Early 1976: Rumsfeld Persuades Ford to Abandon SALT II

President Ford and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sign a communique relating to the SALT negotiations in November 1974. [Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library / Public domain]Newly ensconsced Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after making a series of speeches attacking Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente with the Soviet Union, waits until Kissinger is away visiting his Soviet counterparts in Moscow to persuade President Ford to shelve the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), the ongoing series of negotiations between the US and USSR to limit nuclear arms. “Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle,” recalls Melvin Goodman, the head of the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. The move serves several purposes: to undercut Kissinger, Rumsfeld’s rival (see September 21, 1974 and After); to push Rumsfeld’s own Cold War, hawkish agenda (see June 4-5, 1974); and to set up a move to get Rumsfeld and a coterie of neoconservatives, including Paul Wolfowitz, in a position to either influence or counteract the CIA. The idea is to, in essence, hijack the US’s national security apparatus and find intelligence that will support their much harsher, antagonistic view of US-Soviet relations—and to push their belief that the US can fight and win a nuclear war. [Unger, 2007, pp. 53]