‘America’s Cold Warrior’ Review: The Legacy of Paul Nitze
Though overshadowed by better-known statesmen of his era, Nitze was instrumental in shaping U.S. nuclear policy toward the Soviet Union.
By Richard Aldous July 12, 2024 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/americas-cold-warrior-review-the-legacy-of-paul-nitze-aa72120c?st=4zaue1u001sk841&reflink=article_email_share
On Jan. 17, 1950, a midlevel staffer at the State Department, in charge of its policy-planning team, wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson proposing a study on the implications of moving toward an era of thermonuclear war. Acheson approved the idea, and the study became NSC-68—a foundational text of the Cold War arguing for a major buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal. Its lead author, Paul Nitze—the staffer who had proposed the study—would go on to know as much about nuclear-weapons strategy as anyone in the world.
Yet despite his knowledge and his service to several presidents—from FDR to Ronald Reagan—Nitze (1907-2004) never enjoyed the public fame or esteem of contemporaries that George Kennan or Henry Kissinger did. That fact irked him, as did the idea that he was a mere “intellectual middleman” rather than an original thinker.
James Graham Wilson, a historian at the State Department, believes that Nitze had a point. In “America’s Cold Warrior”—a brilliant political biography, elegantly written, rich in archival material—Mr. Wilson sets out to remind us of Nitze’s critical role in a period of dangerous international rivalry. “No other American in the twentieth century contributed to high policy as much as he did for as long as he did,” Mr. Wilson writes.
Nitze’s essential creed throughout the Cold War was that the U.S. needed to achieve and maintain strategic superiority over the Soviet Union. Deterrence in peacetime, he thought, required the means to prevail in wartime. It was a principle that he advanced with a sharp tongue and a somewhat frosty demeanor.
As Mr. Wilson shows, Nitze’s worldview was rooted in an unexpectedly emotional perspective. As a child, he had been hiking in the Austrian Alps with his vacationing family when World War I began. Over time he came to believe that, even more than World War II, World War I had had a decisive impact “on the structure of civilization, the disillusionment and brutalization of man and his humanity,” as he would write. “The civilized world was never again the same.” The fear that civilization and order might collapse at any moment never left him.
Like his contemporary Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Nitze was the son of a distinguished academic. (William Nitze was a professor of Romance languages at the University of Chicago.) And, like Schlesinger, Nitze yearned to be taken seriously both as an intellectual and as a man of action. His model for the active life was the Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon, who gave him his first proper job just weeks before the stock market crash of 1929.
Nitze was awestruck by Dillon, whose “keen, analytical mind,” he would recall, “combined with a radical and brutal decisiveness in taking the course of action from his analysts.” Objective analysis followed by decisive action: This aspect of Dillon’s character Nitze sought to emulate throughout his career.
In 1940 Nitze got a telegram from James Forrestal, another Dillon protégé, newly installed by FDR as undersecretary of the Navy. It read: “Be in Washington Monday morning.” And so he was. Nitze would stay in Washington for the next 60 years.
Mr. Wilson tells Nitze’s story with an impressive command of detail and sources, no mean feat given the span of Nitze’s career. After coordinating the writing of NSC-68, Nitze drafted the pivotal Gaither Report (1957), which warned of the catastrophic consequences of a Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. In the 1960s he served in the Kennedy administration, including as a “hawk” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then in the Johnson administration during the worst days of the Vietnam War.
Nitze advised a distrustful Nixon on nuclear-arms talks in the early 1970s and then in 1976 participated in the controversial “Team B” National Intelligence Estimate that blasted the CIA for underestimating Soviet capability. He also devised the “Nitze scenario,” a description of what might happen in the event of a Soviet first strike. In Mr. Wilson’s summary: “The Soviets might preemptively take out US land-based nuclear forces while leaving US cities intact.” The purpose was to underline the importance of the U.S. having the capability not only to survive a nuclear strike but also to retaliate effectively.
After exile under Jimmy Carter, Nitze returned to government service, with an emphasis on arms control. Notably, he took a “walk in the woods’’ with his Soviet counterpart at arms-control talks in Geneva in 1982, during the Reagan administration. This famous episode in diplomacy aimed to lay the groundwork for a grand bargain, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, on intermediate-range nuclear forces, and indeed Nitze was instrumental in drafting the final form of the INF treaty that was signed by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev five years later. Nitze also set the framework for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that would be signed by George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev in 1991.
The painstaking work of these later years, Mr. Wilson argues, was Nitze’s “most significant contribution to US peace and security.” James Baker, the new secretary of state in 1989, didn’t exactly reward all this effort, however. He wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessors, Mr. Wilson says, and thus had no place for Nitze—worse, he offered to make him “Ambassador at Large Emeritus for Arms Control Matters.” Still, Nitze remained active in public life, becoming in his final years an éminence grise to the administration of George W. Bush. Indeed, Mr. Bush’s advisers consciously looked to NSC-68—especially its claim that the strength of a country comes from the character of its society and the values on which it is built—for guidance in the wake of 9/11.
All told, Nitze’s career was exemplary, yet he fell short by his own standards. In the realms of diplomacy and statecraft, he never held the highest office, as Kissinger had; nor did he leave an indelible mark through his writing, as Kennan did with the Long Telegram and the “X” article proposing America’s containment policy. “Tension Between Opposites” (1993), the book Nitze had hoped would achieve his lifelong ambition to articulate a unifying theory of international politics, “has not found a place in the political science canon,” Mr. Wilson deadpans.
Those at the very top clearly valued Nitze’s expertise and the assuredness with which he gave advice. But they often did so without a full measure of confidence. For someone like Kissinger, Nitze lacked scholarly prestige or, alternatively, political clout. There was also a sense that Nitze was a little too sure of himself and therefore lacked subtlety. We know from the transcripts of White House tapes that, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy was exasperated by Nitze’s insistence on observing standard protocols, which might have given local commanders the authority to launch missiles and thus risk thermonuclear war. He could not see that the usual rules of the game didn’t apply in such circumstances.
But such reservations miss the point, Mr. Wilson believes. Aside from his achievements in Cold War policymaking, Nitze did more than anyone to craft a new type of career—that of the national-security professional. “The Cold War demanded generalists with competence in multiple areas—economics, military strategy, intelligence, diplomacy—and the know-how to achieve results, whether in the private sector, academia, or government bureaucracies,” Mr. Wilson writes. “Nitze met that demand.”
Nitze was the embodiment of the nonpartisan expert who knew something about everything. Above all, says Mr. Wilson, he knew “how to get things done.” Nitze believed that the skills he possessed were teachable, which is why he established, with Christian Herter (secretary of state in 1959-61), the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Mr. Wilson brings Nitze’s story alive in clear and arresting prose. The nuances and complexities of strategic policymaking might have made for dreary stuff, but not here. We see the human emotions involved alongside the hardheaded analysis. When, for example, the wily Acheson watches Defense Secretary Louis A. Johnson storm out of a meeting rather than let Nitze present NSC-68, we feel the drama of the moment. Johnson was an advocate of limiting the Pentagon’s budget and keeping costs down. He was right to recognize the paper as a turning point in American foreign policy—effectively the militarization of the Cold War and an explicit commitment to containing the Soviet Union.
NSC-68 is suffused with the language of the Founders, setting out a vision of the Cold War that underlined “the integrity and the vitality of our free society,” founded on “the dignity and worth of the individual.” Those phrases, from a passage drafted by Nitze, express the philosophical and moral foundation of his thinking. But he was also a pragmatist. He willingly served both Republican and Democrats. Sometimes he admired the political figures he was advising, sometimes he despised them, but he never turned his back on proximity to power.
Such an approach to government service does raise an intriguing hypothetical for national-security professionals today: Were he alive now, and in the event of Donald Trump winning the election in November, would Paul Nitze have worked for him? The answer surely has to be yes. Nitze always sought the chance to push for policies he believed in, knowing that the closer he got to the president, the more likely his ideas were to prevail. Such an answer will bother a lot of his successors and admirers in Washington today. But that, as the saying goes, is their problem, not Paul Nitze’s.
Mr. Aldous, a professor of history at Bard, is the author of biographies of Douglas Dillon and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.