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Détente was thus built on the twin pillars of resistance to Soviet expansionism and a willingness to negotiate on concrete issues. In Jordan and Cienfuegos in 1970, in the India-Pakistan war of 1971, in the alert at the end of the October 1973 war, the Nixon Administration had vigorously opposed geopolitical challenges by the Soviet Union and its allies. We fought for a strong defense policy over bitter congressional opposition. Simultaneously, we explored the prospects of negotiation. By early spring 1973 a number of agreements had been achieved. But none of them caused us to imagine that tensions with our adversary had ended; we did not slacken our determination to maintain the military balance or resist Soviet expansionism. I believe a normal Nixon presidency would have managed to attain symmetry between the twin pillars of containment and coexistence. But the domestic climate was ill suited for any such effort. As a result, conservatives who hated Communists and liberals who hated Nixon came together in a rare convergence, like an eclipse of the sun. Conservatives were uneasy about the agreements being signed with a declared adversary. The liberal case was more complex. The Administration was pursuing arms control, East-West trade and other negotiations' that liberals had been urging for decades. But the blood feud with Nixon ran too deep. If Nixon was for detente, so the subconscious thinking seemed to run, perhaps the cold war wasn't all that bad.
The result was intellectual chaos. For years Nixon had been decried as a cold warrior; I had received my share of brickbats for the insistence on ending the Viet Nam War on honorable terms. Suddenly there was a new myth: we were both being taken in by the Soviet Union. Human-rights advocates affected outrage that détente was not being used to change the Soviet domestic structure by legislated ultimatums. Doctrinaire defense experts demanded that arms-control negotiations bring about unilateral Soviet reductions without sacrificing any American program. How to accomplish this was generously left to my discretion. The proposition reminded me of the story of the admiral who during World War II claimed to have found a solution to the submarine problem. He proposed heating the ocean and boiling the enemy to the surface. Asked how to accomplish this feat, he replied: "I have given you the idea; its technical implementation is up to you."
All this might have remained inchoate sniping but for the emergence of a formidable leader able to unite the two strands of opposition: Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington. A mainstream Democrat, stolid, thoughtful, stubborn as could be expected from the combination of Scandinavian origin and Lutheran theology, Jackson was convinced that the Soviet goal was to undermine the free world. This was a true enough reading of Soviet intentions, and we agreed with it. Where we differed was in Jackson's corollary that all negotiation was futile.