "You are in a hurry, are you not?"
And I recall Dr. Kissinger nodding affirmatively when...
Le Duc Tho made that statement."
"We knew that Kissinger had met with
the North Vietnamese side in Paris on October 9.
So when he came on October 19 and gave us the text
- in English, mind you -
and he asked us, well, we've got four days to sign
and of course we politely said, 'Well, you know, this is the first time
we have been given this text, so we would like to have time to study it.
By the way, you know, where is the Vietnamese text?"
"When I see the widows, the orphans,
when I see so many tombs, so many sacrifices
for the freedom and liberty of Vietnam,
I reaffirm again that the whole people of South Vietnam will resist again
any peace which demand the rendition of South Vietnam
and which will give South Vietnam to the communist aggressors!"
"I have great sympathy for Thieu
and, at the same time, I have great sympathy for our problem.
We faced 65 congressional resolutions
in the year 1972 alone
that were urging unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam."
"And Mr. Kissinger said, 'Well, if you sign this, we're going to bring peace
and we'll be
- South Vietnam will be developed, people will be happy.' At which...
President Thieu said, 'Listen,
you know, we have the interests and the future of our country.
We are not looking for Nobel Prize."
South Vietnam refused to sign.
With his deal facing collapse,
Kissinger hastily reassured Hanoi America still wanted an agreement.
"We believe...
that peace is at hand.
We believe that an agreement is within sight
It is inevitable that...
in a war of such complexity
that there should be occasional difficulties
in reaching a final solution."
This latest setback in the Vietnam peace talks did not damage Nixon.
He was easily re-elected for a second term.
Back in Paris,
Kissinger had to put Thieu's objections to the North Vietnamese.
"How's it going, Dr. Kissinger?"
"How do I get outta here?"
"We thought you weren't having a meeting today, sir."
"Well, we do something surprising!"
"It's getting to be difficult to have a secret rendezvous in Paris."
"It certainly is!"
"Will you be meeting again tomorrow, sir?"
"Er, we expect to, yes."
"One day we were on the verge of finalizing the text.
The next day, there were suddenly 10 or 12
different issues that popped up
and were unresolved.
And then Le Duc Tho said that he had to go back to Hanoi for consultations."
Le Duc Tho left Paris and the talks broke down.
Nixon ordered air raids on North Vietnam,
hoping to bludgeon Hanoi into agreement
and at the same time bolster the South.
Over 12 days, Hanoi and Haiphong
came under the most sustained bombing campaign of the war.
The bombing served its purpose.
North and South Vietnam
were ready to agree to the deal that Kissinger put together.
Under the peace accords,
American troops would leave Vietnam;
the Saigon government would remain in power
but North Vietnam's troops would stay in the South.
Nixon called it "peace with honor".
"It so happened that with Mr. Kissinger, who had wanted to play the triangular,
to do the détente, Vietnam had to go in order for détente to happen.
This is my own analysis and then that, unfortunately, you know,
was not very good for the South Vietnamese people."
"Good evening. The biggest White House scandal in a century,
the Watergate scandal, broke wide open today.
The attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, has resigned
because - in his own words - he had close personal
and professional associations
with people who may have broken the law.
The two closest men to the president,
H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman,
his chief domestic adviser, have resigned.
Last week both men were fighting hard to keep their jobs."
"We had a great staff system in the White House for dealing with crises.
We didn't apply that system to Watergate.
I think part of the reason was we didn't consider it a crisis.
It was a very small potatoes episode."
"I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in.
I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent...
cover-up activities.
I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal
improper campaign tactics.
That was and that is the simple truth."
Regardless of Watergate, the process of détente continued.
Brezhnev came to America for a second summit with Nixon.
In California, the Soviet leader partied with Hollywood film stars.
The Russians were still keen to deal with the American President.
"Goodbye!"
"Dosvidan'ya!"
In spite of Nixon's denial of guilt over Watergate,
he was accused of obstructing justice
and faced impeachment by Congress.
In August 1974,
Richard Nixon, the man who took America into détente,
gave up the fight and resigned.
His successor was Gerald Ford.
The Soviet leadership was astonished by Nixon's downfall.
"They thought, 'How could the most powerful person in the United States,
the most important person in the world, be legally forced
to step down for stealing some silly documents?'
It was so contrary to the mentality of the Soviet leaders
that a person in such a senior position could be removed by legal means.
They simply couldn't understand it."
"There were various suspicions.
One of those suspicions
was that it was done deliberately by the enemies of rapprochement
between America and the Soviet Union."
In Vietnam, the 1973 peace accords had not stopped the fighting.
By April 1975, South Vietnamese troops were struggling
to defend Saigon against Hanoi's final offensive.
They could expect little help from the Americans.
"The Congress of the United States
refused
to supply the kind of military assistance
that was necessary to keep the South Vietnamese military forces strong."
South Vietnamese who had fought
and worked alongside the Americans against the communists
besieged the U.S. Embassy.
The Americans were getting away
but they had lost the war
and now they could not even save
thousands of their South Vietnamese friends.
"The American experience in Vietnam
- and particularly my own - had been like a B-52 strike
from 60,000 feet up. Oh, we had done a lot of damage
but very seldom did you have to gaze upon the consequences of that...
...damage.
That last day was like being in a B-52 strike right on the deck.
You saw what our actions had wrought
and the horror and the shame...
was almost more than you could bear."
The Soviet Union proclaimed itself confident.
It believed it was a superpower equal to America
and boasted history was on its side.
This rosy view ignored one problem.
The treatment of Soviet dissidents like the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn
threatened to derail détente.
"Mr. Cantor..."
"Russian pig, go home! ... Never again, never again!"
American passions flared over restrictions
on the emigration of Soviet Jews.
"The questions of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union
and of human rights were a very strong irritant.
These issues were raised regularly by the U.S. Congress
and by demonstrations organized by pro-Israeli activists
and sometimes by hooligans."
"There was at the outset of course a genuine backlash
in the Congress of the United States against the policy of détente
not in the first instance from where one might expect it,
from the right-wing pews of the Republican Party.
It came instead from the traditionally right-wing Democrats,
the hard-line, sort of Cold Warrior Democrats like 'Scoop' Jackson."
"When we have something we feel strongly about
and in this case it is civil liberties and freedom and...
what this nation was founded upon, that...
we should do something to implement international law
and it is international law now
the right to leave a country freely and return freely
that we should put that issue of principle on the table
knowing that the Russians...
are not going to agree to it."
"The debate about détente took a very curious form,
because some liberals seemed to take the view...
that maybe tension wasn't all that bad.
And they suddenly developed theories of...
the need to intervene in human rights procedures
that we'd never heard before
and that were strenuously rejected before."
In the Soviet Union,
where memorials kept alive the remembrance of a terrible war,
détente had few enemies.
Soviet leaders hoped to guarantee their country's status and security
with a treaty to be signed in Helsinki
which would recognize the postwar division of Europe.
But this treaty had a stumbling block - human rights.
"The members of the Politburo read the full text.
They had no objections when they read the first and second articles.
When they got to the third 'humanitarian' article,
their hair stood on end.
Suslov said it was a complete betrayal of communist ideology.
Gromyko then came up with the following argument:
The main thing about the Helsinki treaty is the recognition of the borders.
That's what we shed our blood for in the Great Patriotic War.
All 35 signatory states are now saying these are the borders of Europe.
As for human rights, Gromyko said,
'Well, who's the master of this house?
We are the masters of this house
and each time it will be up to us to decide how to act.
Who can force us?"
After overcoming the doubts of his colleagues,
Brezhnev arrived in Helsinki,
keen to cut a figure among leaders from East and West.
Both sides believed they had the agreement they wanted.
"The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations did not recognize
that the human rights provision was a time bomb.
We the United States believed that if we could get...
the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations to respect human rights,
that was worth whatever else was agreed to in the Helsinki Accords."
"Three, two, one, engine sequence start, one, zero,
launch commence! We have a liftoff!"
Thanks to détente, rockets could now point the way to coexistence,
rather than war.
"Houston flight to Moskva...."
"Apollo Houston, I got two messages for you.
Moscow is go for docking! Houston is go for docking!
It's up to you guys! Have fun!"
"Less than five meters distance!"
Soviet and American spacecraft made history,
docking together 140 miles above the Earth.
"Contact! All right, aha!?"
In space, cooperation was replacing years of Cold War confrontation.
"When we went to the United States for training,
we met the Americans.
I remember one of them saying to me,
'Since this international project I have begun to sleep better at night.
I am no longer afraid of nuclear war,
because we are working together."
Subtitles by Juan Claudio Epsteyn
E-mail: epsteyn@hotmail.com