Mort Halperin and the Okinawa Decision

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

Are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. This week, or this episode we don't have Aaron or Ann we have Mort Halperin. Hey, Mort. Hi, how are you?

Mort, how would you introduce yourself? I would say you're a mentor and one of the most important figures in my career. And the problem is you're famous for like three things. So which would you emphasize?

Mort Halperin 0:49

Well, as long as it's not suing Henry Kissinger, I don't care which one.

Jeffrey 0:53

I mentioned that every semester in class.

Mort 0:57

I used to go around saying I did other things. In fact, When I was on William Buckley's program many years ago, he actually said Halperin is often introduced as having sued Henry Kissinger, but he's actually done many other important things.

Jeffrey 1:19

So I guess what I would say for listeners is you've had an extraordinarily long career. You started, how old were you when you and Tom Schelling wrote Strategy and Arms Control?

Mort 1:33

It was 1960, and I was born in 1938.

Jeffrey 1:38

Yeah, so you're very productive. You left Harvard to go to the Johnson administration, which is how you end up knowing a little bit about the subject we're going to talk about today, which is the reversion of Okinawa. You are in the Nixon administration and resign.

Mort 1:57

Yeah, but I work on Okinawa in the Nixon administration as much as well as having worked on the Johnson.

Jeffrey 2:04

Oh, okay. I don't think I caught that quite right.

Mort 2:07

So that That part is critical to the story.

Jeffrey 2:11

And then after that, you sue Henry Kissinger for wiretapping your phone and you're the director of the ACLU.

Mort 2:22

I run the ACLU Washington. Washington. National office for, I was there for 18 years.

Jeffrey 2:28

I think that's the period in which I got the photograph of you with the pipe.

Mort 2:32

Right.

Jeffrey 2:32

When did you give up the pipe?

Mort 2:36

Oh, I don't even remember it so long ago. I think like 70, 90, 70.

Jeffrey 2:42

All right, well, so the thing that we're gonna talk about today is Okinawa, because I teach a class on national security decision-making, and one of the central case studies is the decision of the Nixon administration to give Okinawa back to the Japanese, but to do so without nuclear weapons. And so you are intimately involved in the process that leads to the reversion of Okinawa without nuclear weapons, their withdrawal, And some of the more interesting bureaucratic shenanigans I have ever seen in a case study.

Mort 3:17

So it's actually, it's half in the Johnson administration and half in the Nixon administration.

Jeffrey 3:22

Okay, well, so how does it start?

Mort 3:25

Well, it started for me in a coffee shop in Tokyo in 1963. And it was with K. Wakaizumi. Who was then not a very well-known young professor on the staff of the National Defense University. And I was there to talk about the implications for Asian security of the Chinese nuclear capability, which I ultimately wrote a book about called China and the Bomb.

And so I was asking him and other Japanese, were they worried about a Chinese nuclear capability? And Wakai Jumi's answer, which was similar to many other people, was, We're not really worried about that as long as we have the alliance with the United States, because we think you will protect us even if China gets nuclear weapons. What we're worried about is whether we can sustain the alliance.

And the threat to the alliance is the opposition of the socialists and other leftists in Japan to the alliance because they want Japan to be an entirely peaceful nation without any military alliances. And the thing they will use To force a debate on the alliance and maybe the end of the alliance is the American occupation of Okinawa.

And in 1970, either country can withdraw from the security treaty. And what Kaizumi said and others said, if the United States has not agreed to give back Okinawa by 1970, there will be riots in Japan, which could lead to the end of the alliance or at the very least, The Japanese government insisting on the return of Okinawa and it therefore occurring without any preparations, without any debate.

So we need to find a way to give back Okinawa before 1970.

Jeffrey 5:15

So just for listeners to try to frame this, I think people don't always remember that after World War II, the United States retained control of Okinawa for, well, up until this period. And I mean, the joke I always tell folks in class is like, well, why are we controlling Okinawa and why are there nuclear weapons there? And the answer is because we want it fair and square.

But as you point out, we have to give it back.

Mort 5:44

Right. Those were the days when countries thought if they conquered something in a war, they could keep it. You know, the post-war period rejected that premise. And we, in fact, were forced in the peace treaty with Japan to recognize something that was called residual Japanese sovereignty, which meant someday we would return the island to Japan. And we conceded that it was Japanese territory, not Chinese territory.

Not an independent country, but it was part of Japan and someday we would give it back. But we intended that day to be, you know, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So just to fast forward, I come into the Pentagon in 1966, interested in working on the issue. And by then, Coincidence, I suppose. I get called the first day of my job into the office of the principal deputy assistant secretary, Adam Yarmolinsky, who says there's a task force on Okinawa's reversion issues.

And we want you to represent OSD on that task force. And you should know that I and Mr. McNamara agree with former Ambassador Reischauer. Now we need to give it back and give it back before the end of the decade. So your job is to do that. And the next day, Yolanda Walensky walks into my office with K. Wakai Zumi, introduces me to him, not knowing that I know him, and says, Mr. McNamara has agreed to give him an interview.

You're to staff the interview. And so I start do the interview which helps him get the prestige which eventually leads to him being the chief negotiator for the Japanese on this issue. And I started working on this task force and I have a conversation with a Naval officer who's involved in Okinawa to find out what's going on.

So I say to him, can you describe for me the American military bases on Okinawa? And he says, we have no military bases on Okinawa. And I say, what do you mean? He says, Okinawa is a military base. And he meant that literally. And I say, but there's a million Japanese on the island. And he says, well, that's an administrative convenience, but we work around it.

And it turned out that is exactly the way they thought about it. This was the whole island was treated as if it was Fort Dix. It was a U.S. military base. And it just happened to be people living on the base. They happened to be Japanese, but they got goods from the United States duty free. They paid tariffs on duties from Japan.

The Americans ran the public school system. It was an American military base, which happened to be a Japanese island. And then I said, well, when are you planning to give it back? And he said, when the sky is blue. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, when there are no more security threats in Asia.

As long as there are security threats in Asia, we have to maintain the island, and we have to maintain it under American control. So there were two entirely separate obstacles to overcome, each as difficult as the other. One was that we would give it back And accept limits on the use of the bases, particularly combat operations. And the second is that we would take out nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 9:18

Okay, I see. So in class, we only really talk about overcoming the second obstacle. How long does it take to really overcome the first obstacle and then get in a position where we know the island's going back?

Mort 9:30

It's easy. It comes in the two Sato summits. Sato was the prime minister. First of all, he comes in 65 and Lyndon Johnson says to him, we'll give Okinawa back when the sky is blue. So that's the starting point. Sato probed and Johnson said, there is nothing going to happen here on this. We are keeping it until there is no security problem.

67, there's a Johnson-Sato summit. They agreed to begin negotiations seeking an early return of Okinawa. So that's done in the Johnson administration. It's subject to agreement on the conditions of the reversal. And then Nixon agrees to homeland level for the bases and then to take the nuclear weapons. So it comes in those two, in those two. And I was deeply involved in both of them.

Jeffrey 10:23

So there are two questions. Well, one thing I want to ask about is to talk a little bit about Wakai Zumi himself, because I think that that's an interesting story about where Japan was in this era, in the sense that he's such an unusual figure to play such an important role. And he ends up playing such a strange role, including as what Mr. Yoshida at the end, right?

And when he's using his pseudonym. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Why he ends up playing like who he is, what his personality is like and how he ends up playing this role. Because it's, you know, I think most listeners are going to imagine that there's just like a foreign ministry official who's told to go do this, but instead they, you know, reach out and grab this academic.

Mort 11:14

Well, it's because in both cases, the foreign ministry channel fails and it fails because both Johnson and Nixon want to cut this deal. In part because they want credit for it, but in part because they both want substantial economic concessions from the Japanese in return, something that's very hard to negotiate through a foreign ministry. In any case, neither Johnson nor Nixon want to do that because they want to be the one that gets the credit from Sato.

They want to make the deal because they know the bureaucracy doesn't care. When Johnson has a meeting on it, Okinawa Reversion, they come in and there's a memo about the possible terms of homeland renewal and Russ starts explaining to Johnson what the Japanese want. And Johnson interrupts him and says, I'm not interested in what the Japanese want.

I want to know what they're going to give me. And Nixon, there isn't quite that dramatic moment, but the same thing. He says, well, this is about textiles. Sure, we're going to give them the island back. Sure, we're going to take the nuclear weapons off. But A, I want the credit for it. And B, I want something on textiles in return.

And I know that we can't have that week out, so we can't do it through the foreign ministry. So in both situations, the president and the prime minister want to do it together. And they have to set it up so they know it's going to work, because they can't wait till they get there to try to work out communique language.

Sato in 67 needs to send somebody. Wakai Zumi is a former professor at the National Defense University, known to be very conservative, teaching at a private Japanese university in the Kyoto region, and a sort of prominent defense intellectual, but a very conservative one. So even though people in the United States think of Okinawa reversion as sort of a leftist thing, Raishawa was pushing it.

For the Japanese, it was a very conservative issue. And Sato had come to trust him as somebody who understood Japan. Rostow was his son's godfather. And Wakazumi was very close to Mansfield. So he was a very serious, very thoughtful guy who inspired confidence and trust. And so when in the Johnson administration, There was this fight over, it was literally about how to translate several years into Japanese.

You know, was it, did that mean two or three or seven to 10? And, you know, the words in Japanese, there's no several. Anyway, Sato needed a commitment. That it would happen before 1970. And the Johnson administration was ready to begin negotiations to accept the principle that reversion could recur without the blue sky, but not prepared to commit to a date because it didn't know whether we could reach agreement on the status of the basis after reversion.

And it did not discuss that issue. Deliberately and intentionally, because it was too much to get to agree to at one time. So in both cases, and the second one was easy because he had done it the first time, Sato, at the very last minute, after the foreign ministry came back and said, we can't get the language you want in the communique in 67, and then in 69, they said, The Nixon administration will tell us nothing about taking the nuclear weapons out.

They all say the president will discuss that with you when you come. And so in both cases, he needed to find a way to get around that. And having said that, Wakaizumi in 67 was quite natural to send them in 69.

Jeffrey 15:16

I should warn listeners, by the way, whenever I unmute my microphone, there will be the enormous background noise of my three children. Mort, I wanted to ask about just one more thing about Wakai Izumi, because you remain friends for quite a long time after this. Yes, until his death.

Mort 15:36

Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:39

You know, it just seems to me that it's such an interesting aspect of where Japan is in the 1960s because my sense is there weren't a lot of people like him who were Japanese, who spoke excellent English, who, you know, had spent time in the United States because, you know, the war. Right. You know, is just 20 years prior at this point.

And so, you know, he's quite young, but that in part reflects the fact that he is this kind of new generation of scholars and he's kind of the leading one. I know I always find that really interesting as a historical timepiece because, of course, now there are lots of Japanese academics who speak English and, you know, lots of people who conceivably could be English.

Mort 16:23

When I came in, in 60, 63, I talked to every Japanese who thought about or knew anything about nuclear weapons and strategy issues. And there were probably 12, you know, by a generous definition of them. And five of them worked where Wakai Zumi worked with a man named Saiki, who was the commandant of the Defense University and ran this special organization.

And then there were a couple people at universities. So there were not many choices for Sato when he wanted to do this.

Jeffrey 16:59

So in some of your writings, you talk a lot about the process of softening the Joint Chiefs up in order to be able to accept reversion and then withdrawal of the nuclear weapons. Does that happen mostly in the Johnson administration or mostly in the Nixon administration?

Mort 17:19

Well, what happens in the Johnson administration is getting them to understand that it sure would be better to have free use of the bases. But the risk was to the alliance that in 1970, there could well be riots that would end the treaty or end the bases or end the special level that we had. And therefore, that was the trade-off.

Nobody was saying, if we could do it, we'd want to keep the bases. And that took place. In 67 and 66, but mostly in 67 leading up to the summit. By the summit, the chief position, chiefs never agree. They always say, of course we prefer this, but if it's right that we have to do this, we're prepared to agree to the principle that we will return, we will give up sovereignty over the bases, but maintain the bases.

And then at the very last minute, they sent a memo to the Secretary of Defense saying, the memo to the president should say, we should do this with the understanding that we will insist upon free right to conduct combat operations from Okinawa and right to keep nuclear weapons on Okinawa as part of the negotiations with homeland level.

So that's where the chiefs were in 67. No more blue sky, but freedom to conduct bombing raids from Okinawa and to keep the nuclear weapons there. I got McNamara to agree that we would not say that, not because we're not in favor of it, but because we just hadn't decided it. And it was to be decided. Then in 69, with Nixon, they agreed, and I describe in my memoirs, this NSC meeting in which Buzz Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, says, of course, we'd like to keep the nuclear weapons there.

But if they have to be removed, we need time to do it. And there will be some administrative inconvenience, which was one of the best sentences I ever heard anybody say. Because everybody understood what that meant. Some administrative inconvenience.

Jeffrey 19:26

Yeah, it's actually one of the things I emphasize in the class is that there is this steady process of Pushing the Joint Chiefs not to just say abstractly that the world is going to end, but to specify what the cost of reversion and then removing the weapons is going to be. And once you start to go down that path, and I think you tell this story, which I'm hoping you'll tell again, that when you do that iterative process of forcing people to be specific about what the actual cost is, then suddenly it's not the world ending, it's administrative inconvenience.

Mort 20:04

Right. And so I tried to do that to get them off nuclear weapons in 1968, the last year of the Johnson administration, because McNamara leaves. And I knew as long as McNamara was there, we would win this fight because McNamara did not believe in the utility of nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons were put on Okinawa in the Eisenhower administration when The doctrine was that nuclear weapons went everywhere the troops went.

And the troops were equipped with nuclear weapons. Those were the normal weapons that they were equipped with. And so we had forces on Okinawa and they came with nuclear weapons. Nobody ever had a debate about whether we really needed them there, what the implications for Japan was. They were just there. And when McNamara came in, he had a million fights with the chiefs and never had a fight with them about nuclear weapons in Asia.

He did about nuclear weapons in Europe, but Never on Asia. And as you and I have discussed, Ivan Selin and I did an iterative process, which was trying to lead to taking all the nuclear weapons out of all of Asia. And that was the first time the chiefs were forced to articulate. And there's nothing to articulate. I mean, once you say, well, you know, we had surface, and all of this has now been declassified.

We had surface to air missiles, nuclear warheads there. On the assumption if the Chinese or the Russians try to bomb Okinawa, We would fire a nuclear weapon to destroy an airplane. I mean, that was not gonna happen. And so I had an inconclusive debate with them in 68, because Clifford and NHTSA were not as committed as McNamara was.

And we didn't have to set out, there was no decision to be made. So it was really hard to get them to, so that had to be redone In the Nixon administration.

Jeffrey 22:07

Oh, so you ended up having to do it twice.

Mort 22:10

Yeah. We never finished it in the Johnson administration because there was no, it's very hard to get anybody to do anything when there isn't an event. And the summit was 67. And then in 68, I did this exchange, which I have with them saying, or specify each nuclear weapon that's there. What is it used for? You know, what is the alternative way to deploy that?

What military plans, if any, include using these nuclear weapons. And so eventually, they never want to say that we don't need this at all. So the furthest I've ever heard anybody come was Wheeler saying there will be some administrative inconvenience.

Jeffrey 23:00

I've been pausing this entire time because I don't know if you can hear Sebastian is hitting his pencil sharpener over and over again, mostly to give me a heart attack. Okay, so having taught this as a class, I find it really helps people to reframe. So just in terms of where we are in the story, so... In the Johnson administration, there's a growing sense that we're going to have to return Okinawa, which is the process that you end up working on.

It starts with the Joint Chiefs saying that, you know, well, they'll return it when there are no clouds in the sky, which is, you know, never. But by the end of Johnson, it's pretty clear that the island's going back. But of course, Johnson doesn't run for reelection and we have Nixon come into office. Right. And so now we're really running up against this deadline that Sato, who by the way, for listeners is the great uncle of the current prime minister proving that what the past is never the past.

And so Nixon comes into office and I want to talk about that because to me, that is such a fascinating moment when Nixon comes in because the island is likely going back. But the Japanese aren't... You didn't know? Well, Nixon knew, but Kissinger didn't know. Oh, Kissinger didn't know? Okay, well, so explain that before we get to the issue of nuclear weapons.

Mort 24:32

Mark Izumi actually has in his memoir, you know, he's done a memoir about this episode. It was very, very long in Japanese and fairly long in English. Rostow got him an appointment with Henry Kissinger. And he goes in and sees Henry Kissinger and he says what is consistent with what I know about this, Henry barely knows that Japan exists.

I mean, this was a period which is hard now to understand in which Americans who cared about international relations and who cared about nuclear strategy issues were entirely focused on the Soviet Union and on NATO's nuclear strategy. And most of them had never been to Japan. Most of them knew nothing about Japan, hadn't even thought about China.

And so when Wakazumi goes to see Kissinger, which Rostow arranges, you know, the Johnson National Security Advisor, he reports in his memoirs that Nixon knew nothing about Okinawa, didn't know anything about the reversion issue. And Nixon did know. Nixon was one of the few Americans who had been to Japan and knew about And knew about the issue.

So he was more open to having to deal with it. But it was another one of these coincidence because I had taught at Harvard with Kissinger and he asked me to come work with him in the government. And then Nixon asked Kissinger to design an NSC system Which he said was not as rigid as Eisenhower's, but wasn't as, just ridiculously from Nixon's point of view, informal as the Kennedy one.

Kissinger had no idea what he was talking about and basically said to me, do you understand this request? And I said, yes, I understand it completely. And he said, okay. So I wrote a memo for him to the president proposing the creation of what became the Nixon NSC system. Which most people think of as irrelevant because by a year later, Nixon and Kissinger were working together and ignoring the system.

But for the first year, it actually functioned. And it functioned in particular on Okinawa. So I did a memo to Nixon from Kissinger, which Kissinger sent, saying, you should set up a system where we do study memos asking about Important issues and ask for options and alternatives and no solution, no positions of agencies. Positions come at the NSC meeting orally.

So the people have to look the president in the eye and say, we can do this, not write it out in a piece of paper. And then I proposed in the same memo, the first five or six studies. And of course, one of those was on U.S.-Japanese relations. I also Kissinger was hiring a staff, which was much smaller than, you know, it was like 30 people.

Now it's like 300 people. But there was a senior Asian person to be on the staff. And Larry Eagleburger, who later became acting secretary and I, got Kissinger with much difficulty to hire Dick Snyder, who was then the State Department Japan desk officer and my comrade in arms in the struggle, to come to the NSC. So I moved from defense to the NSC Dick moves from state to the NSC.

And we both have on this, our agenda, the Sato summit's coming up in 69. And we got to get an agreement to complete reversion and to take out the nuclear weapons. And so I do this memo Kissinger sends to Nixon. Nixon approves it, it approves the system, it approves the first five studies, one of which is under Japan.

So I do what's called NISM-5, National Security Study Memorandum-5, which lays out, asks them to lay out the options for Okinawa. Dick goes and works with State on the paper, which includes the option of taking the nuclear weapons out and Then we have this NSC meeting in which Kissinger has sent in advance a memo to Nixon, which I wrote, which says, you've got to give the island back.

You've got to give it back before, read to it before 70, and you've got to take the nuclear weapons out.

Jeffrey 28:52

Well, so one question I always have about NSSM 5, I guess you all just said NISM. Listen. Yeah, okay. It's so funny because obviously when the documents are preserved, right, the language associated with them doesn't. So I didn't know that you said them rather than just spelled out the letters. So National Security Study Memorandum 5. One question I've always had about that is do you remember the list of options for That, wait, so you wrote it?

Mort 29:30

Well, there's two documents that get called NISM-5. One is the study memorandum asking for the study. Right. And then is what we came to call the response to NISM-5. Yes. Which is probably what you're talking about.

Jeffrey 29:44

Yes.

Mort 29:45

And now if you've seen the document, the question is, is it like seven pages or is it like 30 pages?

Jeffrey 29:50

It's like 30 pages.

Mort 29:52

So the 30-page document was done by the interagency process. And was a joint document. The state had the pen, which meant Alex Johnson had the pen, because he was undersecretary for political affairs and obviously deeply involved in this. Snyder was on it for the NSC. It came to the review group. The review group agreed that it fairly stated the options, but that it was much too long.

So then as the person staffing the review group, I got to write A memo with like six pages, which is the memo that actually went to the NSC staff. I mean, everybody saw it. It wasn't a trick. We sent it back. We got agreement at the meeting. It's much too long. It's fair, but too long. We did the six pages.

We sent it around. Everybody agreed, yes, these six pages are a fair statement. So those six pages are what actually went to the NSC principals. Now, the other departments may have sent the other paper along as well. No way to know.

Jeffrey 30:51

So that's so interesting because my students' first reaction to seeing the 30-page version is always, this document is much, much too long and should be summarized.

Mort 31:01

Well, right, they're correct. And it was.

Jeffrey 31:05

Well, so one of the questions I have, and this is like way too far in the weeds, may even not make the final podcast, but, you know, the list of options about withdrawal of nuclear weapons is, And the first two options are kind of not real. And the last two options are kind of not real. But sandwiched in the middle is, it has always seemed to me that the middle option, which gets picked, is actually two different options, one of which is infeasible, but that the Joint Chiefs might have latched onto, which is you can take them out, but only if the Japanese promise to let us put them back in.

Mort 31:44

Did you? Well, that's what they did do.

Jeffrey 31:48

Well, sort of, yes. Well, I do want to talk about the secret agreement, but it's written more strongly than that. So I've always thought that if I were trying to stop the removal of the weapons, and I wanted to let the best be the enemy of the good, I would have insisted on a proper document in writing that provided for the return of the weapons, as opposed to the secret agreement, which they actually got.

So I guess, you actually were thinking of that as a... Real option with variants as opposed to taking a very dangerous option and burying it inside a more safe container?

Mort 32:25

I always thought of it as if we ask, you will say yes, but we will not ask unless there's an emergency. An emergency will be so grave that of course you will say yes, but at the same time being absolutely confident, as confident as I've ever been in anything in my life, that we would never ask. Because when I had this conversation with the military, I would say, well, why can't we take the weapons down?

And they would say, because we may need them. And I'd say, well, give me a scenario in which you would need them. And they would say, we can't give you a scenario in which you'd need them. But we've learned over time that unexpected things happen. And something may happen that we haven't thought about, which requires us to put the weapons back.

And my position was, okay, then we'll get an agreement. If that extraordinary thing occurs, they will say yes. Knowing that it would never, I mean, think about it. If you sat and had your students sit for a week and say, think of a scenario in which it would be plausible to say it would be useful, let alone essential, that we bring nuclear weapons back to Okinawa before we drop them someplace else.

Jeffrey 33:35

There is no such thing.

Mort 33:36

So I was always confident that And I told the Japanese, in fact, the document in which I told, right after the secret agreement, I told the acting ambassador that the Japanese had just released, creating another kerfuffle in Japan about this issue. So I did not see it as too different. I always saw it, it had to be that if we ask, you'll say yes.

Partly because we had to promise not to agree, ask, unless it was, you know, Western civilization was at stake. And if Western civilization was at stake, of course you would say yes. So it was always, in my view, in that way. But one of the advantages of this NSC system was that people weren't drafting a memo to the president explaining their position or even taking a position.

They were drafting a memo to the president That the interagency process would agree is a fair statement of what the options were. And one of the reasons to do that was to keep people in the bureaucracy from saying, well, this is my memo. I'll write it anyway I want to.

Jeffrey 34:48

Again, for listeners who are signposting, we're now in the Nixon administration, and it's clear the island's going back, but the Japanese are insisting it come back with no nuclear weapons. And so the solution that you all hit on is this careful agreement, which I think probably would have worked as an implicit agreement. Where, look, we're going to have to put them back in in a crisis, but we would only ask in an instance that would be so severe.

But what I find really interesting is the Nixon administration decides to do this with a secret agreement to the point where Wakizumi is calling Kissinger using a fake name, Mr. Yoshida. They don't refer to the president or the prime minister. They refer to their friends. And it kind of culminates in this discussion, at least for me, the funniest thing in the telecom is when they're trying to figure out since Santo doesn't speak English and Nixon doesn't speak Japanese, and you can't very well bring in the translators for the secret agreement, you know, how are they going to work all this out?

And they come up with this incredibly convoluted agreement, right, where Nixon says at the end of signing the formal agreement, you know, I have some beautiful art in my study. Would you like to come look at it? And then, you know, everything is queued up. So I wondered if you could talk about that process and like, what was the thinking behind a secret agreement, which, I mean, in some sense doesn't exist, right?

Because it, you know, Sato just puts it in his desk drawer and no one ever sees it.

Mort 36:17

Right. And of course, when it became public, the foreign ministry denied it. And Kissinger, we now know from these telecoms, Told the Pentagon that he had taken care of their concern, but didn't say how. And so nobody in the US government knew about this. But strangely enough, there was some precedence for this in US-Japanese relations. And let me just mention two.

One was when we signed the peace treaty, one of the hard issues was American ships, which of course then had nuclear weapons on board. It was ended by the Bush administration. And we refused to say whether they had nuclear weapons on board. So we needed to keep bringing nuclear weapons in and out of Japan on American ships without confirming or denying that they were on them, with the Japanese being able to say that as far as they know, there are no nuclear weapons on the ship.

And the way we did that is we had a secret agreement with the Japanese. This one negotiated by the Foreign Ministry with the State Department, which said that introduction, the agreement was that we would not introduce nuclear weapons into Japan. And the secret agreement was that introduction meant doing something that we were not doing on the day that sovereignty returned to Japan.

So because the ships were calling with nuclear weapons on board, they would continue to call with nuclear weapons on board. And that would not be introduction of nuclear weapons. And that secret agreement lasted for a very long time. Nobody in the US government knew anything about it except the military, which understood that they could do it. When it became an issue in advance of Okinawa, the foreign ministry people asked me, what was the understanding that we had?

And then when it became public, when the socialist government was in, the democratic left government was in power in Japan for a brief period, again, I had a secret meeting with the foreign ministry guys doing the study to explain to them what the secret agreement was. So there was this tradition of that nuclear secret agreement. And then the actual language on reversion in the Johnson administration, in which they agreed to do it soon.

And then Sato said he had hoped that would be before the end of the decade. And Johnson expressed an understanding of it. It's very convoluted. That was negotiated by Wakazumi. And so the text wasn't secret, but the process of negotiation was secret. I was not involved in that. I left the government. Wakazumi calls me up and says, I'm coming to Washington.

Can you get me an appointment with Nixon? And he puts that transcript of that phone call is in again in his memoir. And I basically write a memo to Nixon explaining that Wakai Zumi came before, that I was sure he had Sato's confidence. And then I leave the NSC. So I see Wakai Zumi from time to time because he sees me every time he comes back.

But he never tells me he's actually talking to Nixon or Kissinger, which I assumed he was. But I knew nothing about it until the memoirs came out, the actual details of how they did that. But I think they had to do a secret agreement because Sato knew if it got out in Japan that he had agreed to this, it would be almost as bad as leaving the nuclear weapons.

And so they had to keep it secret as they had kept secret the prior agreement on the ships coming into port. But here, since Nixon insisted upon doing it with him, it was natural. To keep it as a secret agreement between the two of them. And Nixon was perfectly happy to do that as well.

Jeffrey 40:21

And so my last question. So the thing that I've always loved about the end of this process is, in the end, Nixon is happy or willing to take the nuclear weapons out and complete reversion. But what he wants is a trade agreement. And so I think often my students are a little shocked when they see this because they imagine that for an issue as weighty as whether nuclear weapons will remain in Okinawa and whether the defense of the free world depends on this issue, turns on, frankly, rather dubious prospects for a trade deal in South Carolina.

Mort 41:06

Well, let me say two things in Nick's defense. First of all, As I say, Johnson did the same thing. He said, what is in it for me and what he wanted. At that point, it's hard for anybody to remember, but the Johnson administration was preoccupied with the balance of payments in the United States and the trade imbalances and wanted from Sato a commitment to deal with that.

When they haggled over the amount, although it was meaningless, it was buying U.S. Treasury bonds. And also wanted a commitment to U.S. trade into Southeast Asia. And so Nixon and Johnson both had this economic thing, but they both had something else, which I think is important, which was changing the nature of our ability to use the bases in Japan, the homeland of Japan, as well as Okinawa.

What we said to the Japanese was, if you want the bases back at homeland level, which means We can't conduct combat operations without your permission, we're going to have to change the meaning of homeland level and the meaning of asking. And it was the same as with the nuclear weapons and bringing them back. Up until then, it had been understood that where we had to ask Japanese permission, they would have to say no because of the domestic politics of Japan.

And when we said to them in the Johnson administration, then reaffirmed to Nixon, that's all going to be flipped now. When we ask you whether we can use your bases to defend Korea or defend South Vietnam or defend Taiwan, that means we need you to publicly support what we're doing and not to say you can't stop us because we can't control your use of the bases.

So we're giving you a veto, but the veto with it comes responsibility. And the understanding is, That rather than it being an automatic no, it's virtually an automatic yes. I mean, we're not asking you to give up your son, but we expect that we're only gonna go to war in Asia if Japan is with us and with us publicly and not hiding behind Or the Americans use our bases as they were doing in the Vietnam case.

And both presidents insisted upon that. Sato did a press club speech, which he laid that out. So the Japanese understood. And that was a big change. And it was a big change in the whole nature of the security relationship and was what we got for Okinawa reversion and taking the nuclear weapons out in addition to the economic stuff that the presidents want.

Jeffrey 43:43

Mort, it's been fantastic. I wish we could go on longer. So it's been incredible. And I selfishly am looking forward to reading the memoir and then talking to you about it. Do you have a title?

Mort 43:57

For the memoir?

Jeffrey 43:58

Yeah.

Mort 43:59

Yeah, the title of the memoir is If Only You Don't Want the Credit. It comes from a full sentence that says, there's no limit to what you can accomplish in Washington if only you don't want the credit.

Jeffrey 44:11

Well, that's fantastic. I think you're a giant and I give you a lot of credit. So thank you so much for doing this.

Mort 44:18

My pleasure.