President Richard M. Nixon declared in his inaugural address on January 20, 1969, that “after a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiations” with the Soviet Union. Privately, he told the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, that in the United States “whenever elections approached, political leaders were tempted to take a belligerent anti-Communist line,” but that Nixon himself “did not consider such an approach to be in the interests of world peace or of Soviet–American relations.”

These conciliatory words toward America’s Cold War rival seemed surprising at the time, since Nixon had played important parts in Congress from1947 to 1952 and as vice president from 1953 to 1961 in shaping confrontational American policies toward the Soviet Union and Communism. As president, Nixon put aside his earlier criticism of the Communist system, choosing to focus instead on expanding areas of common interest between the Cold War rivals in order to promote what he characterized as a “structure of peace.” He developed personal relationships with Soviet leaders, and the United States and the Soviet Union reached a series of agreements on arms control, commercial relations, and political cooperation that fostered a fragile détente between them.