“5. No Exile” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 5 No Exile
Paul Nitze remained director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff until June 1953—nearly half a year into the Dwight Eisenhower administration. He then left to set up shop at SAIS, which he had cofounded in 1943 with his wife’s cousin, Christian Herter. Under Nitze’s guidance, SAIS added an early example of a policy think tank and expanded its mission to train aspiring national security practitioners.
At SAIS, Nitze constructed a de facto policy planning staff in exile comprising former State Department officials. Retaining his connection to former secretary of state Dean Acheson—and with an eye on the 1956 and 1960 presidential elections—he kept his security clearances, worked on classified projects for the government, and seldom found himself more than one degree away from national security decisions made at the highest level. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called on Nitze throughout the Eisenhower years despite the disdain the two men held for each other.
Nitze also resumed his quest to formulate a unified theory of politics. He spoke and wrote about topics such as US grand strategy, specific foreign policy challenges, intelligence matters, and the efficacy of government institutions. The geopolitical implications of thermonuclear weapons consumed the bulk of his attention. Notably, he believed that his criticisms of Eisenhower’s nuclear policies eventually led to change. Paul Nitze showed during the period 1953–60 that a man of action could wield quite a few levers of influence without needing a government appointment.
Tension between Opposites
Shortly after he departed the State Department, Nitze traveled to Massachusetts to give the Commencement Address at the Groton School, from which his son Peter was set to graduate. Paul focused on “tension between opposites,” a leitmotif for the rest of his career (although he called it “tension of opposites” that day). Invoking the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Nitze spoke about how the bow and lyre created beautiful music out of physical tension. This principle applied to the work of atomic scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr. As Nitze put it, the behavior of light could only be understood by perceiving it in “two opposite concepts—that of the wave and that of the particle.” He identified a tension of opposites in the broader world of 1953: “individual versus society, change versus continuing order, force versus consent, the East versus the West, power versus responsibility.” Graduates ought to remember the bow and lyre and not ignore the one for the other—they should strive “for a harmony in the tension between the opposites.”1
Nitze proceeded to give a sort of accolade to himself. “In the field of foreign affairs, for instance, it is not those who have taken the specialized courses in international affairs who make the real contribution,” he opined. “[I]t is those who combine a truly humanistic background with a sense for relevant facts and an intense care for the significant details who are invaluable.” Follow in his footsteps, he was saying: approach problems head-on, seek ever-wider portfolios, and risk failure. In order “to carry responsibility in important matters, it is essential to have gained experience through trial and error in handling responsibility in smaller matters.” Not until one overcame failure was it possible to develop “the stamina and courage to become a participant and molder of history—not merely an object of history.” These were lofty expectations for sixteen-year-old Peter, whose father was implicitly chiding his own father and the rest of the scholars at the University of Chicago who failed to turn thought into action.
Nitze concluded by stressing the importance of preserving US strength. Before World War II, a rough balance of power had existed outside the Western hemisphere. The destruction of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and the rise of Soviet power created a bipolar era. Sustaining US power was the minimum requirement for opposing Soviet designs because no alliance could stand up to the Kremlin without a strong United States. The global engagement was a responsibility, not a choice. “We can no longer choose when to throw in our influence,” Nitze told the assembly of teenagers. “Our influence is continually necessary.”
To his young audience, he had to admit: the future was as precarious as ever. The combination of the “ruthless and implacable hostility of the U.S.S.R.” and the range and power of nuclear weapons meant it was clear: “We now find ourselves living in a situation in which most of the other great powers of history continually lived.” He defended the actions of the Truman administration while not omitting a certain sense of satisfaction with his own tenure of office. “Future historians may well judge that the United States moved toward a preliminary adjustment to this new situation with remarkable speed and adaptability, and that it made this preliminary adjustment in a manner consistent with its basic principles.”2
Nitze intended in his peroration to invite the graduating class to seize the “opportunity to participate in the growth of the human spirit.” He pointed to himself as the model. This was hardly outlandish, given that his elite background and education at Hotchkiss and Harvard had opened up many opportunities and he had tried to make the most of them. This advice was aimed at those Groton classmates, including Peter, who were headed for Harvard—and such places.
Nitze spent the summer of 1953 with his family at their farm in Maryland. As he had previously discovered, the outdoors restored his physical and mental energies. He entered a horse race and briefly considered running for the House of Representatives (though it turned out that it was his wife, the daughter of a former representative, Ruth Baker Pratt, on whom Democratic Party leaders had their eye).
SAIS
Following this summer respite—his first since before World War II—Nitze devoted himself to the one institution to which he would remain forever loyal: SAIS. Born out of a conversation between Nitze and Herter in the summer of 1943, SAIS was supposed to be “an institution in Washington that would be outside the government but close enough to it to exploit the knowledge and wisdom of those in it, with ties to business, labor, and the media, and with an academic core to give it continuity and depth.”3 All of the “real-world experience” that Nitze saw as lacking in his education he intended to make up for in SAIS. The most prestigious comparable school of that time was the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston. Nitze and Herter scored a coup in poaching the founding dean of Fletcher School, Halford Hoskins, to come to Washington to be the first director of this new institution.
When Nitze and Herter failed to attract a university affiliation for SAIS, they set up the Foreign Service Educational Foundation to oversee the school’s curriculum and finances. Its charter included the mission of furthering “the education and training of persons in the fields of government, business, international economic relations, international law, and such related fields as may fit them for better service in the foreign interest of this country at home or abroad.”4 Service did not necessarily mean formal government employment. Instead, Herter and Nitze hoped that corporations would send employees to the school to equip them better to conduct business abroad (and, in so doing, promote US values of democratic principles and entrepreneurialism). Finding this to be a profitable investment, they hoped, firms would then underwrite the school’s long-term financial stability.5 While that aspiration fell short—it was more advantageous for corporations to hire fresh SAIS graduates than to give up their best employees for a year or two—SAIS stayed afloat with the implementation of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (better known as the GI Bill), which supported the tuition of returning veterans. Most students during these early years went on to work for the State Department, the CIA, and multinational oil companies.6 And Nitze saw each career as a form of foreign service.
SAIS remained afloat but needed to be financially self-sustaining. Still lacking an endowment, the Foreign Service Educational Foundation took up an offer from the Carnegie Foundation to accept $60,000 on the condition that SAIS affiliate itself with an established academic institution. Based in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University already had an international relations school, the Page School; yet that school’s endowment had suffered during the stock market crash of 1929. Throughout the latter half of the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Page School had been under the direction of Owen Lattimore, the Asia specialist whom Senator Joseph McCarthy pilloried for his alleged role in the “loss of China” to the communists in 1949. SAIS prevailed. In 1950, the Foreign Service Educational Foundation approved its integration with Johns Hopkins. SAIS technically remained a separate entity from the university (an hour away by train), but the president of Johns Hopkins would serve on the board overseeing the school.7
In the fall of 1953, Nitze took over as the Foreign Service Educational Foundation president. In addition to teaching a course, “Concepts of Foreign Policy,” he became chairman of the SAIS Advisory Committee in 1954. With Herter ensconced in the governor’s mansion in Boston, SAIS was now Nitze’s to guide. (They would switch places again in 1960, when Herter, having become secretary of state following the death of John Foster Dulles in 1959, returned to SAIS, and Nitze joined the Kennedy administration.)
In early attempts to raise funds, Nitze insisted that he was not trying to create a “Policy Planning Staff in exile.” But—in actuality—he was. Early faculty included his close friend Charles Burton Marshall, who had served on Nitze’s Policy Planning Staff and would later become the school’s first “Paul Nitze Professor.” Against the advice of Marshall, who figured that overt partisanship would diminish Nitze’s—and, perhaps, Marshall’s—“usefulness to policy” while the Republicans were in office, Nitze stayed closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Since it was clear that Eisenhower and Dulles would never bring him on full time, his best bet was to position himself for office in a future Democratic administration.8 In 1954, Nitze joined former secretary of the air force Thomas Finletter in a foreign policy discussion group in New York City. Finletter held considerable clout in Democratic circles and had political aspirations of his own (he would attempt a run for the Senate in 1958). In New York, Nitze also attended luncheons at the Council on Foreign Relations, which was becoming a nexus between business, government, and academic elites.
Opposing “Massive Retaliation”
On January 12, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles unveiled the Eisenhower administration’s “New Look” defense policy at one such luncheon. He could not resist castigating the Truman administration for the foreign policy messes he and the president had inherited. To the threat of communist penetration anywhere in the world, Dulles said the United States would respond to Soviet aggression “at a time and place of its choosing” using all weapons at its disposal. This prospect would soon become known as “massive retaliation.”9
Sitting at a table with former colleagues from the Truman administration, Nitze was flabbergasted. He wrote up his objections in a private memo he circulated to friends—including the once and future Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, who drew from its points in his own subsequent public criticism. “It is interesting but probably irrelevant that the decision to withdraw our troops from Korea was made on the basis of a recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff transmitted over the signature of General Eisenhower,” Nitze wrote, referring to Truman’s pullback of forces that domestic critics alleged had “invited” North Korean aggression in June 1950. In other words, Eisenhower had advised Truman to do the very thing Dulles now criticized as having invited aggression. Moreover, Nitze believed that massive retaliation took the wrong lessons from the outbreak of the Korean War. The United States had held a practical monopoly in deliverable atomic bombs at the start of the war. That had not stopped Stalin from giving the green light to Kim Il-sung to attack South Korea. A blanket threat of nuclear attack defied credulity and diverted resources and attention from a conventional deterrent. “If we are to attain victory, or peace with justice and without defeat,” Nitze wrote in his critique of Dulles’s speech, “we must attain it with non-atomic means while deterring an atomic war.”10
Nitze was convinced that it was foolhardy to set an arbitrary ceiling on defense spending. Focusing on “atomic deterrents to general war cannot be expected to give us the flexibility required for success in achieving peace with justice against the rising power of the Kremlin and its satellites.” Nitze warned of growing Russian and Chinese capabilities, pointing to ongoing trends and citing the coming years 1958 and 1960 as especially dangerous in the absence of drastic and timely action on the part of the Eisenhower administration. He urged “no exaggerated view” but rather the “coldest, soberest view that our experts are able to give us.” No doubt Nitze meant experts such as himself.
In his January 1954 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Dulles charged the Truman administration with being at the mercy of Soviet initiatives. On that occasion and elsewhere, Dulles described the problem with containment as being fundamentally reactive, not proactive. Feeling otherwise, Nitze thought the problem was not with US containment policies but instead that the United States was devoting insufficient resources to tackling the problem that the Soviets posed to the free world. “Clearly it would be desirable to have[,] together with our allies, such a preponderance of power, military, political, and economic, that it is the Soviets who would primarily be engaged in adjusting their policy to ours.” Unfortunately, that required far more money than what either the Eisenhower administration or the Truman administration was prepared to spend.11
In justifying massive retaliation, Dulles quoted Lenin’s pursuit of the “practicable bankruptcy” of the United States—a line that Eisenhower himself repeated to warn against the nation’s spending itself into oblivion. Nitze considered all this to be nonsense. Americans were “living better than any people on earth have ever lived,” in an economy with significant agricultural surpluses and steel plants at 75 percent of capacity.12 They could afford more in taxes. By Dulles’s logic, “one cannot afford an adequate police force to deal individually with criminals, [and so] it is good enough to have the capability of burning the entire town down.”13 From Nitze’s perspective, it was fundamentally dishonest to promise the American people that nuclear weapons would reduce the financial burden of defense also deterring Soviet and potentially Chinese aggression.
Associating with the Democratic Party
While he initially distributed his critique privately, the public debate over massive retaliation proved a boon for Nitze’s career. Criticizing it put his name on the minds of future Democratic candidates. Not only that, he came at it from the perspective of toughness—precisely what the party needed to counter Republicans’ charges of softness on communism and defense of traitors such as Alger Hiss. Nitze claimed that Dulles’s flawed logic made the United States weak and harmed US relations with adversaries and allies alike—wording intended to help Democrats on the stump. “Whether we can destroy the Russians a little more thoroughly than the Russians can destroy us, while everyone else is getting destroyed in the process, is of little interest to most of the peoples of the world.” “Can one really believe that a policy of political, economic, and military withdrawal, announced with a tone of condescension to our allies, friends and potential friends can give a platform for success?”14
In April 1954, Nitze gave a speech in Boulder, Colorado, titled: “History and Our Democratic Tradition in the Formulation of United States Foreign Policy.” Beating a path through the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Niccolo Machiavelli, and recent headlines, Nitze enumerated the nation’s challenges in the 1950s. “The risks with which we are threatened are diverse and interrelated,” he averred. “One risk is general, all-out war initiated by the U.S.S.R. either by direct attack on us or on one or more of our principal allies. Another risk is localized communist military aggression. Another is the loss of arms or positions important to the West through internal weakness, intimidation, or subversion. Another is the risk of a general weakening and splitting up of the cohesiveness, will, and power of coordinated action of the free world coalition. And finally there is the domestic risk of loss of fortitude, restraint, and faith in our own institutions.” However, the main danger was turning away from “the responsibilities which have fallen to us with respect to the free world coalition.”15
“It would seem to me that we can do so only if we are prepared gradually to withdraw under pressure to this hemisphere accepting the prospect of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and possibly Africa, being gradually added to the enemy sphere,” Nitze continued, recapitulating the strategic rationale for Franklin Roosevelt’s actions in 1940–41 and Harry Truman’s in 1946–47. “Then our survival, even as a secondary power, would become contingent on whether or not the Kremlin, unopposed by any power comparable to their own, could successfully coerce and organize the rest of the world.” “Cut off from the rest of mankind, subjected to mounting external pressures and humiliations, the time would not be long before domestic faction and dissension destroyed such of our internal freedoms as still remained. We would then have lost that external climate in which our democratic experiment can survive and prosper.”16
Renouncing US leadership abroad was tantamount to surrender. That was not actually what the Eisenhower administration was doing, but Nitze was in full partisan mode. “The other course, the course of responsible leadership of the free world coalition, is not easy.” “It requires that we take no narrow view. It means, above all else, that we must regard the vital interests of those peoples and nations who are members of the coalition as being associated with our own most basic interests. The purposes and policies we pursue must be broad enough to embrace the essential interest of the whole group. The essence of leadership is the successful resolution of problems and the successful attainment of objectives important to those whom one is called upon to lead.”17
He felt there was no need for a fundamental reconceptualization of US traditions, to which the Truman administration had subscribed in its program of aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, Point Four, networks of alliances, revitalization of the military, the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb, and repulsion of communist aggression in Korea. “In fact it is our belief in truth, in the dignity of the common man, in the consent of the governed, in the independence of nations, in a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, which is the core of our psychological strength and the force which, if backed by adequate material strength, can attract to our leadership nations and peoples all over the world.”18 Such was the essence of NSC-68, the drafting of which Nitze led in 1950—even though that paper remained classified for another two decades.
Uneasy Relationship with Academia
Back in Washington, Nitze developed a “Framework of Theory Useful to the Practice of Politics,” which he wrote out in the style of the Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza in preparation for the seminar he was teaching at SAIS. Despite the encouragement of his SAIS colleague, the acclaimed international relations scholar Arnold Wolfers, he did not turn the framework into a book. While he could lead a large writing project, as he had demonstrated both with the Summary Report (Pacific Theater) and NSC-68, he did not possess the same facility for words as George Kennan or academics closely aligned with the Democratic Party such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He was also never comfortable with a discipline like social science; he preferred hands-on policy work.
Emblematic of Nitze’s ambivalence toward academia was the fate of his attempt to hire Hans Morgenthau, the author of Politics among Nations, who was probably the leading scholar of international relations at the time. Morgenthau came from the University of Chicago to SAIS in 1954, and Nitze must have taken some satisfaction in luring a leading scholar from that particular institution. However, Morgenthau’s basic views about the levers of power were incompatible with those of Nitze. “I became thoroughly disillusioned with Hans Morgenthau as being really a rigorous student of the subject,” Nitze later recounted. “He had this simplistic idea that the only consideration was the maximization of power on behalf of the State and that’s what drove everybody who dealt with foreign policy and this clearly wasn’t so. It bore no relationship to the way in which policy was made in the U.S. Government.”19 Realism, in theory, was not the same as realism in practice. Academic models did not adequately account for the frenetic pace by which human beings made decisions based on imperfect information. Morgenthau returned to Chicago.
Lacking a sense of community with leading academics, Nitze took heart in the response of his students. At the end of his one of his seminars, he later recalled with great pride, a student approached him to say that he had not taught them anything new—it was all “just plain common sense.” That, to Nitze, was the highest compliment a teacher could receive.20
The Cold War in Theory and Practice
Meanwhile, in policy debates, Nitze continued to inveigh against the New Look. In a July 1, 1954, letter to the influential columnist Joseph Alsop, he inserted himself into an exchange between Alsop and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on the topic of whether to launch a preventive war against the communist world—something that Alsop had proposed following Eisenhower’s disinclination to stave off French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, that spring. As someone who had grappled with such topics—especially during the Korean War—Nitze professed to know more than either the journalist or the historian.
Whether or not Eisenhower’s inaction in Vietnam could genuinely be “Munich at all costs,” as Alsop called it, Nitze wrote that neither the president nor members of the NSC—nor, above all, the American people—supported launching a preventive war that would inevitably lead to the use of nuclear weapons. It was unfair of pundits to argue for something outside the realm of the possible just to have it on record for later on. “It may give you some sense of personal satisfaction later when things go badly to be able to say, if only they had done what I suggested,” as Nitze put it, “but that isn’t going to help the country one iota.” Absent here was any self-reflection on Nitze’s part: Was he doing the same thing by claiming that 1958 would mark a deterioration of the United States–Soviet nuclear balance unless Eisenhower heeded his warnings?
Concerning policy makers and the bomb, the gap between theory and practice clearly animated Nitze. Throughout the 1950s, researchers at the RAND Corporation and elsewhere came up with elaborate models that contributed to the emerging field of security studies.21 These focused on “thinking about the unthinkable” use of nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with the Soviet Union or China. Nitze regarded his calculations and his beloved logic chains as necessary and sufficient to figure out the policies that would avoid nuclear war.
Setting aside the morality and the lack of domestic support for preventive war against the Soviet Union, Nitze contended that the complex strategic calculus of such a war was bleak. The highest amount of damage the United States could anticipate in a first strike would be 50–75 percent of Soviet cities—though these numbers would be likely lower because Soviet citizens would be evacuated before a nuclear exchange—and it could not expect to take out Soviet bombers. The resulting Soviet counterattack would consist of at least 150 atomic weapons reaching targets within the United States. Even taking out 50 percent of incoming Soviet bombers would still lay waste to “a considerable percentage of U.S. centers of population and industry.” Nitze asked: Was this scenario—the likely result of preventive war—a better outcome than the present state of affairs? He answered himself: “I can hardly believe that morale would be high in the United States if such an event occurred as a result of policy decision most Americans were wholly against, about which they weren’t consulted and, in preparation for which, wholly inadequate measures had been taken.”22
Implicit in Nitze’s closing remarks to Alsop was a question that no president seemed willing to address: What would US and allied “victory” in a general war entail? For instance, would it be a Pax Americana, meaning a peace imposed by the United State upon the rest of the world? In his response to Alsop and Schlesinger, Nitze considered this prospect and cited his inability to obtain final approval of NSC-79, the unfinished “war aims” paper (described in chapter 4) that identified Pax Americana, world government, and balance of power as the three options for a new order following a global war between the United States and Soviet Union. Acheson had declared each potential outcome to be contrary to the fundamental values of the country. That determination emboldened Nitze’s conviction that the United States needed sufficient strength to place severe constraints on the Kremlin’s appetite for risk-taking. The overriding objective of US strength was to deter war, not initiate it.
RAND scholars such as Herman Kahn dwelled on updating traditional theories of war to fit the nuclear age. Nitze was more practically minded. In his letter to Alsop and Schlesinger, he touched on the geopolitical consequences, based on his wartime experience dealing with allies and the attempt to rebuild Europe from the ashes of World War II. What kind of world would emerge after World War III? It would have to be one that lived up to US values, as demonstrated by how Washington nurtured political and economic coalitions after World War II rather than dictating its will to war-weary people. Pax Americana was decidedly different from the approach that the Truman administration took to rebuilding Europe and Asia after 1945: Nitze was convinced—the United States did not count as an empire. “I doubt whether American democracy as we have known it could survive the test” of Pax Americana, he went on to say. “Democracy at home and imperium abroad have rarely mixed well for long.”23
Nitze yearned for decisive leadership from the White House—as he rather than Alsop envisioned it. “I do not believe leadership consists in advocating a course impracticable by any constitutional standards, dubious as to its outcome if it were practicable, and offensive to all morality, just because it appears neat, bold, and decisive one way or another and all other courses are uncertain, difficult, expensive, and complex.” Instead, Nitze wanted Eisenhower and Dulles to increase defense spending and level with the American people that massive retaliation would cost far more money over the long run and make war more likely. “As you know,” Nitze wrote Alsop, “I generally felt that the last administration [that of Truman] was doing too little too late … The trouble is this administration [that of Eisenhower] is doing less and less beyond issuing empty and misleading statements.”24
Government Contractor
Nitze’s public and private criticisms drew the ire of Secretary of State Dulles, who complained to Vice President Richard Nixon, at a January 13, 1955, meeting of the NSC, about a memorandum to members of Congress criticizing the administration over its proposed mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. This document was written by a “somewhat nebulous group of former members of the State Department” that included Paul Nitze. Dulles thought this one more endeavor “plainly designed to obfuscate the issues and to throw monkey wrenches into the Administration’s plans.”25
There was nothing nebulous about Nitze’s connection to the Democratic Party during the Eisenhower era. He stuck with Adlai Stevenson and rallied to the support of Dean Acheson, who remained a bogeyman to the Republican Party but who was also well connected to power brokers in the nation’s capital. What might be said to be nebulous was Nitze’s connection to the executive branch of the US government over which Eisenhower presided. Dulles himself had been a consultant to the State Department during the Truman years, while also serving as the top foreign policy aide to the 1944 and 1948 presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. Similarly, from 1954 onward, Paul Nitze served as a consultant to the CIA under the direction of the secretary of state’s brother, Allen Dulles. An added layer to Nitze’s national security work was that he had set up the Foreign Policy Institute of SAIS to solicit work from the legislative branch.
By 1954, Paul Nitze was working for the US government, advising policy makers of the political party out of power, and castigating the administration in power. With the rise of Federally Funded Research Centers and the proliferation of privately funded think tanks that also accepted government contracts, this would become an increasingly common set of circumstances. However, that would be so a decade later.
In the case of RAND, founded in 1948 to assist the air force, there was not the same fluidity among government, business, and academic circles. Its most prominent figure, Bernard Brodie, remained an academic by profession. His research spoke directly to the concerns of the time, and he invented the discipline of strategic studies as an outgrowth of economics. While Nitze lacked the same level of intellectual depth, he possessed something essential that Brodie lacked: real-life experience in advocating for war plans in front of generals and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of questions such as whether to pursue the hydrogen bomb and whether or not to use atomic weapons against the enemy during a war. Brodie dazzled other experts who sprang up in the discipline of security studies within this relatively new field of political science. Nitze tended to respect those figures who demonstrated respect for him. After his tenure in the Truman administration, his attitude toward nuclear strategists recalled his reaction to John Maynard Keynes, who published his General Theory while Nitze was working on Wall Street: nothing about it added value to what experienced practitioners already knew.
Sometime after 1953, Nitze’s old friend Max Millikan, who had gone to MIT to lead the Center for International Studies, invited him to Cambridge for a conference considering how the United States should approach the Soviet Union following the death of Stalin. Participating along with Clyde Kluckhohn (Harvard anthropologist) and Richard Bissell (CIA), Nitze’s contribution was to stress the importance of obtaining overhead photography of the USSR as an essential long-term US capability. He took pride in that advice since years later, Bissell, who would become CIA deputy director of plans and then the first head of the National Reconnaissance Office, said that his arguments convinced him to sign off on the U-2 spy plane.26
In January 1955, Nitze accepted an invitation from Admiral Norvell Ward and Jerome Wiesner, head of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, to be a consultant for the highly sensitive Project Lamplight, which operated under the auspices of MIT. Its goal was to consider options for the continental air defense of the United States. Nitze tackled the problem of establishing a communications network to link early warning outposts to a central command. He also evaluated a proposal (later called “Texas Towers”) to set up a series of giant oil rigs hundreds of miles along the US coast on which radar devices could be placed. These would also pass on early warnings allowing US interceptors to take out incoming Soviet bombers in the event of an attack on the American homeland. On this last project, Nitze pondered how to integrate this ambitious and as-yet untested scientific project with foreign policy and any international legal concerns that were bound to emerge.27
Meeting with Wiesner on the MIT campus, Nitze learned about his efforts to harmonize communications from early warning systems in Canada with the newly proposed Pine Tree radar network. As always, Nitze embraced a quest to solve logistical problems. Given the cost of installing landlines to route communications to the radar outposts, Wiesner came up with the idea of bouncing signals off meteor showers using burst transmissions to deny the enemy the opportunity to intercept them. While the project did not finally amount to much, working on it kept Nitze up to speed on the most urgent and highly classified national security concerns. And it compounded his interest in bringing together offensive and defensive capabilities. This pursuit would animate much of his thinking about the evolution of the strategic arms competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Increasingly, that would focus upon on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
The Soviet Union Up Close
In the summer of 1955, the Nitzes traveled to Moscow, where they met with Ambassador Charles Bohlen and his family. Bohlen had just attended the Geneva summit between the “big four” leaders from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union (with Khrushchev also in attendance).28 Amidst the new “spirit of Geneva,” Nitze’s children chided him for his pessimistic view of their destination while marveling at the sites en route from the airport to central Moscow. That scenery failed to impress the elder Nitze. After the family had crossed the Moscow River, “the depressing reality of the city settled around us like a blanket of fog,” as he later described it. “Stretches of scarred earth greeted us where buildings had been stopped in mid-construction and abandoned years earlier.” The Nitzes eventually arrived at Spaso House, the residence of the US ambassador, which sat in the middle of a slum. Nearby, “A ruined church sagged at one of the squares and pavement was in dire need of repair.”29
Ambassador Bohlen invited Paul to attend a meeting of the Supreme Soviet. The two men sat together as Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin reported on their recent meeting with President Eisenhower in Geneva. From the diplomatic box, Nitze observed audience members nodding off as Khrushchev and others droned on for hours, and he became fixated on the word mir, which he heard repeatedly. Bohlen, who was considered the best Russian speaker in the foreign service, confirmed that mir had several meanings—but in this case probably meant victory through socialism. He assessed that the audience responded better to mir than to calls for the relaxation of tensions between the superpowers.30 Nitze’s takeaway was that “victory” received more applause than “détente.”
After a few days in Moscow, the Nitzes and Bohlens traveled to Leningrad, where the Nitzes visited Peterhof Palace (Peter the Great’s architectural attempt to rival Versailles) and wandered around the city. At the Astoria hotel, they were amused to learn that the authorities discouraged dancing. When it came time to depart, the Nitze family flew from Leningrad to Helsinki in a Douglas C-47 Dakota (a modification of the civilian Douglas DC-3 airplane) that the Soviets had received from the Americans as part of Lend-Lease during World War II. Nitze later recalled seeing from the air the starkness of one side of the border between the USSR and Finland and the other. “Everything was shambles on one side, and everything was green and beautifully cared for on the other side.” “There was a difference of day and night between looking at Finland from the air and look at the USSR from the air.”31 Even the Nitze children had changed their tune on the Soviet Union, rushing out of the plane when it arrived in Helsinki and exclaiming: “You can feel it, it’s free.”
The visit to the Soviet Union reinforced Nitze’s previously held assumptions. Unlike Bohlen and Kennan, who were deeply steeped in the Russian language and culture, Nitze held no affinity for either. After his thwarted attempt to visit the Soviet Union during his Europe trip after college (as described in chapter 1), he could now tell others he had seen the country up close and that it had lived down to his expectations. Moreover, in assessments of Soviet military capabilities and intentions, he now claimed firsthand expertise. Walking past visible pipes sticking up from the ground near subway stations, Nitze had inquired passers-by about them and was told they were ventilation tubes for the underground civil defense shelters. Some US analysts denied such shelters existed—Nitze would set them straight. In Leningrad, while in between the excursion to Peterhof, and not dancing at the Astoria, Nitze spotted several Chinese individuals who he concluded—though without any hard evidence—were apprenticing in the shipyards and other naval facilities. Such “firsthand” observations only bolstered Nitze’s previously held suspicions of close Sino-Soviet cooperation and his conviction that monolithic communism posed a threat to the free world.32
“It is quite a different thing to read and argue about a place and actually see it in the flesh,” Nitze reported to his friend Charles Burton Marshall in October 1955. “On balance I think I found it somewhat more humane and understandable than I had anticipated but even more worrisome and disturbing,” he said. “Basically, it is more of a dump than I had thought but the degree to which they can concentrate on any given objective is really impressive.”33
The primary Soviet objective was victory, Nitze heard the Supreme Soviet spell that out. Not that the Kremlin intended to wage a nuclear war. Instead, victory meant eroding US strategic and conventional superiority, which would cause US leaders to be deterred from protecting vital interests. “The situation is analogous to a game of chess,” as Nitze put it in a January 1956 Foreign Affairs article. “The atomic queens may never be brought into play; they may never actually take one of the opponent’s pieces. But the position of the atomic queens may still have a decisive bearing on which side can safely advance a limited-war bishop or even a cold-war pawn. The advance of a cold-war pawn may even disclose a check of the opponent’s king by a well-positioned atomic queen.”34
From June to September 1956, Nitze participated in Project Nobska, a summer study organized by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, which called on Nitze, physicist Edward Teller, and other leading physicists and military leaders to come up with ideas for upgrading US anti-submarine warfare. Participants started their deliberations by boarding the USS Nautilus, the first US nuclear-powered submarine—so named for the vessel in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Their subsequent discussions laid the foundations for developing the ballistic missile submarine and modernized torpedoes.
Once again, Nitze’s involvement was due to his forceful policy advocacy, enthusiasm for improving US technological capabilities, and possession of high-level security clearances—which he retained as a consultant to the CIA. As with the Texas Towers analysis, the expertise he brought to the table relied less on mastery of scientific or military matters than his ability to evaluate the implications of technology through the lens of US national security. “I was asked to translate all this [technology] into the strategic importance of this kind of warfare,” as he later wrote. In the ongoing competition between the navy and air force for being at the vanguard of the United States’ nuclear arsenal, participants in Project Nobska probably also presumed that Nitze would someday receive some high appointment in a future Democratic presidential administration.
Ike’s Reelection and the Establishment of the Center for Foreign Policy Research
Nitze and other Democrats would have to wait. On November 6, 1956, Eisenhower crushed Stevenson in an electoral landslide of 457 to 73. The president’s reelection did not fundamentally alter Nitze’s professional activities. In 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation, led by Nitze’s former State Department colleague (and future secretary of state) Dean Rusk, granted SAIS $300,000 to establish what became the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research (FPR). Launching such a think tank allowed Nitze to help shape policy debate during the Cold War. “What I tried to do [with FPR] was get a research adjunct to the school, which would deal with the longer-term aspects of current problems that the government, particularly the State Department, the defense establishment, and the Treasury Department, were dealing with.”35
The establishment of FPR allowed SAIS to attract and retain world-class faculty whose joint appointments would enable them to teach less and write more. Arnold Wolfers could now spend more time on his research, and the university brought on Robert Osgood, another acclaimed realist scholar, who focused on contemporary policy making (and would later serve on the Policy Planning Staff). While Nitze kept his work separate from intelligence, Congress, and other institutions around DC and New York, basic knowledge was fungible. There was nothing “top secret” about rigorous thinking.
Under the auspices of the FPR—and at the behest of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace—Nitze wrote a paper on the prospects of a UN police force. This he sent on to Assistant Secretary for International Organizations Francis Wilcox (who would become dean of SAIS in 1961).36 This paper recalled work he had overseen back in 1949–53 when he directed the Policy Planning Staff. Whether or not the Eisenhower administration chose to take up his proposals, Nitze was mirroring the internal think tank of the State Department—which itself reflected external think tanks—relying on acquired knowledge from sources inside and outside government. Unlike the Institute for Defense Analysis, which had been established the previous year to be semiautonomous from the Department of Defense, Nitze did not have to worry about someone above him “clearing” his proposals. Thus, by coauthoring papers with Wolfers or other colleagues, Nitze operated outside the restrictions of government bureaucracy.
Around the same time he set up FPR, Nitze joined Dean Acheson on the Democrats’ Advisory Committee on Foreign and Defense Policy. Acheson was a chair with Nitze, the vice chairman. Undeterred by Stevenson’s defeat, Nitze reaffirmed his connection to Democratic Party leaders. He lacked passion for a domestic agenda that included bolstering labor unions or advocating for civil rights. His focus remained on national security with an emphasis on external threats. His own politics stemmed from a mixture of personal ambition and realpolitik. The February 24, 1957, issue of Foreign Policy included an article by Nitze titled the “ ‘Impossible’ Job of Secretary of State.” In it, Nitze reveals how he himself might have approached the job.
Introduction to Henry Kissinger
Later in 1957, Nitze joined a Council on Foreign Relations study group to reexamine the impacts of nuclear weapons on foreign affairs. He contributed a pamphlet based on a speech he had previously given, “The Effect of New Weapons Systems on Our Alliances.” In this, he contended that nuclear weapons had done little to enhance the security of NATO countries in light of overwhelming Soviet conventional capabilities.37 The study director, thirty-four-year-old Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, synthesized the work of Nitze and others and then published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a book that to Kissinger’s surprise—and Nitze’s chagrin—became a national bestseller.
Nitze and Kissinger were different people. Nitze was not a flatterer. He did not come across as self-deprecating and witty as Kissinger could. Most importantly, Kissinger wrote faster than Nitze. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy exposed the fallacy of Eisenhower’s stated policy of massive retaliation in the way Nitze might have done following Dulles’s 1954 speech had he concentrated his efforts and steadied his aim. Rather than writing a private memorandum to Adlai Stevenson, or a letter to Joe Alsop and Arthur Schlesinger, Nitze might have attempted a Kissinger-type book. But his facility and mastery of the written word did not compare with Kissinger’s.
In his review of September 5, 1957, Nitze took Kissinger to task, focusing his criticism on sloppy mathematical calculations related to nuclear yields and other such esoteric matters. He did not write what he believed at the time and afterward: that Kissinger had taken the work of others and published it under his name. Through his writing Kissinger, not Nitze, became the most prominent critic of massive retaliation. Being overshadowed was not new to him. In his work on the Summary Report (Pacific Theater), Nitze felt he had summed up Stalin’s challenge to the United States in the postwar era, drawing on lessons learned from earlier challenges from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He was eclipsed by the more effective writer: George Kennan.
With a similar sense of irony mixed with tragedy, Kissinger could speak about the balance of power in the nineteenth century. Nitze, in contrast, liked to list numbers of nuclear weapons and joust, with neither irony nor tragedy, at nuclear scientists as well as tenured professors. He would explain how such numbers applied to international relations—a project the reading public found less interesting. Thus Kennan and Kissinger became iconic figures of US realism and, consequently, household names. Very few among the Kennan/Kissinger readership cared about the accuracy of nuclear yields.
In an early moment in what became a long-term (and mostly one-sided) rivalry, Kissinger threatened a lawsuit upon reading a draft of Nitze’s review of his book. Nitze was surprised by such a response. Kissinger had quickly established himself as an expert on the policy implications of nuclear weapons; by the time Nitze’s critical review finally came out, few people noticed. Nitze may have regarded Kissinger as a younger and more aggressive version of himself. Throughout his early career, Nitze had acted audaciously around more senior figures; but he always paid deference to those he believed commanded respect. Although Kissinger generally did likewise, he paid little attention to Nitze. After all, he lacked the academic credentials of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kissinger’s friend; and he wielded neither the political nor financial clout of Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger’s patron.
The Gaither Report
Nitze and Kissinger found agreement in their low regard for the Eisenhower administration’s attitude toward nuclear weapons and its lethargic (as they saw it) responses to imminent national security challenges. Sputnik I, on October 5, 1957, affirmed what they already believed. On that day, the Soviet Union launched into outer space what they called “a traveling companion” the beeping of which could be picked up by radios in households across the United States.
On November 3, Sputnik II delivered a dog named Laika on a one-way trip to the heavens.38 In the wake of these astounding Soviet achievements, President Eisenhower received a briefing on November 7 from a commission headed by Ford Foundation head Rowan Gaither. This commission, in which Nitze took part, had just published “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age,” also known as the Gaither Report.39
Conceived initially as a project to develop ideas meant to strengthen US defenses against a Soviet attack, the Gaither Report expanded into a more comprehensive critique of US preparedness. This was in good part the result of Nitze’s participation. “Our early warning radar network could not assure sufficient warning time to our bombers to get them into the air before being destroyed on the ground,” Nitze later recounted. “We calculated that ninety percent of our bomber force could be knocked out on the ground by a surprise Soviet bomber attack, let alone an attack by Soviet ICBMs.”40 As a result, the report “emphasized that maintaining an effective second strike force should be our priority. Deterrence … was not achieved by the force we had in being during peacetime. Still, by that portion of the force that was capable of surviving a Soviet first strike.”41 When the Gaither Committee met with President Eisenhower on November 7, the president expressed little enthusiasm.
On November 16, Nitze wrote Secretary Dulles a letter expressing his frustration about the Gaither briefing as well as a discussion the day before to which Dulles had summoned Nizte and others. “Finally, assuming that the immediate crisis is surmounted,” Nitze wrote Dulles, “I should ask you to consider, in the light of events of recent years, whether there is not some other prominent Republican disposed to exercise the responsibility of the office of Secretary of State in seeking a balance between our capabilities and our unavoidable commitments, equipped to form persuasive policies, and able to secure the confidence and understanding of our allies, whether by direct communication or communication through emissaries.”42 Dulles, asked to find a replacement for himself, took no action.
A few weeks later, Stewart Alsop and Chalmers Roberts wrote about the Gaither Report in the Washington Post. The article was written after Roberts had lunched with Nitze, leading one biographer to speculate that Nitze discussed the classified report’s details.43 Evidence neither supports nor rules that out. Nitze was careful to compartmentalize classified and unclassified information, yet he relied on his judgment to determine that distinction. Moreover, the report’s gist was consistent with what Nitze had been saying publicly and in his letter to Alsop and Schlesinger about his unsuccessful efforts to sustain increased military spending during the final years of the Truman administration. (Admittedly, in that letter, Nitze took it upon himself to describe details of a classified NSC study.)
Nitze remained plugged into strategic debates for the rest of Eisenhower’s second term. In December 1957, he was invited to join the Air Force Advisory Board. Given that both Eisenhower and Dulles regarded Nitze as something of a nuisance, it is unclear whether they realized that he was actually in the employ of their own administration. In a 1958 Senate Foreign Relations study, which he wrote with SAIS professor Arnold Wolfers, Nitze warned of a potential “missile gap” favoring the Soviet Union shortly. Nitze’s disdain for Eisenhower and Dulles notwithstanding, he saw his work as impacting their move away from New Look and the doctrine of massive retaliation. He also credited Albert Wohlstetter, who in 1958 published “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” a much more influential paper than anything Nitze produced about nuclear weapons. From the perspective of strategic nuclear policy, Nitze considered the second Eisenhower administration to have been better off than the first. He later wrote that the administration “got all the things going which cured the problems which [he] had foreseen in the Gaither Committee,” including “the gross vulnerability of our bomber force.”44
The lesson Nitze took was that his constant barrage of criticism had paid off. No longer did US bombers and tankers lie in close proximity so as to invite a surprise Soviet attack that would cripple US offensive forces. By the end of the second Eisenhower administration, the United States had restored funding for the B-52, placed the first Polaris submarine at sea, and deployed the first Atlas missiles. It had constructed the strategic triad—ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and heavy bombers—that has lasted well into the twenty-first century. In later years, Nitze asserted that US nuclear strength had improved so that “by 1963 we were in strong shape, all that had been gotten underway in the Eisenhower administration so that all the work on improving the accuracy of our bombing and improving the weapons so that they were more accurate … was done during the … latter part of the Eisenhower administration.”45 The “high priority recommendations” of the Gaither Committee prevailed, in other words, Eisenhower’s skepticism notwithstanding. “As a result, the relative strategic position of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union rapidly became both more stable and more favorable to the United States.”46
Whether or not he acknowledged it, Nitze had internalized the lesson that the threat should be stated in the clearest terms. That had worked—temporarily—with NSC-68 and then again with the Gaither Report. He was convinced that his judgment had been ahead of the curve in both instances. Even as he aspired to obtain a high national security post in the next Democratic administration, he considered himself an analyst who tackled the facts without a partisan filter. Proximity to power was essential. SAIS could not succeed without an apparatus supported by government contracts and foundations run by Nitze’s former and future colleagues. While he and Herter initially hoped to train a cadre of business executives in international affairs, and that their companies would then underwrite an endowment for the school, these early aspirations were never realized. SAIS would not have remained in existence without the proximity to power that Nitze nurtured and sustained. On the other side of the coin was Herter, who served for one term as governor of Massachusetts and then became secretary of state following the resignation of John Foster Dulles in 1959.
Years without a full-time appointment in the government placed Nitze in a unique position in the 1950s. “I was very much around [and] probably [knew] more [about] what was going on in the government than I did at any other time,” as he later put it, “cause you know more when you’re outside the government but still have friends all through it. They’ll tell you what’s going on.… While when you’re in a given job you’re kind of isolated just to see what’s working with the people at your level one echelon above or one echelon below. But you can’t get down the bowels of the problem.”47 People told him what they believed was happening, as opposed to what he only “needed to know.” While Nitze focused primarily on matters of nuclear and conventional force structures, he had time to travel and learn about new areas of the world. That meant traveling across Africa on a fact-finding trip jointly sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment. Nitze had established himself as an important voice, SAIS provided a base of operations, and there was plenty of money sloshing around.
1960 Campaign and Missile Gap
In 1958, the Eisenhower administration considered using tactical nuclear weapons in response to the People’s Republic of China’s shelling of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off the coast of Taiwan. Nitze bet a friend that the offshore island crisis would blow over. He was pleased when it did, yet also horrified by the reaction of Senator William Fulbright, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who confided in him: “You know, Paul, I wish the President had stayed with his decision to use the nuclear weapons … it would be terribly interesting to see what would have happened.”48
Nitze would never have been that cavalier about the potential use of such weapons. At the same time, he was dubious about the prospects of agreements either to limit the testing of nuclear explosions or limit the arsenals of warheads and delivery vehicles. The danger may not yet have arrived, yet it lay on the horizon.
In the spring of 1960, Nitze went to Geneva as a consultant to the US delegation at a UN conference of eight nations on disarmament.49 The negotiations were “extremely interesting” to him. “The contest between the Russians and ourselves was a contest in establishing which of us was more rigorously and absolutely dedicated to the total abolition of nuclear weapons.” The Soviets were for the “total and complete abolition of nuclear weapons,” while the Americans favored the “phased and complete elimination of nuclear weapons.”50 However, as Nitze saw up close, neither side had any idea of how to achieve its stated objectives.
In the fall of 1960, Nitze contributed material to Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy speeches. A short time after Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon, President Eisenhower asked his advisers about “what kind of a man Mr. Nitze is”—presuming that he was soon to receive an appointment to high office in the incoming John F. Kennedy administration. Unlike Kissinger, whose nuclear book Eisenhower had assigned subordinates to read, Nitze failed to impress the president with his own criticisms. Nitze “is a very able and dedicated man,” responded Under Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon (the son of Clarence Dillon), one “extremely embittered against the Republicans because, as a Republican, he was forced to withdraw from consideration for Assistant Secretary of Defense by Senator [William] Knowland early in this administration. He thereupon became a Democrat.” Eisenhower’s trusted Staff Secretary Andrew Goodpaster “agreed with Mr. Dillon’s assessment of Mr. Nitze’s capacities. He is very keen and able although he does not have perhaps a personal ‘fly wheel’ of a size commensurate with his energy and intelligence.”51
Nitze would have disputed Goodpaster’s assessment—although it was probably true. Under two terms of a Republican presidential administration, he had avoided political exile and learned to wield at least some levers of influence. In the United Kingdom, the shadow cabinet comprises senior members of Her (or His) Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, usually about twenty in number. The US practice of national security that Nitze established during the Cold War was less formal. Unelected officials spoke for the political party out of power with the expectation of future high appointments. Nitze positioned himself for that opportunity and took full advantage of his current and previous access to classified information. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, amended in 1954 and 1958, set strict limits on who could access nuclear secrets. As a result, it was exceedingly rare for those outside the military services to obtain them. Paul Nitze could not forget what he had already learned. This made him valuable to Dulles and others in the Eisenhower administration who needed intellectual sounding boards—however much he irked them in person and disparaged them in public.
Nitze’s unique accumulation of policy experience was on view at Sunday dinners in Georgetown. These became small interagency meetings where he would encounter such influential journalists as Joseph and Stewart Alsop. He was one of the handful of individuals during the Eisenhower years who understood the challenges of the Cold War. His opinions were informed opinions. He took away from the 1950s the realization that he could shape US national security policy from just outside an administration. No doubt he would have preferred to be fully inside.
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