PAUL NITZE
We must not write into the constitution of the world society a license to universal intervention. For if we license it, we shall invite it. If we invite it, we shall get it.
—WALTER LIPPMANN
Paul Nitze was one of the first Americans to visit the spectral ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But the experience affected him in a very different way from George Kennan’s visit to Hamburg four years later. Nitze had a specific job to do: “measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two bombs—in other words, to put calipers on the problem so that people back home would have a factual frame of reference within which to draw conclusions about the bomb’s true capabilities as well as its limitations.”1 He had arrived in Hiroshima from Tokyo, where the U.S. Air Force had deployed incendiary devices to create a firestorm that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city and killed upwards of eighty thousand people. For Nitze, the devastation visited upon Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was indistinguishable—the differences between atomic and conventional weapons were not as surprising as the similarities in outcome. It was as if Nitze had traveled from Sodom to Gomorrah to Admah in the aftermath of Yahweh’s final judgment. Each biblical city had been utterly destroyed. Did it really matter whether this was achieved by fire or brimstone? In those abnormal times, during a pitiless war, the atomic bomb struck Nitze as a weapon like any other in the modern era.2
There were other aspects of the atomic bombings that Nitze found particularly noteworthy. While the firebombing destroyed a large radius of Tokyo, the atomic bombing had a more intense but localized effect. “The significance of the atomic bomb,” Nitze wrote, “was that it compressed the explosive power of many conventional bombs into one and thus enormously enhanced the effectiveness of a single bomber.”3 Beyond the immediate blast radius, Nitze noted that Nagasaki’s railroads were operating after only forty-eight hours. People sitting by closed windows were hurt by broken glass but protected from the radiation. Residents who had retreated to subterranean air raid tunnels, even within ground zero, had survived the blast. The atomic bomb was not just a usable weapon—its impact could even be mitigated by civil defense. He took this lesson home with him, proselytizing on the issue of nuclear preparedness. When Nitze returned to New York City, he asked the powerful urban planner Robert Moses to encourage property developers to include nuclear bunkers in all new structures. Moses cut him off mid-sentence: “Paul, you’re mad, absolutely mad. Nobody will pay attention to that.”4
Nitze would encounter more occasions where his conception of the national interest would run aground on the rocks of what was domestically practicable. Throughout his career, Nitze ascribed consistently malevolent intentions to Moscow and insisted doggedly that its military capabilities were more fearsome than the intelligence community believed. Combining a keen interest in psychology, systems analysis, and the academic discipline of international relations, Nitze believed that America’s political leaders had a marked tendency to systematically underestimate the magnitude of the threat posed by Moscow. Nitze was particularly hostile toward presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, believing that each had endangered the nation in a different way. To dissuade Soviet aggression, Nitze recommended that the United States devote a far higher proportion of its GDP to military spending. He recognized that this course would prove a hard political sell, but he believed that the American people were willing to pay higher taxes, and sacrifice a little material comfort, to better safeguard their nation. Nitze’s seminal contribution to U.S. grand strategy, NSC-68, dangled worst-case scenarios, then rationalized a vast expansion of the national security state to meet and repulse them; his scientism and certainty were a potent combination.5
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Paul Henry Nitze was born in 1907 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where his father, William Albert, was a professor of philology. His family was of German extraction and had made a fortune in the nineteenth century during the boom in railway construction. The security of inherited family wealth and the elite university settings in which the family resided made for a rarefied childhood. A year after Paul’s birth, William Nitze accepted a position as head of the department of Romance languages at the University of Chicago, where he remained for four decades.6 Paul’s best friend at school was Glenn Millikan, the son of a Nobel prize–winning physicist who lived across the street.7 The Nitzes spent long summers in Europe, taking advantage of Chicago’s generous sabbatical arrangements.
His father was a quiet man, though he came down volubly on any intellectual shoddiness displayed by his son. His mother, Anina Hilken, was different: flamboyant, socially confident, consumed by myriad interests—and utterly devoted to Paul. At dinner parties she drank, smoked, and engaged in passionate scholarly debate with her many academic guests. She read Kafka, admired the music of Richard Strauss, became friends with the dancer Isadora Duncan and the actress and burlesque dancer Sally Rand, and once remortgaged the family home to assist Clarence Darrow, as her son recalled, “in order to provide bail for a left-wing agitator he was defending.” Anina was an irresistible presence in her son’s life, filling the parental vacuum left by his father’s taciturnity. “By far the greatest influence in my life was my mother,” Nitze wrote. “At times the intensity of her love was overwhelming.”8
Paul was a capable student at school. Indeed, he had little choice but to perform or face William’s wrath, remembering later that none of his friends had such a demanding father.9 But when he left John Dewey’s University of Chicago Laboratory School for one of the nation’s elite prep schools, Hotchkiss, he rebelled and took full advantage of the attendant freedoms, observing that his years in Connecticut “were full of camaraderie, athletics, girls, and studies—pretty much in that order.”10 Nitze remained true to these priorities when he joined Harvard’s class of 1928, reflecting later on America’s preeminent university with a strong dose of self-exculpation: “In those days grades didn’t count. Harvard was more like a European university. You just tried to absorb wisdom. We all drank too much, had girls, and a rich, glorious life.”11
He joined the highly exclusive Porcellian Club, contravened the strictures of Prohibition at every available opportunity, and generally had a riotous time. The Porcellian’s motto is Dum vivimus vivamus—“While we live, let us live”—which in Nitze’s case appeared not to refer to the life of the mind. His performance his first two years was abysmal, though the jolt to the system provided by these results spurred him on to perform well through the rest of his studies. After his slow start, it was in fact miraculous that Nitze only narrowly missed graduating magna cum laude. His talent was clearly present even if the application was harder to discern. Nitze and Kennan’s experiences of college could scarcely have been more different.
Nitze was struck down by a serious bout of hepatitis upon graduation—his immune system compromised, perhaps, by his champagne-fueled decision the previous week to canoe from Boston to New York with only two cans of beans and a pocket knife for company. It took Nitze some months to recover from his illness, which derailed his initial plans to enter Harvard’s doctoral program. Then, to his father’s chagrin, Nitze changed tack and decided against pursuing an academic career. He had always found academia’s detachment from public affairs troubling. One episode that struck home with young Paul was an erudite discussion that his father and his colleagues had about the Treaty of Versailles. Each agreed, with good reason, that the treaty was fundamentally flawed, but each, Nitze later observed, was “powerless to influence events … I wanted to be in a position where I could participate in world events, and be close to the levers of influence. Distinguished scholarship did not appear to offer that opportunity.”12
Instead Nitze made some serious money. A Harvard urban legend holds that if a member of the Porcellian has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, the club would cover the shortfall. Paul Nitze required no such largesse. In October 1929, the New York investment bank Dillon Read hired him. He decided to specialize in economics because it “was a field where one could be close to the levers of power—to put it frankly the levers of influence.”13 Nitze was conscious of his luck in landing a plum job with a storied firm at that vertiginous moment in world economic affairs: “I was very likely the last man hired on Wall Street for many years thereafter.”14 He took full advantage of this good fortune. While Nitze’s father disapproved of his career as a shallow “money lender,” Nitze made a million dollars by 1935 through an astute investment in a laboratory based in the United States, run by two French scientists, which developed a vitamin-mineral supplement called Visyneral and a “pill for certain types of diabetes,” both of which turned out to be “smashing success[es].”15 From Nitze’s perspective, the marvelous thing about making so much money was that it allowed him to ignore quotidian matters like earning a salary. Instead he could now devote all his time to pondering issues that really mattered—like the precarious balance of power in Europe. This life of the mind had a distinct advantage over the university-based version. Nitze’s financial success meant he could pursue his intellectual interests without attending to teaching or university service.
The book that transformed Nitze from banker into aspiring diplomat was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which had also weighed on Kennan: Nitze read it during a fishing trip in 1937 “with care, word by word, while waiting for a fish to appear.”16 The book evoked in Nitze deep concern about America’s place in the international system, tilting inexorably away from the years of Western advantage, although he had mixed feelings about Spengler’s analysis:
It had all the faults of the German temperament; it was brilliant, full of profound feeling and thought, but dogmatic, rough, tactless. Along the peaceful banks of the Upsalquitch River, I pondered the flaws in its logic. How could the tendencies toward cultural delay, socialistic Caesarism and war, which he saw as being irreversible, be countered and reversed? I knew of no one who had a lucid and persuasive opinion on those issues.17
In search of remedies to Spengler’s gloomy prognoses, Nitze resigned from Dillon Read and enrolled in Harvard as a graduate student in sociology, taking supplementary seminars in philosophy and international law. Nitze’s second sojourn in Cambridge was significantly more diligent than the first—he drafted a well-received thesis on Spengler supervised by the eminent sociologist Pitirim Sorokin—but he ultimately found the experience frustrating, complaining that he “received almost no answers about Spengler, the trends of the future, and what could be done to affect those trends.”18 The discipline of history still dominated the teaching of international affairs at Harvard—and this was not enough. Nitze believed that foreign policy had to be reconceived and practiced on a more scientific basis.
Having received no assistance in identifying a strategic worldview at Harvard, Nitze joined Charles Beard and other isolationists in favoring a passive one: neutrality from European affairs. Indeed, his frequent trips to Germany, his Teutonic ancestry, and his respectful appraisals of Hitler’s success in rebuilding a strong Germany led some critics to suspect him of harboring Nazi sympathies.19 These whispered allegations were off the mark; Nitze was a consistent if apathetic “America Firster” in the absence of any better alternatives. Hitler was a serious threat to American interests; Nitze was sure of that. He simply held to this view while at the same time holding a grudging respect for Hitler’s success in reenergizing his nation.
The fall of France led Nitze to abandon his isolationism, never deeply felt, and his hope that someone else might answer Spengler; he would have to do this under his own steam. James Forrestal, a former colleague at Dillon Read, hired Nitze to serve as one of six “administrative assistants” with links to the business community; their purpose was to co-opt the private sector in an era of total war. Forrestal asked Nitze to serve his government on June 22, 1940—in those pithier days the entire cable ran: “Be in Washington Monday morning. Forrestal”—but it took awhile for the government to grant him the necessary security clearances, largely due to persistent rumors circulating about Nitze’s admiration for the Third Reich. He had not helped his cause when at a dinner party in 1940 he joked that he would rather live under Hitler’s rule than that of the British Empire—a remark that clearly made its way to the wrong audience.20 Nitze was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, though he accumulated a weighty FBI file in the process. Once added to the government payroll, Nitze was charged with sourcing materials needed for the war effort, including Mexican prairie dog bones, required for making glue, and dried cuttlefish, for making bombsight lenses.21 Nitze performed adeptly in this role, even if the duties were somewhat infra dig for a Wall Street millionaire. What Nitze found harder to accept was the lackluster way the State Department went about its business:
As Forrestal and I began to dig into the matter, we found the State Department under Cordell Hull almost totally lacking an organization for strategic policy-making. Most of the people in the State Department at that time had been brought up in the school of diplomacy that emphasized reporting; few were oriented toward the formulation and execution of strategic policy per se. We concluded that the State Department was inadequately staffed and not intellectually equipped to deal with the radically new situation brought about by the war.22
This disturbing geopolitical vacuum was of course addressed by Walter Lippmann in U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims, and by Kennan in the Long Telegram and the X Article. Nitze first began to ruminate seriously on foreign policy in the summer of 1944, when he was invited to participate in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, established to ascertain the effectiveness of Allied strategic bombing in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during the Second World War. The USSBS boasted a remarkable staff, including a young Canadian economist named John Kenneth Galbraith and a future undersecretary of state and critic of the Americanization of the Vietnam War, George Ball. It was a rich experience, from which aspects of Nitze’s “theory of international relations,” as he later described it, began to emerge.
The survey drew mixed conclusions about the effectiveness of Allied bombing in reducing the ability of German factories to produce munitions. In the summer of 1943, for example, an RAF-led bombing raid code-named “Gomorrah” targeted the center of George Kennan’s beloved Hamburg with conventional ordnance and incendiary devices, unleashing a firestorm that reached a thousand degrees, killing some thirty thousand people in hideous circumstances. The historic and commercial center of the city—home to its restaurants, shops, and museums—was razed to the ground. But the factories and shipyards on the city’s perimeter were untouched by the inferno. This was a dark day in German history: the heart of a great city was destroyed at appalling human cost. But the unintended consequences could hardly have been worse from an Allied strategic perspective. An exodus of waiters, bank clerks, and shopkeepers, “forcibly unemployed by the bombers,” as Galbraith recalled, “flocked to the war plants to find work … The bombers had eased the labor shortage.” The USSBS found that strategic bombing did not critically hinder Germany’s military capabilities.
The bombing did accrue advantages, but they were as unintended as the disadvantages. Allied bombers forced German fighters to scramble, where they were overwhelmed in dogfights through Anglo-American weight of numbers. Dominating European airspace, George Ball recalled, “gave us command of the air for the [D-day] invasion.”23 Nitze took note of the limitations and unintended benefits of strategic bombing. More important, however, he was deeply impressed by the fact that the much larger defense budget of the United States, and that of Stalin’s Soviet Union, had allowed the Allies to simply outproduce and outlast the German war machine. Berlin could not keep pace with its enemies in production terms, despite Albert Speer’s best efforts. Once this fact was established, and it became clear that “Hitler’s Empire” was not an imperial system—like Great Britain’s—that could be co-opted and worked to the homeland’s advantage, its military prospects were greatly diminished.24 Nitze extrapolated that America should seek to build a permanent military advantage through devoting a higher proportion of national wealth to defense spending than any peer competitor. He described this goal as achieving for the United States in perpetuity a favorable “correlation of forces”—the strategic imperative that guided him through the entire Cold War.
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From Harvard to Wall Street to World War II, Nitze was a committed Republican: cool toward Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and seriously concerned about his successor’s leadership potential. Nitze’s wartime appraisal of Truman was “less than favorable … When he became president I had visions of this country being turned over to political cronies of his … My wife Phyllis caused me to change my mind about Mr. Truman. When I came home from Europe in 1945 I found her convinced that the Trumans—Mrs. Truman in particular—were wonderful people of great integrity.”25 Throughout the early stages of the Cold War, Nitze came to warmly support the president’s hard-edged diplomacy and was particularly impressed by the Truman Doctrine, caring little whether or not the commitments enunciated were open-ended. Truman had proved himself to be a leader of “courage and guts,” in Nitze’s estimation, who intuitively understood that the United States had to assume the preponderant burden “of leadership of the free world, no matter what was required.”26 The Wilsonian elements of Truman’s approach that worried Kennan—linking America’s liberty to the extension of freedom to all nations—roused only the warmest support in Nitze.
Nitze was based in the State Department’s Office of International Trade Policy during the genesis of the Marshall Plan. After Kennan and Lippmann had thrashed out the basics of a reconstruction program, Nitze found himself in disagreement with its sole European focus. He suggested to his close friend Will Clayton, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, that the government disburse $5 billion of aid per annum, over a five-year period, to offset a balance of payments of surplus of a similar amount. But Nitze wanted this funding allocated “on a worldwide basis rather than concentrating it all in Europe.” Kennan was hostile to the idea of spreading aid thinly, and to areas of the world whose prospects he deemed tangential to America’s national interest. Nitze’s view was, “Why Europe? The problem [of the communist threat] was a worldwide problem. Why not do it on a broader scale? But the decision finally was in favor of Kennan’s approach of just an aid program to support Europe, not worldwide.”27 Nitze was forming a strong difference with Kennan on what constituted an appropriate range of America’s overseas interests.
After he lost this debate, Nitze picked himself up with little fuss or self-recrimination and started adding substance to the Marshall Plan’s bare outline. He called in favors to borrow some protocomputers from Prudential Life Insurance and began figuring out exactly what each European nation required. Nitze was in his quantitative element, compiling charts and graphs, identifying each nation’s economic strengths and weaknesses, predicting the likely agricultural productivity of each, matching American surpluses in raw materials to European shortfalls. This paragon of Wall Street was a splendid statist, warming to the powers and certainties of centralized planning. Clayton described Nitze as “young, able and a hard worker. Moreover he knows more about the Marshall Plan than perhaps any other individual around here.” Nitze was called to testify before a hostile Congress on the Marshall Plan’s substance and purpose. It was a rough ride, but he managed to convince many Republicans of its merits, including Arthur Vandenberg, who observed that it was “backed by more hard work and careful research than almost any other bill to come before Congress.”28 Kennan’s ideas and Nitze’s logistical prowess had worked well in tandem.
On balance, however, discord between Nitze and Kennan was a more common response than concord to the salient geostrategic issues. President Truman’s Point Four Program, for example, designed to deploy American science, industry, and aid to modernize the underdeveloped world, garnered Nitze’s strong support. He was concerned that U.S. policy in Asia focused so intently on China and Japan, to the exclusion of a vast area: “The rest of Asia, except for the Philippines, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, was generally unfamiliar territory that festered with problems—anticolonialism, social unrest, overcrowded populations, and economies that despite their resources and potential wealth remained underdeveloped.”29 Kennan evinced little concern for the Third World, for it mattered little to Washington if those nations continued to stagnate or flourished. It was preferable if poorer nations became richer, but it did not fall upon the United States to facilitate this process, the costs of which would eventually outrun its resources. Nitze believed that the range of America’s overseas interests had no geographical boundaries, and that its latent capabilities would simply have to expand to take the strain. If that required a tax hike or the restructuring of the American economy—well, so be it.
Of course, Kennan’s conception of the national interest had not diverged only from Nitze’s but from every senior figure in the Truman administration. He liked Nitze personally, found him highly capable, and was relaxed at the prospect of him succeeding him. When Nitze joined PPS as his deputy in the summer of 1949, Kennan vacated his office for him and moved to work in a conference room down the hall. There could hardly have been a clearer signal that Kennan had anointed his successor. Then the H-bomb debate intervened, Kennan fell farther to the margins, and he began to have second thoughts. He wrote to Chip Bohlen that the “question must soon be faced as to who should succeed me. My own inclination would be to say that unless you yourself would feel like coming home … they should leave it vacant for a while.”30 But the die had already been cast. Nitze had momentum and had forged a close working relationship with Dean Acheson. After relocating to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—where he eventually won over the mathematicians who were skeptical about his lack of academic bona fides—Kennan found it difficult to accept the manner of his eclipse. In the summer of 1950, Kennan half joked to Nitze and Acheson that “when I left the department, it never occurred to me that you two would make foreign policy without having first consulted me.”31
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Upon taking the reins at the PPS, Nitze effected a transformation in its manner of operation. Alluding to his predecessor’s foibles, Nitze observed, “There was no point in producing a marvelous piece of paper if it didn’t get read.”32 The main problem with Kennan’s PPS was that it resembled an artist’s studio in Renaissance Florence. Each of the staffers gained valuable experience and proximity to a genius, and many, in turn, went on to become substantial figures in their own right. But the papers that emerged were unmistakably Kennan’s—as the paintings and sculptures were Donatello’s or Michelangelo’s. True collaboration was not possible in the master-apprentice relationship favored by Kennan, meaning all documents that emerged from the PPS had a single voice. This was hardly surprising, as Kennan’s mode of operation was to discuss an issue with his staff and then sequester himself away to write alone without interruption. All policy papers had literary consistency, but when the audience became uncongenial, as happened with Acheson, the papers ceased to matter in the policymaking crucible. The Policy Planning Staff’s output throughout 1949 came to consist primarily of minority reports and dissenting opinions—valuable for posterity but peripheral to the times.
Reporting on Nitze’s appointment, The Washington Star quoted an unnamed source at the State Department who observed perceptively that “Kennan’s leadership of the Policy Planning Staff was a little like a gallant cavalry charge with George brandishing a saber in the lead, astride the most spirited horse in the regiment. Nitze operates more like a chief of staff—or like the editor of a great research project. He presides, listens, and suggests. He organizes, deputizes, and supervises. He weighs, balances, analyzes, and sums up.”33 This marked difference in style owed a lot to Nitze’s career on Wall Street, as well as to the logistical nature of his wartime service and his work on the Marshall Plan. But due to his disciplinary preferences, it also stood to reason that Nitze would prefer the collaborative model of research common to the natural and social sciences, ahead of the lone scholar version common to the arts and humanities.
Nitze had developed many close links with the RAND Corporation (an acronym for research and development), which was established in 1946 to offer quantitative analysis to the U.S. Air Force, but which struck out as a nonprofit think tank in 1948 with seed money from the Ford Foundation. RAND’s motto is simple: “To help improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis.” According to the historian Alex Abella, its headquarters in Santa Monica, California, were “designed to be like a campus without students, just faculty thinking about the vicissitudes of their specialty.”34 RAND’s approach was interdisciplinary, bringing together natural and social scientists to offer recommendations informed by the fledgling discipline of systems analysis. Nitze had long sought to quantify problems, eradicating the requirement for subjective value judgment in the process. He believed that the practice of international relations could be made more scientific, reducing the margin for error.
Nitze was given an opportunity to deploy these RAND-favored methods when President Truman issued a directive on January 31 that the State and Defense Departments “undertake a re-examination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear capability of the Soviet Union.”35 Acheson delegated this task to Nitze, who immediately gathered an abundance of numerical data, which included predictions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Soviet Union could have in its armory some 135 atomic bombs by mid-1953. If the figures were correct, the response was clear: the United States had to spend much more on both its nuclear and conventional deterrents. Nitze identified the likeliest opponents of military expansion and hired them as consultants to the project, persuading the likes of Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant—the president of Harvard University and consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission—that the Soviet threat was as ominous as the JCS suggested. Nitze also convinced Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett to abandon the Pentagon’s plans for a separate review and instead collaborate with his team at the PPS. Through a deft bureaucratic sleight of hand, Nitze used new classification rules to shield his deliberations from the Treasury and budget bureau.36 Through force of personality and example, Nitze inspired his team to work unrelenting hours in preparing a comprehensive response to Truman’s request. The report that emerged, NSC-68, was very much a team effort, with PPS staffers such as John Paton Davies crafting some of its most memorable phrases. But its primary author and booster was Paul Nitze.
The manner of NSC-68’s planning and execution was far removed from the style favored by Kennan. Its contents were too. NSC-68’s estimate of threat assessment was influenced by Nathan Leites, a RAND social scientist who would write the important book The Operational Code of the Politburo. Nitze came to know Leites’s work through his connections with RAND, and he was impressed by his insights, drawn mainly from psychology and psychoanalysis, regarding the relentless expansionary instincts of the Politburo. NSC-68 follows Leites in identifying a series of “rules” or “codes” that drove Soviet behavior—referred to in the document as the drivers behind a cohesive Soviet “design.” Indeed, the word “design” is used some fifty times in NSC-68 and is deployed to imply malevolence, rather than “purpose” or “strategy,” which suggest normality in diplomatic intention. So the third section of NSC-68, “The Fundamental Design of the Kremlin,” describes Soviet intentions in the following terms:
The design … calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.37
A very different manner of expression had entered the American diplomatic lexicon.
Interpretative certainty conveyed in searing language courses through NSC-68’s seventy-one pages. The following sentences provide a good example: “The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis.” The violence of the language was designed to carve out latitude in implementing a response. Defeating the designs of a “slave state,” the ultimate purpose of which is to eliminate “freedom,” justifies recourse to just about anything in whatever location the threat arises. And this is what Nitze demanded. Kennan’s Long Telegram and X Article were imprecise in delineating the full range of vital American interests. There is no such ambiguity in NSC-68. The document identifies and confronts a major problem: that Marxism-Leninism holds the greatest appeal to underdeveloped nations emerging from colonial rule, hostile to a “West” synonymous not with progress and freedom but with exploitation:
The ideological pretensions of the Kremlin are another great source of strength … They have found a particularly receptive audience in Asia, especially as the Asiatics have been impressed by what has been plausibly portrayed to them as the rapid advance of the USSR from a backward society to a position of great world power … The Kremlin cynically identifies itself with the genuine aspirations of large numbers of people, and places itself at the head of an international crusade with all of the benefits which derive therefrom.
To remedy this situation, Nitze advocated greater “assistance in economic development,” but that on its own is insufficient. “The assault on free institutions is world-wide now,” he wrote, “and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” The Cold War had been truly transformed into a zero-sum game, in which few Soviet provocations—real or perceived—could be ignored. Here was a doctrine of considerable force. In combating a broad-front Soviet assault, NSC-68 cautions against letting anything slip:
The shadow of Soviet force falls darkly on Western Europe and Asia and supports a policy of encroachment. The free world lacks adequate means—in the form of forces in being—to thwart such expansion locally. The United States will therefore be confronted more frequently with the dilemma of reacting totally to a limited extension of Soviet control or of not reacting at all … Continuation of present trends is likely to lead, therefore, to a gradual withdrawal under the direct or indirect pressure of the Soviet Union, until we discover one day that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest. In other words, the United States would have chosen, by lack of the necessary decisions and actions, to fall back to isolation in the Western Hemisphere.
This dilemma can be rephrased as an old adage: give an inch and Moscow will take a mile. NSC-68 calls for the creation of a flexible U.S. capability to respond to all manner of provocation at all geographical points. American credibility was at stake everywhere, for ignoring transgressions would invite subsequent aggression on a larger scale. All citizens needed to realize that “the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”
Despite its militant language, NSC-68 did not countenance waging a premeditated war against the Soviet Union—America reserved the right to respond symmetrically or asymmetrically depending on circumstances. “It goes without saying,” Nitze clarified, “that the idea of ‘preventive’ war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans … Although the American people would probably rally in support of the war effort, the shock of responsibility for a surprise attack would be morally corrosive.” Instead NSC-68 called for a “more rapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength,” to a point of sufficiency where the United States had “the military power to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions of a limited or total character.”
Defensive capabilities of this sort were not likely to come cheap, and Nitze, before submitting the report, asked Acheson for advice on whether to include a realistic cost estimate. “Paul,” Acheson said, “don’t put any such figure into this report … One first ought to decide whether this is the kind of policy one wants to follow. The extent to which one actually implements it with appropriations is a separate question which involves the domestic economy and other considerations. So don’t get into that hassle at this stage.”38 Acheson later commented that the purpose of NSC-68 was to “bludgeon the mass mind of government.”39 Nitze wielded the bludgeon, certainly, but Acheson was wise to counsel against revealing the true cost of waging the global Cold War. The actual cost was arguably more frightening than the presentation of an expansionist Soviet slave state. The U.S. defense budget quadrupled from 1950 to 1951: from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion.40 In some ways Nitze was following Alfred Mahan in emphasizing the need for greater military preparedness. But Mahan made his case when the United States was a second-tier military power; Nitze did so when the United States was utterly dominant at sea and in possession of the world’s most advanced weaponry. NSC-68 truly created what Dwight Eisenhower would later identify with concern as the “military-industrial complex.”
Senator Arthur Vandenberg had told Truman and Acheson that they would “have to scare hell out of the American people” to secure the necessary support for the containment strategy.41 NSC-68 was written for a supposedly less credulous and twitchy audience: the government and bureaucracy. But it scared people all the same. Nitze submitted the report to President Truman on April 7, 1950, who passed a copy to his chief domestic adviser, Charles Murphy, for his assessment. Murphy took the report home, read it, and was so shaken by Nitze’s diagnosis of Soviet intentions that he took the following day off work, reading key passages again and again, worrying about the war that was all but certain to visit the world.42
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson was less impressed. A thrifty man, Johnson immediately understood that the document’s planning prescriptions, though unspecified in cost terms, would require a fundamental restructuring of the American economy. At a March 22 meeting called to discuss the report, Johnson stormed in, accused Nitze of hatching a “conspiracy” designed to undermine his efforts to control the budget, and stormed out again. News of the meeting spread throughout the Truman administration, generating sympathy for Nitze—a rare occurrence—and scorn for Johnson’s supposedly intemperate stance. A few weeks later, while Johnson was in Europe on NATO business, the report made its way to the president. Nitze recalled that Johnson “made kind of an ass of himself.”43 The secretary of defense had also lost control of the planning process and, with it, the budget.
George Kennan took a predictably dim view of NSC-68: “With the preparation of NSC-68 I had nothing to do. I was disgusted about the assumptions concerning Soviet intentions.”44 It was histrionic, adjective laden, belligerent, and informed by insights from the social sciences, and contained an explicit rebuttal of his containment doctrine. It had taken just weeks for Nitze to jettison Kennan’s cautious and carefully calibrated diplomatic legacy. Chip Bohlen joined Kennan’s side in decrying the manner in which the report “gave too much emphasis to Soviet ambitions for expansion.” Acheson stepped in to arbitrate the dispute but found Bohlen’s critique unpersuasive. The language stood; all that remained was a presidential signature.
But this was no formality. Truman sympathized with Louis Johnson in his desire to limit American defense spending and balance the books. The president placed NSC-68 in a holding pattern, concerned that Nitze’s grand strategic vision might derail his domestic agenda and his party’s political prospects. Chances for presidential approval appeared slim until a conflict intervened that vested the report with decisive momentum. When North Korea invaded South Korea, Nitze’s supposedly alarmist portrayal suddenly appeared accurate and measured.
* * *
At the close of the Second World War, Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel, with a Soviet occupation zone to the north and an American one to the south. The fiercely doctrinaire communist Kim Il-Sung ruled northern Korea in the manner of Josef Stalin. In the south, the corrupt, conservative Syngman Rhee wielded power. Rhee had studied for his doctorate at Princeton with Woodrow Wilson, was strongly pro-Western in political and economic preferences, Christian in spiritual matters, and as determined as Kim to reunify the nation on his own terms. The United States was unwilling to sanction or support Rhee’s desire to launch a preemptive strike north of the 38th parallel. But Kim was more fortunate—if that is the word—in his superpower patron. Having been pestered for months with requests for support, Stalin reluctantly agreed to support Kim’s invasion plans in April 1950, warning his zealous young comrade that “if you get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger.”45 Stalin’s qualified consent was more than enough encouragement for Kim. On June 25, a hundred thousand North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel, forcing the enemy into full-scale retreat.46 The shock felt in Washington was palpable. Nitze’s NSC-68 began to look as farsighted in 1950 as Kennan’s Long Telegram had appeared in 1946.
The speed and purpose of America’s reaction startled Stalin, whose support for Kim presupposed that the Western response would be limited to nonmilitary channels. Instead, Truman came out fighting to a degree that surprised even Nitze, who described his president as “a very feisty fellow [who] was prepared to fight anybody and everybody as long as he was convinced he was right.” And so it was with the Korean War. The president took advantage of the Soviet Union’s absence from the United Nations Security Council to secure UN approval for military action to repulse the northern offensive. Within days, the United States had committed itself to liberate South Korea. And as NSC-68 had recommended, America’s range of strategic interests widened considerably. The Seventh Fleet was deployed to the Taiwan Strait. The Truman administration increased its financial support for the French effort to put down a communist insurgency in Indochina. Hard realities compelled Truman to conclude that his fiscal caution had been misplaced, that NSC-68 was correct in identifying Marxism-Leninism as expansionary and insatiable. Nitze recalled that “when the attack took place, [Truman] felt that really did settle the matter in his mind. He came to the conclusion that what NSC-68 basically said … was true.”47 Containment had truly shed its European focus.
Nitze’s and Kennan’s responses to the war were in fact identical. Both shared a common belief that the United States should respond forcefully to this gross violation of the postwar status quo; this was a clear example of what NSC-68 identified as “piecemeal aggression.” Kennan was immediately summoned to Washington from rural Pennsylvania in an advisory capacity—the summoning process hindered by Kennan’s refusal to have a telephone installed at the farm. At a meeting in Dean Acheson’s office on June 26, Kennan “stated it as my deep conviction that the U.S. had no choice but to accept this challenge and to make it its purpose to see to it that South Korea was restored to the rule of the Republic of Korea. The question of what we should commit to this purpose was simply a question of what was required for the completion of the task.”48 Nitze was of a similar mind, though Kennan confided to his diary that he was worried about working with his successor, as “my whole framework of thought … was strange to Nitze, and … he would be apt to act on concepts of his own which would differ from those I had put forward.”49 Kennan need not have worried. NSC-68’s bluster and unwillingness to countenance opportunity costs was not to Kennan’s taste, but confronting a clear-cut case of communist aggression—an internationally recognized boundary was breached, after all—was a different matter.
In September 1950, United Nations troops, composed primarily of U.S. Marines, executed an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon on the northwestern part of the Korean Peninsula. General Douglas MacArthur devised the plan and led the assault, which ultimately enabled the UN forces to divide and scatter its enemy. After Inchon, first Seoul and then the remainder of South Korea were liberated in a matter of weeks. This major battlefield victory led MacArthur to pose the question of what to do next. The primary goal of restoring Korea’s 1945 boundary at the 38th parallel had been achieved. But building on this momentum to liberate North Korea from Kim Il-Sung was an enticing prospect for a man of MacArthur’s outsized ambitions, which included a likely run at the presidency in 1952. Truman was fully aware of MacArthur’s megalomania, describing him privately as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur.”50 Yet the president understood that MacArthur had momentum, and that liberating North Korea might quiet Republican attacks that he had “lost China” in 1949—when forces loyal to the communist Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, so ending the Chinese Civil War. MacArthur and Truman both discerned political advantage in removing a communist regime from the face of the earth.
During a debate in the State Department on the merits or otherwise of attempting to liberate North Korea, Nitze and Kennan collaborated on a paper that argued strongly against it. The gist of their opposition was that moving north might provoke Chinese intervention, which in turn would lead to a much larger and more dangerous conflict. John M. Allison, director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs at State, presented a strong case to the contrary, criticizing Nitze and Kennan for recommending “appeasement”—that dread word which summoned worst-case scenarios to conceal argumentative deficiencies—and the abdication of “moral principles.” Instead, Allison advised that MacArthur be permitted to lead his troops “right on up to the Manchurian and Siberian border,” a crushing hypothetical victory that would facilitate a “UN-supervised election for all of Korea.”51 Caught up in the fervor, Acheson, George Marshall—who had been recalled to replace Louis Johnson as secretary of defense—and Truman all decided to support the “sorcerer of Inchon,” as Acheson nicknamed MacArthur upon more sober reflection. On September 29, Marshall sent MacArthur a cable that read: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.”52
Kennan and Nitze called it correctly. As MacArthur edged northward, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed their border to assume well-concealed defensive positions, hiding themselves in mine shafts and tunnels, not lighting fires that might alert their enemy, and preparing themselves to strike if MacArthur’s UN force came too far north. After testing the water with a series of minor skirmishes, on November 25, 1950, the People’s Volunteer Army launched a massive surprise attack that forced the advancing UN army into a swift and embarrassing retreat. By January 4, 1951, Chinese and North Korean troops had recaptured Seoul. China’s shock entry to the Korean War had forced the U.S. military into its longest retreat in history.
The UN force eventually recovered its poise and Seoul was recaptured. But General MacArthur again wanted to expand the war’s parameters, placing him on a collision course with Washington. In March 1951, Truman received word from the National Security Agency that MacArthur had been musing openly on launching a wider war against Red China to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power. Late that month, MacArthur supplied the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Joseph William Martin Jr., with a speech criticizing Truman’s leadership, which Martin read out on the floor of the House. The concluding paragraph brought to mind NSC-68’s stridency:
It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you have pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.53
Nitze had authored, or at least superintended the drafting of, similar sentiments. Yet he was appalled by this rank insubordination. On April 10, he helped draft President Truman’s announcement that MacArthur was to be relieved of his command. MacArthur returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was given yet more material for his campaign to purify the nation. Privately, McCarthy said of President Truman that the “son of a bitch ought to be impeached.” Publicly, McCarthy predicted during a speech in Milwaukee that MacArthur’s dismissal would produce a situation where “red waters may lap at all of our shores.” He further opined that “unless the public demands a halt in Operation Acheson, Asia, the Pacific, and Europe may be lost to communism.”54 After observing an enthusiastic audience applaud McCarthy’s histrionics in Milwaukee, his hometown, Kennan committed a long, mournful entry to his diary:
For the first time in my life I have become conscious of the existence of powerful forces in the country to which, if they are successful, no democratic adjustment can be made: people in other words, to whom there is no reasonable approach, to whom the traditions of tolerance and civil liberty are of no real importance, people who have to be regarded as totalitarian enemies … I am now in the truest sense of the word an expatriate. As an individual, my game is up in this part of the world.55
Two days later, Kennan observed that “McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy. The result is that there is no place in public life for an honest and moderate man.”56
The Korean War was effectively stalemated near the 38th parallel from the summer of 1951 to the summer of 1953. It had been waged for sound reasons—to repulse clear-cut aggression—but had expanded into a much wider conflict, with the potential to expand even farther, and had caused painful ruptures in the American polity. The way MacArthur and McCarthy excoriated Truman’s handling of the conflict—his refusal to invade China and/or use nuclear weapons for fear of provoking the Soviet Union—testified to the dangers of open-ended fidelity to strategic blueprints. Nitze himself advocated an unerringly cautious approach to the Korean War. But rationalizing the Cold War in NSC-68 as a struggle between “slave states” and the forces of “freedom” raised the stakes to a dangerous level, contributing to the creation of a febrile environment conducive to demagoguery. As Kennan wrote on August 4, 1951, “There is no escaping the vulgarizers, the detractors, the dismantlers, the strident over-simplifiers of our generation.”57 Diplomacy was no place to pander to the lowest common denominator. The Korean War was a truly terrible conflict in which upwards of two million soldiers died, including nearly forty thousand Americans. The reckless way the conflict was waged on the battlefield, and debated on the American home front, was a foretaste of worse to come.
* * *
Fearsome as it was, the Korean conflict coincided with Paul Nitze’s optimum moment of professional satisfaction: “The happiest and most productive years of my life were those from 1947 to January 1953, when I was among those working closely with Dean creating the modern world.”58 Acheson was similarly inclined—he titled his subsequent memoir Present at the Creation—viewing Nitze as the exemplary strategist: hard-nosed, steadfast, but aware that full-frontal war with the Soviet Union offered no answers. Nitze and Acheson formed a very close friendship. George Kennan, meanwhile, continued to view both men, and the vast geostrategic commitments promised by NSC-68, with alarm. He wrote a long letter to Acheson on September 1, 1951 detailing his continued desire to avoid government service. Kennan noted that his high regard for the State Department, and his personal friendships with those who labored there, “have served to obscure the full measure of divergence between my own views and those that have been, and are, current in the shaping of policy and in the administration of the process of external relations. I say that quite without bitterness, and in the full realization that in many of these differences it is entirely possible that I may be the one farthest from wisdom.”59 Nitze and Acheson had no doubt of the truth conveyed in Kennan’s final sentence.
But Nitze’s service to the Truman administration had to come to an end. In February 1951, the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment—which limited American presidents to two terms, or to one term and more than two years of a previous president’s term—made it likely that this would occur after the general election of 1952. In a study in contrasts, the election pitted the Democrat Adlai Stevenson against the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower—the intellectual versus the war hero. Weighing each candidate’s merits, Walter Lippmann decided to endorse Eisenhower. Considering the national interest first and foremost, Lippmann believed that the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on the executive branch had created a harmful imbalance in the political system: “Eisenhower appeared as a possibility, and a national hero—and that had other advantages. It not only virtually insured [sic] that the Republicans would come back to power, as you might say, respectably … but also because Eisenhower, due to his position as a national hero, was, in my view, bound to attract McCarthy and destroy him. And that is, as a matter of fact, what happened.”60
Nitze’s view of Eisenhower was less favorable. He had actually supported Eisenhower through the primary campaign—having remained a registered Republican through his service to the Truman administration—but Nitze switched allegiances following the Republican National Convention in Chicago in July 1952. Nitze watched in disgust as one speaker after another lambasted the Truman administration for a litany of supposed misdeeds: losing China; firing General MacArthur, one of the nation’s greatest patriots; harboring communists; engaging in corruption; and so on and so forth. Eisenhower, who should have known better, was guilty of some of the worst slurs. Nitze recalled that “he said the most outrageous things that I was fully persuaded that he knew to be untrue or else he was the stupidest man in the world. I couldn’t imagine he was that stupid, therefore I came to the conclusion that he was basically a fraud.” Eisenhower’s acceptance speech accused the Truman administration of corruption and malfeasance. “To have Eisenhower call [Democrats] a bunch of crooks, carpetbaggers, and so forth,” Nitze fumed, “was absolutely the worst kind of demagoguery.”61
Eisenhower, who had served an unhappy tenure as president of Columbia University, was generally skeptical of the utility of hiring intellectuals to advise politicians. Responding to an aide’s proposal that a group of academics might be convened to review U.S. nuclear policy, Eisenhower replied that he did not want a “lot of long-haired professors” to examine matters of such national significance, exclaiming, “What the hell do they know about it?”62 In 1954, Eisenhower described the “intellectual” acidly as “a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”63
Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s Princeton-educated, pointy-headed candidate—and a Unitarian, to boot—may well have been Eisenhower’s intended target. The columnist Stewart Alsop coined the word “egghead” to categorize the type—of bulging cerebra—who swooned at Stevenson’s erudition. Academic luminaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., drafted Stevenson’s speeches, which were peppered with classical allusions and quotations from Shakespeare.64 George Kennan, delighted to have the chance to vote for a politician who did not resemble an irredeemable philistine, was charmed and offered Stevenson his support. But Stevenson himself recognized that his intellectual disposition, and devoted following among the nation’s intelligentsia, was unlikely to provide a real advantage. Responding favorably to one of Stevenson’s elegantly crafted speeches, a campaign supporter reportedly gushed, “Good for you, Governor, you’re the thinking man’s candidate!” “Thanks,” replied Stevenson, “but I need a majority to win.”65 And so it turned out. Eisenhower won with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89. As a consolation prize, which distilled both his virtues and his predicament, Stevenson was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Paul Nitze was disappointed at the outcome of the election, but he remained hopeful that his advisory services might be retained. To this end Nitze, in collaboration with others, including Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Nash, drafted a long paper titled “Reexamination of United States Programs for National Security,” which was presented to the National Security Council as NSC-141 on President Truman’s last day in the White House. The paper called for a vast buildup of nonnuclear forces to allow the United States to properly meet the range of challenges delineated in NSC-68. The report placed no price tag on its recommendations, which amounted to a significant expansion of a military budget that had already quadrupled over three years. But the report made clear the severity of the challenges that lay ahead:
A capability for varied and flexible application of our striking power is essential both because of the wide variety of situations which may confront us and because such a capability offers the best chance to convince the Soviets that they cannot hope to destroy our striking power by surprise attack.66
Nitze’s valedictory advice to the Eisenhower administration was uncompromising: continue implementing the expansionary logic of NSC-68, funding nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities at ever-increasing levels, or invite Soviet aggression. “Flexibility” in response was the key word, a capability that would come at a substantial price.
* * *
It all started so promisingly. President Eisenhower’s inaugural address could have been filched from NSC-68, declining as it did to impose any hierarchy of interest upon a concept as pure as freedom. “Conceiving the defense of freedom, like freedom itself, to be one and indivisible,” Eisenhower said, “we hold all continents and peoples in equal regard and honor. We reject any insinuation that one race or another, one people or another, is in any sense inferior or expendable.” Uttering a sentiment that chimed melodically with Nitze’s worldview, and jarred discordantly with Kennan’s, Eisenhower reinforced the universalism of his inaugural address six months later: “As there is no weapon too small, no arena too remote, to be ignored, there is no free nation too humble to be forgotten.”67
These sentiments cheered Nitze, but they were not matched by the necessary corollary: increased defense spending. In fact, Eisenhower had told Senator Robert Taft, his main challenger throughout the Republican primaries, that he planned to cut $5 billion from the Truman defense budget in 1954—the reverse of what Nitze had recommended in NSC-68 and NSC-141. Indeed, Eisenhower was as good as his word, cutting the defense budget from $41.3 billion to $36 billion in his first year in office, taking the largest share from the Air Force—as any good soldier should. Eisenhower’s public stance was that America’s foreign-policy interests were theoretically limitless. Privately, he opposed increasing the defense budget “excessively under the impulse of fear,” which “could, in the long-run, defeat our purposes by damaging the growth of our economy and eventually forcing it into regimented controls.”68 As Nitze was sympathetic to such government controls—believing that living standards could stand to fall and taxes could certainly rise, in the pursuit of an unchallengeable military machine—he did not look kindly upon the Eisenhower administration’s defense policies.
Prior to assuming office, Eisenhower actually considered appointing Nitze as his secretary of defense. John Foster Dulles talked him out of this idea, observing that it was unwise to appoint “an Acheson man” to such an important post, particularly as Eisenhower’s hawkish running mate, Richard Nixon, had described Acheson as the “red dean of the cowardly college of containment.”69 But Eisenhower had been impressed by Nitze’s anti-Soviet mettle and remained keen to find a place for him in his administration.
To this end the president drafted Nitze to advise the administration on how to respond to Stalin’s death in March 1953. Did the dictator’s demise present any opportunities for U.S.-Soviet rapprochement? If so, how might they be pursued without appearing weak? Nitze’s advisory role began inauspiciously when he walked into the president’s quarters midway through a change of outfit: “I caught him standing in nothing but his undershorts. His wife Mamie, who was sitting in a chair near the window, grinned, but the President flushed with annoyance … Thus ended my only claim to intimacy with Dwight Eisenhower.”70 Their relationship had not started well, but Nitze made a substantial contribution to the president’s speech, advising Eisenhower to convey optimism but to temper this with a clear statement of U.S.-Soviet disagreements. Only if these differences were bridged could a truly meaningful dialogue with Moscow commence. Titled “The Chance for Peace,” Eisenhower’s speech offered a cautiously hopeful response to Stalin’s death that was reported favorably in Pravda and The New York Times. Nitze had proved his worth to the new president.
As a reward, Nitze was finally offered a job—assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—in June 1953. But the Washington Times Herald, a conservative paper sympathetic to Senator Joe McCarthy, made a devastating intervention. It ran a story that read: “Paul H. Nitze, 46 and wealthy, one of the principal shapers of the European recovery plan, is the latest Truman-Acheson lieutenant contemplated for retention in a powerful position under the Eisenhower administration.” The article impugned Nitze “for pouring billions into Europe” through which “enormous profits were reaped by Wall Street.” The Times Herald had characterized Nitze as a moneyed, liberal northeasterner out for personal gain—sufficient to torpedo his prospects. Eisenhower’s Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson informed Nitze that a change in the political climate made his position no longer tenable. Appalled, though not particularly surprised, that the administration had caved to a piece of defamatory reporting, Nitze replied, “Very well, Mr. Secretary. I didn’t ask for this job.”71
It is likely that Nitze would have resigned from the administration regardless, for there was much in Eisenhower’s presidency that he disagreed with. The president and his hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, viewed the Soviet threat in similar terms to those presented in NSC-68: Moscow’s expansionary instincts were insatiable and wholly nefarious. Indeed, Dulles went further than Nitze (and much further than Kennan), arguing that “liberation” should replace “containment” as America’s default goal. But the administration’s bark turned out to be worse than its bite. President Eisenhower’s frugality made sure of that. At the Council on Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954, Dulles presented the logical conclusion of espousing strong anticommunism on the cheap. Recounting the substance of a meeting called to survey the Eisenhower administration’s first year in office, Dulles said, “The President and his advisers, as represented by the National Security Council, had to take some basic policy decisions. This has been done. The basic decision was to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.”
Nitze sat next to the banker and diplomat—and later John F. Kennedy’s treasury secretary—Douglas Dillon during Dulles’s speech. He recalled, “We looked at each other in amazement as his words sank in.”72 Dulles had unveiled the policy of “massive retaliation,” whereby the United States seemed to promise to confront all gradations of Soviet provocation—from meddling in a civil war in Congo to invading West Germany—with a massive American nuclear response. George Kennan was even more horrified, writing to Adlai Stevenson that “if we were to attempt to use the atomic bomb because—let us say—Italy might go communist in an election, we would be taking upon ourselves a most hideous moral responsibility for the sake of an extremely questionable issue. I cannot believe that our allies would bear with us in such an act of petulance.”73 Eisenhower and Dulles disagreed, viewing massive retaliation as the best way to keep Moscow in check at minimal financial cost.
Nitze was relieved to discover that massive retaliation was merely the scariest hollow threat in history. In fact, Dulles allegedly told Nitze and Kennan, in separate meetings, that “rollback,” “liberation,” and “massive retaliation” were political slogans designed to distinguish Eisenhower from his much-maligned predecessor and they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The truth of the matter was that Eisenhower’s foreign policies were not so different from Harry Truman’s. In October 1953, for example, Eisenhower approved NSC 162/2, which affirmed many of NSC-68’s precepts—though not those that vastly increased the defense budget. As Nitze himself observed, “By 1955 it became clear that Foster’s doctrine of massive retaliation was merely a declaratory policy, while our action policy was graduated deterrence.”74 Of course, George Kennan viewed both Nitze’s and Dulles’s strategic approaches as alarmist and needlessly provocative. He continued to lick his wounds, finding some solace in the fact that “the American people … would certainly not know brilliant and perceptive diplomacy if they saw it.”75
Kennan did not like the substance of Eisenhower’s foreign policies, but he had played a significant role in devising one of the president’s major innovations: CIA covert action in the Third World. When designing his containment doctrine in the mid-1940s, Kennan had emphasized the merits of political warfare, covert action, and espionage—the dark arts of international relations—as Cold War weapons. Because Kennan’s version of containment viewed war against the Soviet Union as inconceivable except as a last resort, deploying the talents of the CIA, as a coercive and supposedly undetectable tool, was greatly appealing. Kennan expended a lot of effort during the Truman years arguing first for the creation of the CIA, and second that it be funded more generously and deployed more frequently. So if a nation was susceptible to communist-inclined revolution—whether through force of arms or at the ballot box—America should neutralize this threat by funding Western-inclined individuals and groupings, while surreptitiously undermining their opponents, using whatever worked.
The Eisenhower administration deployed this rationale in extremis. It used the CIA to orchestrate the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the independent-minded, democratically elected prime minister of Iran who had irritated the United States and United Kingdom by nationalizing British oil interests in Iran and displaying a clear preference for socialistic solutions to endemic poverty in Iran. But the Iranian prime minister was no communist—not that this mattered much to Eisenhower, Dulles, and Winston Churchill. The CIA, led by Allen Dulles, John Foster’s brother, began plotting Mossadegh’s overthrow in the fall of 1952. The following summer the CIA hired a large group of Iranians to behave thuggishly—smashing windows and monuments, starting fights, and the like—while chanting pro-Mossadegh slogans. Counterdemonstrations were also organized, creating what the CIA viewed as the perfect storm of chaos and instability—optimal conditions for a coup d’état.
In August 1953, Mossadegh resigned under duress and the pro-American shah Reza Pahlavi took his place. The shah would remain in power until he was violently deposed by Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini in the Iranian Revolution of 1979—which had a much broader base of support than that of 1953. President Eisenhower’s intervention was a success in that it showed that the CIA was entirely capable of toppling distasteful leaders in the right circumstances. But deposing Mossadegh and installing the shah was a strategic error—it led, among other things, to a vast increase in anti-American resentment in a volatile region. It was also remarkably callous and undemocratic. The CIA’s actions in 1953 set a disturbing if seductive precedent, which encouraged illusions of consequence-free omniscience. A year later, the CIA intervened to depose Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, who had the temerity to pursue land reform policies that damaged the American multinational company United Fruit. Again a statist-inclined leader with broad popular support was deposed in the spurious name of anticommunism. The sanctity of democracy had been grievously damaged—not by the Soviet Union but by the United States. Kennan later described his role establishing the CIA’s covert action capability as “the greatest mistake I ever made.”76
Nitze was nonplussed by the ouster of Mossadegh, whom he had met and liked in 1952. Following a series of meetings in the latter stages of the Truman administration, Nitze had concluded that the Iranian leader “was neither a Marxist nor a Communist. He was … a shrewd and tricky politician, but, in my view, far preferable to the Shah and his regime.”77 But NSC-68’s overheated rhetoric—which vested large stakes in ignoring any leader or crisis incommodious to U.S. interests—appeared to justify covert actions such as those that deposed Mossadegh and Arbenz. Like “massive retaliation,” Nitze was a more fearsome prospect in theory than he was in reality. But other policymakers were not so queasy about following NSC-68’s interventionist formula through to its logical conclusions. In deploying the CIA in Iran and Guatemala, Eisenhower and Dulles believed they were pursuing an unremarkable course of action—justified by framework precedents established by their predecessors. A State Department official named Joseph Jones captured this imperative when posing and answering the question “What indeed are the limits of United States foreign policy?” “The answer is that the limits of our foreign policy are on a distant and receding horizon; for many practical purposes they are what we think we can accomplish and what we think are necessary to accomplish at any given time.”78
In opposing President Eisenhower’s policies, Nitze seemed not to realize that he was partly reneging on the logic of NSC-68, which rationalized open-ended responses to communist threats. Nitze would go on to voice opposition to a series of foreign-policy misadventures to which his writings actually lent sanction. George Kennan was shocked by the damage that his loosened boulder, containment, had wreaked on the mountain and valley below. NSC-68, meanwhile, was an avalanche. But Nitze refused to accept that his blueprint harmed America’s ability to ascertain which threats were mortal and which were ignorable.
* * *
The presidential election of 1956 reprised the 1952 candidates with Eisenhower again trouncing Stevenson. George Kennan again lent his support to Stevenson, although he was generally unimpressed by the Democratic Party. “I found myself disgusted by everything about the Democratic convention,” Kennan wrote Nitze in September, “except Stevenson himself. The impression I get is that the only aspects of the Administration’s performance that the Democratic professionals approve and do not intend to criticize are the conduct of foreign affairs and the security program. In these circumstances it seems obvious that the party has no need for anyone like myself at this juncture.”79 Kennan had expressed his ambivalence toward the Democratic Party in a speech for the Princeton Stevenson for President Committee earlier in the year. In the remarkable address, which must have met with a bemused response, Kennan observed that “I’ve never been able to believe that the Democrat Party has a monopoly or wisdom … I regard myself, actually, as a conservative.” What kept him in the Democratic fold was disgust “over the naked and undiluted materialism that is so rampant in our country today” and despair at the GOP’s anti-intellectualism, exemplified by John Foster Dulles’s simplistic Cold War shibboleths. In such bleak circumstances, Adlai Stevenson was the only national political leader possessed of sufficient “intellectual and moral conscience” to enable him to communicate hard truths: “to say to our people what ought to be said to them by their own government, which is not necessarily always what they would most like to hear.”80 It is safe to assume that Kennan’s speech did not produce a flood of checks.
That Kennan disliked the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy plank was unsurprising given that Nitze was one of its authors. Kennan had earlier conveyed his own foreign-policy preferences in a letter to Stevenson:
I am actually inclined to question the utility of the whole concept of “bipartisan foreign policy.” I wouldn’t want to sponsor, or share responsibility … for, anything that Foster did, even if I were able to write the ticket. This particular administration may be justly criticized for smugness; for talking big and doing little; for acting in such a way as to frighten our friends and reassure our adversaries. One could talk about the grievous over-militarization of thought and statement.81
Stevenson wrote an appreciative note in return, but it was Nitze who commanded his attention. And Nitze disagreed with everything in Kennan’s letter, except for the part that shunned bipartisanship. Nitze developed a close working relationship with Stevenson and advised him to attack the Eisenhower administration for complacency in the face of a global communist offensive that could not be deterred by brute nuclear force. In particular, Nitze wrote that the United States had to devote much more attention to the Third World, which he described as “a fertile field for communist exploitation.” Scores of nations had been freed from European colonial rule or were close to doing so. If this new generation of leaders were to embrace Marxism-Leninism, spurning the West, then “peace can be lost without a shot being fired.”82 Nitze advised the reticent and bookish Stevenson to attack the four-star general and architect of the D-day landings for being an irresolute Cold Warrior. While Stevenson could not carry it off against General Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy found electoral success with this approach four years later.
The problem with the activism of Nitze—the archetypal liberal Cold Warrior—was that ducking challenges was not an option, for the right wing was ever poised to attack and exploit any foreign-policy irresolution. In the aftermath of Stevenson’s defeat, Nitze joined the Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), similar in broad purpose to a British shadow cabinet, alongside Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Galbraith recalled that the discussions on foreign policy, dominated by Nitze and Acheson, “were the true portents” of disasters to come. At each meeting, Nitze and Acheson would distribute a paper “attacking whatever John Foster Dulles had done in the preceding weeks. The attack was always for being too lenient toward Communism and the Soviet Union.” Galbraith found it disturbing that Nitze’s and Acheson’s perspectives were treated almost as holy writ:
Here, early and in miniature were the fatal politics of Vietnam. It was not that the decision was debated and the wrong decision taken; it was rather that there was no debate. The old liberal fear of being thought soft on Communism, the fear of being attacked by professional patriots and the knowledge of the political punishment that awaits any departure from the Establishment view … all united to eliminate discussion. Democracy has, as ever, its own forms of authoritarianism.”83
Nitze’s NSC-68 had played a major role in shaping America’s basic Cold War posture. Out of office, he was exerting comparable influence shaping the foreign-policy priorities of the Democratic Party. Having suffered scabrous McCarthyite attacks on the sincerity of his own anticommunism, Nitze was pleased to return fire on a Republican administration shirking the full spectrum of its Cold War responsibilities. Nitze was coming to believe that the Cold War would be won or lost in the underdeveloped world, in nations and regions dismissed by Kennan as inconsequential hinterlands. “Flexible response” to communist encroachments would become his mantra—a stick with which to beat Republicans. It is little wonder that Kennan declined Nitze’s invitation to join him on the DAC, writing that “it is a tempting prospect—to merge one’s efforts once again with so many other people after so many years of working alone—but sober reflection forces me to doubt that any very useful purpose would be served by my association with this Committee.”84
Nitze was given a further opportunity to assault the Eisenhower administration in 1957 when he was invited to join a committee, led by H. Rowan Gaither of the Ford Foundation, established to provide an independent assessment of national security policy. The NSC had convened the committee to report on whether the United States should embark on a large-scale civil defense program to mitigate the human costs of nuclear war, a course that Nitze viewed as imperative. The committee was composed largely of RAND analysts, including the Columbia University–trained nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, who firmly believed in the utility of nuclear deterrence and was deeply concerned by the consequences of the Soviet Union securing parity with the United States. Wohlstetter convinced Gaither to expand the committee’s remit to examine American vulnerability to a Soviet preemptive nuclear attack. Gaither in turn hired Nitze as a consultant, who found that the committee’s alarmist perspective chimed with his own. Wohlstetter reported to the steering committee that his analysis, drawn largely from Air Force intelligence, showed that the Soviet Union could have in its possession some five hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1960. This would allow Moscow to obliterate America’s retaliatory nuclear capability—organized under the auspices of the Strategic Air Command (SAC)—with a devastating first strike, leaving American cities vulnerable to subsequent annihilation. Wohlstetter had identified a hypothetical missile gap—though he did not use those exact words—which the United States had to remedy as the highest, existential priority.85 Nitze, Wohlstetter, and the other members of the committee critiqued Eisenhower and Dulles for failing even to get the “massive” part of their strategic linchpin right. Nitze’s vast experience in this field, allied to his skills as a coordinator and a draftsman, ensured that he became the primary framer of the Gaither Report: NSC-68 Redux.
Nitze recalled that the report’s primary recommendation was that “maintaining an effective second strike force should be our first priority.” This meant the United States had to “improve its early warning network, train its SAC bomber crews so that the portion of bombers on alert could take-off within the available warning time, accelerate our missile production program, and phase in hardened bases for our ICBMs as rapidly as possible.”86 In the event that America’s nuclear deterrent failed to deter, the report urged contingency planning in the form of a large-scale civil defense program. Like NSC-68, the Gaither Report recommended a course of action that was astronomically expensive and that invited the military to assume an ever-larger role in the life and economic health of the nation.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial orbital space satellite. Having a Russian-made object whiz unseen across the continental United States every ninety-eight minutes was a worrying development—to put it mildly. If the Soviets were able to launch a satellite, did they also have the capability to launch ICBMs that could reach New York or Washington? Nitze hoped that this was a watershed moment and that Eisenhower would approve the Gaither Report in all its aspects. But this was not to be. During a meeting on November 7, Eisenhower described the report’s recommendations as “far-fetched”—as well as ridiculously, unsustainably expensive.87 “You know, you recommend spending a billion dollars for something in here,” Eisenhower informed the report’s authors. “But do you know how much a billion dollars is? Why, it’s a stack of ten-dollar bills as high as the Washington Monument.”88 Nitze was appalled by the president’s grade-school reasoning—preventing nuclear war was surely worth any cost, and a billion dollars was not what it used to be—but he reserved special scorn for John Foster Dulles, whom he was beginning to view as a chickenhawk. To vent his frustration, Nitze wrote Dulles a remarkably hostile letter. He pointed out that without a “much more vigorous defense program,” a Soviet nuclear attack could “destroy the fabric of our society and ruin our nation.” For presiding over such complacency, Nitze advised Dulles to take the honorable course and fall on his sword: “Finally, assuming that the immediate crisis is surmounted, 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.”89 Unsurprisingly, Dulles did not resign and Eisenhower did not relent. As a weapon of final resort, Nitze leaked the Gaither Report to Chalmers Roberts of The Washington Post. The front-page article observed: “The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays the United States in the gravest danger in its history.”90
Nitze was clearly not angling to secure a special place in Eisenhower’s heart. George Kennan and Walter Lippmann, meanwhile, were as hostile toward the Gaither Report’s rationale as was the president. The British Broadcasting Corporation had invited Kennan to deliver its prestigious annual series of Reith Lectures, in which prominent intellectuals are gifted six hours of radio time to reflect on a significant contemporary issue. Kennan’s topic was “Russia, the Atom, and the West,” and his arguments were antithetical to Nitze’s. Kennan heaped scorn on those nuclear strategists who “evidently believe that if the Russians gain the slightest edge on us in the capacity to wreak massive destruction at long range, they will immediately use it, regardless of our capacity for retaliation.” He also identified serious problems with the notion of civil defense: “Are we to flee like haunted creatures from one defensive device to another, each more costly and humiliating than the one before, cowering underground one day, breaking up our cities the next, attempting to surround ourselves with elaborate electronic shields on the third, concerned only to prolong the length of our lives while sacrificing all the values for which it might be worthwhile to live at all?”91
In a letter to Walter Lippmann in the summer of 1951, Kennan had earlier complained that foreign policy had become excessively quantified and mechanized and that wise diplomatic strategy required the touch and insight of a “gardener,” not a “mechanic.” Strategists like Nitze “do not understand the difference between working in a mechanical medium, where you can translate direct impulses in a mechanical way, and working in an organic medium, where the living impulse is beyond your own doing and you achieve your effects by altering the environmental stimuli to which a given growth is subjected or, if you cannot do this, then adjusting yourself as best you can to whatever unpleasant quality it may have.”92
Kennan’s implied critique of Nitze was deep but opaque. Lippmann’s scorn was presented with hallmark clarity in a 1959 column titled “The Tired Old Men.” The article blamed three individuals—Nitze, Dean Acheson, and ex-President Truman—for devising a confrontational blueprint from which U.S foreign policy still recklessly operated. Nitze was appalled by the article and attributed its genesis to a heated dispute he had with Lippmann five days earlier. Over the course of a wine-fueled lunch, Nitze had grown increasingly tired of Lippmann’s sanctimonious call for a more “reasoned” approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. “You know, Walter,” said Nitze, “it’s possible to be too G-D impartial.” “Paul, when you say that,” replied Lippmann, “to whom are you referring?” Nitze replied, “Walter, if you press me, I have to admit that I have you in mind.” According to Nitze, Lippmann “turned purple and then pink and then white and then black … [He was] absolutely outraged by that remark.”93 Lippmann and Kennan had come to view Nitze’s foreign-policy recommendations with genuine concern.
Nitze cared not a jot for their poor opinion because he was developing warm relations with a more significant personage: Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was all but certain to run for the presidency in 1960. Nitze first met Kennedy in 1959, when he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs on a fact-gathering trip he had taken to the continent for the Council on Foreign Relations. Nitze was impressed by the young senator’s focus: “He listened carefully, absorbing information and ideas for use when the occasion arose.”94 Nitze’s testimony on the vital importance of the unaligned, developing world to America’s Cold War prospects found a receptive audience in Kennedy. He firmly believed in the necessity of a vastly increased foreign aid program, and for deploying a more varied set of diplomatic tools. The one tool currently in the box—the mallet of “massive retaliation”—was not designed for close work like undermining communism’s appeal in the Third World. As early as 1954, Kennedy had delivered a speech in the Senate in which he observed that “our reduction of strength for resistance in so-called brush-fire wars, while threatening atomic retaliation, has in effect invited expansion by the Communists in such areas as Indochina.”95 Kennedy’s and Nitze’s views were closely aligned on a variety of issues, as the latter recalled with satisfaction:
I thought he was very quick. In fact, he had independently come to some of the ideas that seemed to me to be very important. He was concerned about the massive retaliation doctrine. He was concerned that we were not putting enough emphasis upon defense options rather than the strategic nuclear attack option. He was concerned about the military support which we were able to give in crisis spots in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.96
A few months after their first meeting, Nitze was furnishing Kennedy with foreign-policy advice and contributing to the drafting of his speeches. They were an excellent match. Kennedy liked tough-minded advisers who got to the point; Nitze admired leaders who emphasized the possibilities, rather than the limitations, of American power.
Similarly attuned to the senator’s potential, George Kennan had attempted to win Kennedy’s favor when he wrote him a long letter detailing his own foreign-policy views. Kennan began by emulating Nitze’s Paul Revere approach, observing that “the Russian and Chinese Communists are obviously determined to bring about, before a new administration can take over and get into the swing, an extensive and decisive undermining of our world position, with a view to isolating us politically and militarily and to eliminating us as a major factor of resistance to their ambitions and undertakings.” The purpose and vitality of the prose might have surprised seasoned Kennan watchers. But after this tub-thumping buildup, Kennan reverted to type:
One of the most dangerous elements in our present world position is that we are greatly over-extended in our commitments, political and military. I have felt this for years; so, I believe, has Lippmann. This provides our adversaries with one opportunity after another for badgering us and thrusting us onto the defensive. To get ourselves back into a sound position, there should be a careful appraisal of our existing commitments and a ruthless elimination of those which are unsound, super-annuated, or beyond our strength to support.97
At this moment of supposedly “maximum danger,” to borrow Nitze’s phrase from NSC-68, Kennan recommended “ruthlessly” hacking away at America’s overgrown defense commitments. JFK was not won over. Kennan and Nitze did not so much disagree about foreign policy as inhabit different planets.
After securing the Democratic nomination ahead of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy was keen to solicit the best—which for him meant the most robust—foreign-policy advice. He did not turn to Kennan, needless to say, and instead sought out the engineer of NSC-68. On August 30, 1960, Nitze and Kennedy held a joint news conference. The Democratic presidential candidate announced that he had appointed Nitze to convene and chair a Committee on National Security Policy. Its purpose was not to furnish Kennedy with partisan debating points but to provide concrete foreign-policy recommendations that would permit the new administration to hit the ground running. Kennedy informed the assembled press that he wanted Nitze to “consult … on national security problems with the ablest and most experienced authorities in the nation, without regard to party.”98 Nitze was given an office in the Russell Senate Office Building, right next to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, where he sat down with his team—David K. Bruce, Roswell Gilpatric, and James Perkins—to prepare his report. With his usual diligence, Nitze took soundings from RAND and some of the nation’s elite universities, including the Center for International Studies at MIT, which had developed a distinctive research program emphasizing the centrality of the struggle with communism in the Third World.
While Nitze worked on his report, Kennedy had an election to win—against Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Milhous Nixon. One of Kennedy’s most effective campaigning strategies was to portray the Eisenhower-Nixon years as a period in which the big stick of massive retaliation actually encouraged drift and irresolution, which had allowed the Soviet Union to narrow the gap in nuclear capabilities and project power and influence beyond the European theater. Even Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida, had been “lost” to communism in 1959. For hawkish Democrats with painful memories of McCarthyism, attacking Nixon and the GOP for foreign-policy weakness was cathartic. Drawing on Nitze’s and Wohlstetter’s dark Gaither scenarios, Kennedy blasted the Nixon-Eisenhower team for allowing a “missile gap” to develop, which imperiled American security: “Whether the missile gap—that everyone agrees now exists—will become critical in 1961, 1962, or 1963 … the point is that we are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival … Unless immediate steps are taken, failure to maintain our relative power of retaliation may in the near future expose the United States to a nuclear missile attack.”99
This inflammatory allegation was taken right from Nitze’s playbook. Never mind that the missile gap did not actually exist; the mere allegation was damaging enough. And Nixon could not decisively rebut the charge without revealing the full extent of America’s surveillance operation over the Soviet Union. On this and other issues, Kennedy had Nixon on the hook.
Partly assisted by these foreign-policy advantages—as well as Walter Lippmann’s priceless endorsement—Kennedy defeated Nixon on Election Day by the slimmest of margins. Across the nation he secured just 100,000 more popular votes, which translated as 303 votes to Nixon’s 219 in the electoral college. Nitze submitted his report to President-elect Kennedy on November 9, the day after his victory. It called for an “early decision” on whether the United States should “attempt to achieve a politically meaningful ‘win’ capability in general nuclear war, or settle for the more modest goal of being able to deny the Soviets such a capability through assuring ourselves secure retaliatory capability.” It also focused on the sheer weight of crises that would confront Kennedy upon entering the White House, in “Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and the ‘smoldering guerrilla war in South Vietnam.’” “Because of limitations of time and space,” Nitze recalled, “our report made only brief stabs at sorting out the multitude of problems inherent in these global time bombs.”100 An appreciative Kennedy directed that a copy of the report be sent to all cabinet appointees as the starting point for their subsequent recommendations. The main question that remained was where would Nitze—an architect of Kennedy’s main diplomatic campaigning advantage—land?
President-elect Kennedy offered Nitze three jobs during the transition, in a brief phone conversation. He informed Nitze that the incoming secretary of state, Dean Rusk—a man Nitze had recommended for the job—wanted him to serve as his undersecretary for economic affairs. “Before you respond to this, however,” said Kennedy, “you should know that I would like you to become either my national security adviser or deputy secretary of defense.” Nitze asked, “How long do I have to make up my mind?” to which Kennedy answered, “Thirty seconds.” His mind set to gallop, Nitze immediately dismissed the job at State because he had already worked in economic affairs during the Truman administration. He liked the proximity to power that the office of national security adviser provided, but worried that he would be continuously “stalemated by a Pentagon unsympathetic to the type of policy I thought was required.” To truly grapple with the issues that mattered most—primarily pertaining to strategic vulnerabilities and the conventional and unconventional means to address them—Nitze believed it was vital to work in the Pentagon. “I choose the post of deputy secretary of defense,” replied Nitze within the thirty seconds. “Fine,” said Kennedy, who hung up without saying goodbye and crossed another job off his long to-do list.
Nitze made a major error in declining the job of national security adviser. The position had lacked clout during the Eisenhower years, certainly, but the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter appointments—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski—used the office to construct independent power bases in the White House, exerting an influence on presidential decision making that often exceeded the supposedly more powerful cabinet appointments. Nitze’s mistake was compounded when Kennedy appointed Robert S. McNamara as his secretary of defense and his position immediately became insecure.
McNamara and Nitze shared many traits. A graduate of Berkeley and the Harvard Business School, McNamara had enjoyed a spectacularly successful business career, rising to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company. He also held a strong belief in deploying quantitative methods to assess a whole range of issues—from automobile production in Detroit to military progress in Indochina. Once described memorably as an “IBM machine with legs,” McNamara was a formidable presence whose crisp analyses, impatience with prolixity, and unforgiving work ethic kept his subordinates in a state of perpetual tension and exhaustion. He accepted Kennedy’s job offer on one condition: that he would have total control over subsequent Pentagon appointments. McNamara decided that he did not want another McNamara (with actual foreign-policy experience) serving as his number two. He wanted a loyal lieutenant to carry out his orders without demur. This person turned out to be the hardworking and selfless Roswell Gilpatric. “I had never met Bob McNamara,” Nitze later recalled, “but he knew of me and my reputation for hard-nosed determination. He told Mr. Kennedy that he would prefer a deputy who would be his alter ego and carry out his programs without argument or confrontation.”101
Nitze was instead forced to take the position of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—the job he had accepted in 1953 before the forces of McCarthyism had intervened. It was not a bad compromise move, as it turned out, because the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), known as the “little state department,” offered Nitze considerable autonomy and some three hundred staff. The ISA’s primary function was to coordinate the disbursement of foreign military aid, but Kennedy wanted the office to do more. On Christmas Day, The New York Times endorsed Nitze’s appointment, noting that the ISA’s scope had been “widened” to allow Nitze to contribute to policy on multiple levels. President-elect Kennedy remarked that “I cannot too strongly stress the importance of the post which Mr. Nitze has accepted … His wealth of experience will be of great assistance to both Defense Secretary McNamara and to me.”102 Kennedy’s warm words were likely conditioned by some guilt at the retraction of his initial job offer. In fact, Nitze’s influence on the Kennedy administration turned out to be significant. But this owed less to the job he assumed than to the geopolitical principles he bequeathed. John Kennedy was the first president to fully embrace the maximalist crisis logic of NSC-68: “We cannot simply sit by and watch on the sidelines. There are no sidelines.”103
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In January 1961, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy delivered seminal speeches: the first a farewell address, the second an inaugural. They were opposite in purpose. Eisenhower’s speech repudiated Nitze’s foreign-policy vision; Kennedy’s embraced it. Eisenhower was bidding farewell to the nation. Foremost on his mind was the manner in which the military had come to assume an outsized place in national life. He observed that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government.” Eisenhower was referring to the quadrupling of America’s defense budget ushered in by NSC-68 and the Korean War—and the problems he had faced in trimming a budget once it had been established. “In the councils of government,” Eisenhower warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” This complex did not only threaten “our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower said, but could also sully the nation’s reservoir of intellectual capital:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.104
Eisenhower’s presidency had ended in the most remarkable fashion.
Kennedy delivered his inaugural address three days after Eisenhower’s elegiac farewell. It was a typically frigid January day in Washington, and Kennedy chose not to wear an overcoat or scarf so as to emphasize his youthful vitality. Flanked on each side by two well-wrapped former and future presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy spoke with conviction and purpose, his words given exclamation points by visible puffs of exhalation. It took just two and a half minutes for Kennedy to commit U.S. foreign policy to anything and everything: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.”105
The speech was one of the most gracefully written inaugurals in history. It contained myriad other themes presented with artistry: a pledge of assistance to “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery”; an entreaty to remember that “civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate”; a challenge to American citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The speech became the unavoidable point of comparison for all subsequent inaugurals; its primary author, Theodore Sorensen, set the highest literary bar. Yet lurking behind the ornate words was a fierce commitment to Cold War confrontation and activism every bit as pungent as that presented in NSC-68. “In the long history of the world,” Kennedy said near the end of the speech, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.” The inaugural address synthesized Woodrow Wilson’s idealism—“defending freedom”—and Paul Nitze’s alarm-fueled pugnacity: “its hour of maximum danger.” The United States had arrived at a high point in its confidence in muscular foreign-policy idealism. For Kennedy to remain true to his inaugural word, America’s diplomatic commitments would have to expand in precisely the way Nitze had earlier proposed.
Many of the young president’s appointments were precisely the type of policy-oriented academics that Eisenhower identified with alarm. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, was old-money Boston and a star in the academic firmament. Harvard had elected Bundy to its prestigious Society of Fellows in 1941, when he was just twenty-two, and made him dean of the college in 1953, when he was thirty-four—the youngest man so honored in Harvard’s history. Walt Rostow, Bundy’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, was a Yale Ph.D. and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He joined the administration from MIT’s CIA-funded Center for International Studies, where he had participated in numerous government-sanctioned research programs. In 1960, Rostow “answered Karl Marx” with his seminal book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Rostow claimed that the United States was destined to best the Soviet Union in “modernizing” the Third World, thus sealing the West’s victory over Marxism-Leninism—which Rostow dismissed as a mere “disease of the transition” to modernity.106 Rostow borrowed from NSC-68—and expanded upon it—in rationalizing a vast increase in America’s Cold War commitments. Finally, Robert S. McNamara moved from the presidency of Ford to assume control of the Pentagon—an even larger organizational behemoth. Nonetheless, his academic credentials, from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Business School, were highly impressive. Indeed, McNamara made his cerebral proclivities clear when he chose to live in the college town of Ann Arbor rather than buy a mansion in Grosse Point, the more conventional housing choice of Ford executives. He was a voracious reader, possessed of preternatural self-assurance, and devoted to RAND’s pioneering work in quantitative analysis. McNamara was set on rationalizing his department, on making it bow to his will.
Kennedy himself was a gifted student at Harvard and the London School of Economics, although he followed Nitze in succumbing to extracurricular temptations that brought down his grades. His gilded childhood and early adulthood involved a significant amount of European travel, which included a trip to Prague in 1938, where he had roused the ire of George Kennan, then serving as the U.S. ambassador. Kennedy summarized the method behind his hiring policy when he remarked, “There’s nothing like brains, you can’t beat brains.”107 Rostow, in turn, was impressed by Kennedy’s intellect, observing, “Ideas were tools. He picked them up easily like statistics or the names of local politicians. He wanted to know how ideas could be put to work.”108 Having been rejected for his preferred position as secretary of state—this vital position went to another Rhodes scholar, Dean Rusk—Adlai Stevenson accepted as a consolation prize the ambassadorship to the United Nations. Casting a jaundiced eye over the bright young things hired ahead of him, Stevenson observed: “They’ve got the damndest bunch of boy commandos running around … you ever saw.”109 Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn relayed his own concerns in memorable terms to his friend and protégé, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson: “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”110
Rayburn’s meaning was clear: running for elected office imparts a cautionary sense of what will fly that might elude the most brilliant thinkers, unused to real-world constraints on their process of thinking and strategizing. Rayburn suspected that the Kennedy administration was committed to too many bold, transformational ideas—rendered vital by the backdrop portrayal of acute crisis presented by Nitze and others—and seemed to have only trace understanding of what was meant by the art of the possible. The Kennedy era truly witnessed the social sciences entering the “crucible of circumstance,” as Charles Beard had prophesied in 1917.
* * *
During the televised presidential debates with Richard Nixon, Kennedy had criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing Cuba to turn communist on its watch. It was a damning charge, which consciously echoed Republican attacks on Truman for “losing China” in 1949. What Kennedy did not know was that Eisenhower and Nixon had already laid plans to oust Castro through a CIA-orchestrated counterrevolution—the gambit that had apparently worked so well in Iran and Guatemala. Yet Nixon could not reveal these plans in response to Kennedy’s charge without giving Castro notice of America’s intentions. Holding his tongue must have been agonizing for Nixon in the circumstances. But he had some kind of revenge when it fell to President Kennedy to implement the optimistic plans already laid. Having hammered Eisenhower and Nixon for complacency, Kennedy could hardly refuse to sanction the ouster of Castro. Indeed, many of Kennedy’s “best and the brightest” welcomed the opportunity. A few weeks prior to the invasion, McGeorge Bundy complained, “At this point we are like the Harlem Globetrotters. Passing forward, behind, sideways and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet.” Here, Bundy reasoned, was a chance to put some points on the board.111
Unfortunately, implementing the CIA’s plan was akin to attempting a half-court hook shot with a beach ball. In the early morning of April 7, 1961, approximately fifteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles boarded agile landing craft and moved toward Playa Girón—the Bay of Pigs. Their purpose was to establish a beachhead and foment a popular rebellion that would lead in neatly cascading stages to Castro’s removal. A tragic series of events ensued. As the boats approached the Bay of Pigs, some of their engines failed, leaving the occupants sitting ducks. Some of the other boats crashed into a coral reef that the CIA advance operation had misidentified as seaweed. Castro’s regular army had little trouble subduing this bedraggled insurgent force as it eventually made landfall. Presented with the option of deploying the Air Force to strafe Castro’s forces, Kennedy declined, deeming it wiser to cut losses and regroup than to risk a wider conflict. It was an inglorious episode for which the president accepted full responsibility—although it was CIA director Allen Dulles who lost his job. Kennedy was shocked to discover that this misadventure had not dented his high approval ratings, which remained true at 82 percent. He commented wryly, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.” It fell to Dean Acheson to capture the flawed logic undergirding the operation, observing that it did not take “Price-Waterhouse to discover that 1,500 Cubans weren’t as good as 25,000 Cubans.”112
Nitze was torn about the merits of invading Cuba with CIA-trained exiles. Major General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency adviser based in the Pentagon, had serious doubts about the viability of the operation. He relayed them to Nitze, who also found them sobering. He confessed to his “uneasiness about the operation,” although he ultimately kept those doubts to himself, supporting the action in a meeting called by President Kennedy. “In my mind,” Nitze stated, “our moral right to try to stop the Communist menace from invading our hemisphere was not the issue. The Soviet Union had inserted itself in our backyard by stealth and deception in the form of the Castro regime in Cuba. Like a spreading cancer, it should, if possible, be excised from the Americas.”113 The logic of Kennedy’s activism did not faze Nitze—indeed, he had encouraged it. But he would increasingly find himself at odds with the administration on the best means to implement NSC-68’s precepts. Nitze liked military assertiveness in principle—his career to date had been devoted to maintaining and extending U.S. strategic dominance over the communist world. While “throw-weights”—the combined weight of each side’s ballistic missile payloads—were calculable, however, civil wars in distant theaters were unknowable, impervious to charting, a law unto themselves. And Nitze disliked uncertainty.
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Walt Rostow suggested that the president focus more intently on combating the fast-growing communist insurgency in South Vietnam—a crisis that had been festering for some time. After the nationalist Viet Minh had defeated France at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the contours of the newly independent nation were thrashed out at the Geneva Conference: Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel on a temporary basis. The communist Ho Chi Minh led North Vietnam while South Vietnam was governed by the pro-Western combination of President Bao Dai and his prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. The treaty stipulated that the division was temporary and that the 17th parallel should not be “interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”114 Nationwide reunification elections were scheduled to take place in 1956, but realizing that Ho Chi Minh was likely to win a national ballot, South Vietnam, with Washington’s full support, refused to participate. From that point a civil war in the weaker South Vietnam became virtually certain. In December 1960, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam, or DRV) approved the establishment of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam. Its avowed aim was “to overthrow the dictatorial … Diem clique, lackey of the U.S. imperialists, to form a … coalition government in South Vietnam, to win national independence and … to achieve national reunification.”115 In little time, the NLF insurgency began to ask hard questions of South Vietnam’s continued viability as a state. On April 21, 1961, Rostow advised Kennedy that “Viet Nam is the place where … we must prove we are not a paper tiger.”116 He believed that the conflict in South Vietnam was precisely the type of Third World crisis that the United States had to step in and resolve. Even history needed a nudge sometimes.
Nitze had served on Truman’s Policy Planning Staff as the rebellion against French rule intensified under Ho Chi Minh’s leadership. Nitze had participated in strategic discussions through two and a half years of the Korean War. It was a conflict that had highlighted serious operational deficiencies in the U.S. military, which had struggled on alien terrain against a well-drilled opponent. Unlike Rostow, McNamara, and Bundy, Nitze had already advised a president on how to respond to conflict in Southeast Asia. The experience was not one Nitze thought warranted repeating. He had supported the Korean War because a communist nation had invaded its neighbor, crossing an internationally recognized boundary in the process. This casus belli did not apply to the conflict in Vietnam. Nitze found plenty of reasons not to stake American credibility in fighting Vietnamese communism. So when Rostow and others began recommending an escalation in the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam, Nitze generally took the opposite view.
In October 1961, for example, Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor, a special military adviser to Kennedy based in the White House, embarked on a fact-finding tour to South Vietnam. Upon their return they submitted a report that recommended the dispatch of six to eight thousand U.S. combat troops—disguised as “flood relief workers”—to South Vietnam.117 Taylor and Rostow also pointed out that Ho Chi Minh “not only had something to gain—the South—but a base to risk—the North—if war should come.”118 They believed that the insurgency in South Vietnam might be choked off by an attack on the North, cabling Kennedy on October 23 that “NVN is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off South Vietnam.”119 Nitze’s experience with the USSBS led him to treat such claims with skepticism. He also worried about the jauntily upbeat nature of Rostow’s escalatory advice—he described him as “the most irrepressible optimist you can find any place”—which he felt was abstract and untested by hard diplomatic experience. Nitze later elaborated on this theme: “Walt and Max Taylor were more on the side of ‘let’s do it,’ and less on the side of how do we do it, can it be done, are there crevasses there, how passable are they, should we put some pitons in the mountain wall in order to make it safe to go up the goddamn thing or we’re going to fall flat on our face if we don’t put those pitons in. That wasn’t their mood.”120
In a meeting called to discuss Taylor-Rostow, Nitze argued strongly against sending U.S. troops to South Vietnam. “There was no such thing as being a little bit pregnant,” Nitze observed, “and an open-ended commitment could well lead to American involvement in another major ground war in Asia under unfavorable political and logistical circumstances.”121 In earthier language, Nitze suggested that the dispatch of American combat troops “wouldn’t be decisive, it would just get our tit in the wringer.”122 Critically, Nitze managed to persuade Robert McNamara, an early supporter of the Taylor-Rostow report, that it was in fact based on a dangerously uncontrollable rationale. “I think I was the one who persuaded him to reverse his position,” Nitze recalled with satisfaction. “I’m sure I did. This was one of the things that really got my dander up and I was absolutely convinced that this was a bad idea so I held forth with acerbity and carried the day.”123
While Nitze and the skeptics of escalation won this particular skirmish, the American commitment to South Vietnam increased steadily during the Kennedy years. Nitze was correct in predicting that even a modest detachment of U.S. combat troops generated an escalatory momentum that was difficult to reverse. If eight thousand troops were unable to protect South Vietnam from communists, why not double the number? In fact, why not keep doubling until an optimum number is reached? In striving to locate an illusory tipping point—when each additional American soldier would supposedly have a decisive effect in quelling the insurgency—the United States would find itself with half a million troops stationed in South Vietnam in 1968. Nitze’s “little bit pregnant” captured an essential truth. And his anticommunist credentials meant his cautionary advice could not be dismissed as dovish irresolution. Nitze had great instincts about certain things.
* * *
Important as his ideas were to the administration, Nitze never hit it off with President Kennedy. He found socializing with the “Kennedy set” tiresome—the demands made on Camelot’s courtiers were unreasonable. “There was a certain difficulty with the Kennedys,” Nitze noted. “Either you became very much a part of the Kennedy set, you know, went to all their functions at Hickory Hill and played touch football … McNamara did that. He was very much part of the Kennedy set. Mrs. N[itze] and I knew them all, and from time to time went to these things, but you know we don’t like to become part of somebody else’s group.” This independent-mindedness partly explained why Nitze declined the position that McGeorge Bundy accepted. There was a constant pressure on national security advisers to “become the president’s man and not an independent soul. And I hate the business of being somebody’s man.”124 Nitze’s isolation from the Kennedy circle became more pronounced during the Cuban missile crisis and the postmortem that followed.
In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being constructed in Cuba. Moscow had embarked on an audacious attempt to equalize the nuclear balance of power. The United States had to do something—but what exactly? The stakes were unimaginably high, with no margin for error. An American air strike could destroy the sites, but what if the missiles were operational and a zealous communist managed to fire one away? What if Moscow decided to up the ante in response to a strike on Cuba? And if the United States did nothing, would not Moscow interpret this as a sign of weakness, an invitation to future mischief?
To coordinate the administration’s response to the Cold War’s most perilous crisis, the president convened an Executive Committee (ExComm) comprising his most significant and trusted foreign-policy advisers. Nitze was the only person authorized to take notes at the meetings, which he compared unflatteringly to “sophomoric seminar[s].” He soon grew tired of Kennedy’s glacially slow consultative approach. On October 19, three days after the crisis began, he and U. Alexis Johnson, undersecretary for political affairs, sketched a range of possible American responses moving upward in intensity from a naval blockade to an air strike to a full-blown invasion. The following day ExComm arrived at a consensus view that a blockade was the most appropriate first response. But then two days later, Nitze reneged on his earlier recommendations and advised the immediate launching of an air strike to “eliminate the main nuclear threat.”125 He believed it was unlikely that the Soviet Union would order a strike in response while the American Strategic Air Command was mobilized, primed, and geographically dispersed. A Russian retaliatory strike would merely invite its own annihilation.
Nitze’s change of heart on the supposed necessity of destroying the missile sites led to his marginalization. Kennedy implemented the quarantine, and it worked. Meanwhile Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin worked a secret bilateral channel to thrash out a quid pro quo. President Kennedy’s public posture was one of indefatigability—nothing would be gifted to Moscow as a reward for its misdeeds—but behind the scenes his younger brother offered as bargaining chips the removal of obsolete Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey and an assurance that the United States would never invade Cuba again.
Nitze viewed this kind of horse trading as unbecoming of a nation as powerful as the United States. He was upset that the Jupiter missiles had been traded in this fashion, observing, “Our NATO partners—Turkey, in particular—would be outraged at our weakness in the face of an immediate threat to our security.” Thanks in part to Nitze’s efforts, Washington had a far greater nuclear capability than Moscow. His retrospective assessment of the Cuban missile crisis was that it was America’s superior deterrent that allowed it to prevail—Khrushchev realized there was no point pushing on toward a war of self-immolation. Kennedy had a very strong hand and gave up too much in the process:
I believed that we should have pushed our advantage with greater vigor. We had achieved our objective of getting offensive weapons removed from Cuba with a minimum amount of force. With the nuclear balance heavily in our favor, I believed we should have pushed the Kremlin in 1962 to give up its efforts to establish Soviet influence in this hemisphere. As it turned out, while the resolution of the crisis was seen as a triumph for the West, the Soviet Union achieved its goal of securing a guarantee from the United States to respect the territorial integrity of a socialist state in the hemisphere.126
It is impossible to know whether Nitze’s plan to push America’s advantage “with greater vigor” would have resulted in Soviet concessions or a third world war. We do know that it was a high-risk stratagem that led Bobby Kennedy and others to view Nitze as reckless. He came out of the missile crisis badly, and in the late summer of 1963 Kennedy transferred him from the Pentagon to a position he did not want: secretary of the Navy. For Nitze, being eased out of policymaking and placed back in management was something like purgatory. Richard Nixon remarked brutally that “the service secretaries, well, they’re just warts. I like them as individuals, but they do not do important things.”127 Nitze did come to enjoy aspects of the job, but he longed to return to an advisory role. Kennedy reassured Nitze that his stint as Navy secretary would be short; within six months the president would return him to a job appropriate to his talents. But Kennedy was unable to keep his promise. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered the president in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A distraught George Kennan, who admired Kennedy’s intuitive diplomatic style—if not the advisers he hired—composed a eulogy that lauded the president’s understanding of the two fundamental principles of statecraft: “First, that no political judgments must ever be final; and second, that the lack of finality must never be an excuse for inaction.” Kennan hailed the fallen president as “an extraordinarily gallant and gifted man” whose vast potential had barely been realized when “the hand of the assassin reached him.”128
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A few weeks after assuming the presidency in those traumatic circumstances, Lyndon Baines Johnson called Nitze to a one-on-one meeting in the White House. Here was an ideal opportunity for Nitze to convince LBJ of his merits as an adviser—the first step to his coming in from the cold. Nitze prepared assiduously, anticipating a series of questions on various Cold War flashpoints. Instead, Nitze was disappointed to find that the meeting was merely a test of his endurance and loyalty. LBJ asked Nitze no questions. Instead, he went about his presidential business: he made phone calls, took notes, signed documents, dictated letters, and watched news reports on his television. “From time to time,” Nitze remembered, “he would look at me out of the corner of his eye to see whether I was duly impressed, and then would continue his work.”129 Nitze, whose presence was scarcely registered, was forced to endure this spectacle for four hours before the president dismissed him. He ruminated on Johnson’s motives: “He was trying to satisfy himself as to whether or not I was capable of being a wholly dedicated supporter, or whether I really was an incorrigibly independent man. In other words, would I become one of his boys or would I refuse to become one of his boys. And I was clear in my mind that I would never give up being an independent man.”
Nitze attributed Johnson’s coolness toward him to his dim view of the “Eastern Establishment,” of which Nitze was assuredly a member. “He had this grave suspicion of anybody part of the Eastern Establishment. [He] felt that they looked down upon him, didn’t have a true appreciation of his merits.”130 There was truth to Nitze’s suspicions, although Johnson managed to get over his alleged phobia in respect to McGeorge Bundy—who was as Eastern Establishment as they came. The main reason LBJ kept Nitze at the Navy Department was that he remembered his opposition to the Taylor-Rostow report and viewed him as a potential irritant on the Vietnam War. President Johnson wanted everyone on the same page—he disliked arbitrating disagreement among his advisers. But singing in harmony was not Nitze’s thing. He believed that Johnson’s insistence on unity was part of his tragedy:
I found President Johnson, in spite of his occasional lapses into coarse behavior, to be a man with drive, humanity, and depth of sensitivity, struggling with too large an ego and too little solid confidence. He felt a need wholly to dominate those around him, but those who could really be helpful to him would not let themselves be dominated. He thus came to rely on those not worthy of his own stature.131
This was a gracious and perceptive assessment of the Johnson presidency. Kennan failed to muster similar evenhandedness at the time. He wrote in 1965 that “what this man represents—this oily, folksy, tricky political play-acting, this hearty optimism, this self-congratulatory jingoism, all combined with the whiney, plaintive, provincial drawl and the childish antics of the grown male in modern Texas—this may be the America of the majority of the American people but it’s not my America.”132
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The foreign-policy crisis that came to define, and eventually crush, Johnson’s presidency was the Vietnam War. Three days after Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ informed his advisers that he was not going to be “the president who saw Southeast Asia go the same way China went.” “Tell those generals in Saigon,” he said, “that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word.”133 The only thing that matters in South Vietnam, Johnson said bluntly, is to “win the war.”134 This tough talk did not necessarily stem from a sincere commitment to South Vietnam’s inviolability; rather, it was a means to an end. The new president’s all-consuming passion was to create the Great Society, a radical reshaping of the United States on socially progressive lines. All other matters came a distant second on the president’s list of priorities. But creating the Great Society required Johnson to protect his right flank from the GOP. He had seen firsthand how Republicans, emboldened by the president’s supposed foreign-policy weaknesses, had derailed Harry Truman’s Fair Deal: “I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.”135
Building the Great Society meant winning the Vietnam War—or at least doing enough not to lose. So President Johnson secured congressional authorization, in the form of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, to combat Vietnamese communism in whatever way he deemed fit. The first step was a program of aerial bombing to hurt Hanoi and stem north–south infiltration: on March 2, 1965, the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam commenced. Next was the introduction of U.S. combat troops: on March 8–9, nine thousand men from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade made landfall in South Vietnam. These modest early commitments snowballed in precisely the way Nitze feared. By the end of the following year, there were 365,000 American troops in Vietnam. By 1968, the total number of American troops had reached half a million. Making good on NSC-68’s strictures, and protecting the president’s right flank, was a vastly expensive business.
While he had devoted relatively little time to considerations of foreign policy, there was also a clear Wilsonian aspect to Johnson’s worldview. The president liked to quote Wilson’s observation that “I hope we shall never forget that we created this nation, not to serve ourselves, but to serve mankind.”136 Like Kennedy, LBJ hoped that the combination of U.S. foreign aid and expertise might help solve the perennial global problems of “ignorance, poverty, hunger, and disease.”137 Johnson would later expend a lot of energy considering how New Deal–style public works programs might be applied to South Vietnam. During a celebrated speech at Johns Hopkins University in April 1965, Johnson announced his intention to build a new Tennessee Valley Authority in the Mekong Delta. NSC staffer Robert Komer recalled that Johnson would drive him “up the wall” on the issue of rural electrification in South Vietnam.138 Exporting the New Deal would modernize countries in the Third World, allowing the United States to realize Wilsonian dreams. Banished at the Navy Department, Nitze played no role in the key escalatory meetings of the Vietnam War. But NSC-68’s portrait of communist intentions tended to frame discussions on the efficacy of escalation. Nitze would find himself torn over whether to support the Americanization of the conflict.
Walter Lippmann and George Kennan both believed that it was foolish to invest American credibility and resources in preserving South Vietnam’s independence. The faux nation was so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that any American effort to prop it up was little more than a fool’s errand. Lippmann initially welcomed Lyndon Johnson’s accession to the presidency. The two men enjoyed warm relations in the first couple of years when the esteemed journalist was a regular visitor to the White House. In September 1964, Johnson awarded Lippmann the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in educating his fellow Americans about the complexities of world affairs. But the president’s escalation of the Vietnam War through 1964 and 1965 caused Lippmann to reassess. He went from hailing LBJ as “a man for this season” to describing him as a “primitive frontiersman” who had “betrayed and abandoned” his worthy domestic ideals.139 On October 14, 1965, Lippmann wrote to Allan Nevins, a history professor at Columbia, “I do not doubt Johnson’s sincerity and fervor for these domestic reforms, but when he looks abroad, he is filled with a simple-minded chauvinism of the good-guy, bad-guy thought, and I doubt very much if he has the kind of moral courage to liquidate an unprofitable war.”140 Lippmann began to attack Johnson’s Vietnam policies in his “Today & Tomorrow” column. In response, administration officials established what became known as the “Lippmann Project,” parsing the journalist’s voluminous writings for egregious inconsistencies and errors of counsel. “An acceptance of Lippmann’s doctrine [in Vietnam]—as in the cases of Greece, Berlin, Korea, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” reassured Walt Rostow in a memo to Dean Rusk, “would undermine the stability of the Free World everywhere and endanger our own safety by making the mainland of Europe and Asia safe hunting ground for the Communists.”141
George Kennan joined Lippmann in attacking the president’s policies in private and in print—and similarly earning LBJ’s enmity. On February 7, 1965, the NLF had attacked Pleiku air base in South Vietnam, killing nine Americans and injuring five hundred. McGeorge Bundy was in South Vietnam at the time and, upon visiting Pleiku, he fell under what General William Westmoreland described as “field marshal psychosis.” On Bundy’s recommendation, the president ordered reprisal bombing raids against North Vietnam.142 Kennan recorded his concerns in his diary the following day: “The provocation, admittedly, was great; but this bombing of points in Vietnam is a sort of petulant escapism, and will, I fear, lead to no good results.”143 On December 12, 1965, Kennan wrote the lead article in the Outlook section of The Washington Post on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. His critique was typically elegant and searing:
I would not know what “victory” means … It seems to me the most unlikely of all contingencies that anyone should come to us on his knees and inquire [about] our terms, whatever the escalation of our effort … If we can find nothing better to do than embark upon a further open-ended increase in the level of our commitment simply because the alternatives seem humiliating and frustrating, one will have to ask whether we have not become enslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation—to the point where we have lost much of the power of initiative and control over our own policy, not just locally but on a world scale.144
Lippmann was thrilled to have a fellow dissenter, writing warmly to his former adversary: “[I] read your article in the Washington Post on Sunday. It is very illuminating and profoundly true, and I am very much afraid that the President has got beyond the point of no return in the distortion of our foreign policy by this Vietnamese War.”145
Kennan’s article in The Post annoyed LBJ, as was expected, but worse was to come. In February 1966, Senator J. William Fulbright called Kennan to testify before his Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright, a cerebral and imposing presence in the Senate, had become increasingly frustrated by Johnson’s escalation of the war, which he had come to view as unwarranted. He made arrangements for the hearings to be televised live to maximize the impact of his star witness’s testimony. It certainly made for powerful theater. The White House could hardly impugn the architect of America’s containment doctrine as weak willed—a man interned by the Nazis and banished from Moscow by Josef Stalin. In clipped, elegant sentences, Kennan eviscerated the shibboleths that served to sustain America’s escalating commitment to South Vietnam. Kennan observed that President Eisenhower’s “domino theory”—which held that if one nation falls to communism, its neighbors will soon follow—had recently been proved nonsensical by events in Indonesia, where a brutal anticommunist insurrection in 1965 had wiped a protocommunist regime off the map. The rebellion marked a vicious period of bloodletting in which half a million Indonesians—those of Chinese origin were targeted in particular—were killed. But the toppling of Sukarno’s Jakarta regime showed that some dominoes could pop back up with minimal American interference (the CIA was involved only in a secondary capacity). Sukarno’s ouster certainly seemed to show that East Asia was not quite the region on the brink of communist revolution that crisis-driven Vietnam hawks liked to maintain.
Kennan devoted much of his testimony to explaining how the United States should extricate itself from the mess in which it found itself. The United States was sufficiently strong and respected, Kennan insisted, that a tactical withdrawal from Vietnam in 1966 would scarcely register among allies and enemies: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.” Kennan suggested that the United States withdraw incrementally by limiting tactical engagements and defending strategically important enclaves. The important thing was to melt away quietly without instilling too much consternation or conveying a sense of panic. Thereafter, Saigon’s fate would be entirely in its own hands. If the nation failed to stand unaided on its own two feet—well, then, Charles Darwin had a theory about that.146
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, was smitten by Kennan’s coolly rational logic, observing that “words simply fail me in expressing the degree to which this testimony of yours has moved me this morning … It is going to be referred to for generations to come.” Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio pushed a little harder, asking Kennan how the architect of containment could so readily abandon his own theory. Kennan replied simply that “the situation has changed”—America had to choose where to spend its finite resources, and South Vietnam was not sufficiently important to warrant the investment. Angriest of all was Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, who had recently returned from Vietnam mightily impressed by the morale of U.S. troops and appalled by tales of atrocities perpetrated by the Viet Cong. “Morally,” Symington demanded, “do you think we have the right to desert them by going into coastal enclaves?” Kennan, impassive during the tirade, replied slowly and patiently:
Senator, if their morale is so shaky that without an offensive strategy on our part they are simply going to give up the fight, I do not think they are worth helping anyway. And, as for the question of our having a moral obligation to them, they have had enormous help from us to date. I mean, goodness, they have had help in billions and billions of dollars. How many countries are you going to give such a claim on our resources and on our help? If they cannot really do the trick with this, I feel strongly that the trouble lies somewhere with them and not with us.147
Kennan’s testimony caused a remarkable stir. NBC broadcast the hearings live in their entirety, but CBS opted to air a rerun of I Love Lucy instead. The network’s decision led its news president, Fred Friendly, to resign in protest. Meanwhile Kennan was swamped with a barrage of fan mail from across the nation. His secretary recalled that the mailman would arrive at his Princeton home every day “hauling sacks like Santa Claus.”148 One poll revealed that in the month after Kennan’s testimony, public support for LBJ’s handling for the war dropped from 63 to 49 percent.149 For a man of Kennan’s self-critical disposition, the acclaim and validation must have been pleasurable—though the warm feeling did not last long.
As Lippmann and Kennan presented formidable public critiques of President Johnson’s Vietnam policies, Nitze continued in his struggle to master his views on the conflict. He had visited Vietnam in June 1965 in his capacity as secretary of the Navy and was unimpressed with the field commander, General William Westmoreland. He had queried the general on some of the data he presented on troop numbers—with a little too much certainty, in Nitze’s opinion—and Westmoreland “took deep umbrage and said I was accusing him of inflating enemy strength in order to justify lifting the ceiling on American forces in Vietnam.”150 Upon his return, Nitze warned McNamara about Westmoreland’s cavalier methods for calculating enemy strength—perhaps, Nitze ventured cautiously, the United States should consider withdrawing its forces from Vietnam. McNamara asked whether withdrawal would lead communists to escalate their efforts elsewhere. Nitze replied yes. McNamara then asked where this might happen. Nitze didn’t know. “Well,” McNamara observed, “under those circumstances, I take it you can’t be at all certain that the difficulties of stopping them in the next area that they may choose won’t be greater than the difficulties of stopping them in South Vietnam.” When Nitze replied “no, I can’t” to the second consecutive question, McNamara killed the discussion: “You offer no alternative.”151
The following month, Nitze was given an unambiguous opportunity to voice his concerns when Johnson called a meeting to discuss Vietnam with the cabinet secretaries, service secretaries, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Midway through the meeting, LBJ asked Nitze directly what he thought of American prospects in South Vietnam—should he agree to Westmoreland’s request for more troops? Nitze replied that the situation was challenging but that adding more troops would commensurately increase prospects for success. “Would you send in more forces than Westmoreland requests?” interrupted the president. “Yes. Depends on how quickly they—” LBJ cut him off. “How many?” the president demanded. “200 [thousand] instead of 100?” “Need another 100 in January—” replied Nitze. “Can you do that?” Johnson cut in again. “Yes,” said Nitze obligingly.152 Over the course of a minute-long presidential interrogation, Nitze had lent clear support to a war he had found troubling for so long. In a room of can-dos, the principal author of NSC-68 had decided to take ownership of its logic.
Nitze lived to regret the advice he dispensed under pressure at the meeting, although his support for the war certainly improved relations with the president. When McGeorge Bundy left the White House to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, LBJ briefly contemplated appointing Nitze as his replacement. Robert McNamara was open to just about anyone taking the job so long as it wasn’t the relentlessly hawkish Walt Rostow. So he told Johnson that Nitze “could do it all right,” though he added a caveat: “I don’t know if you’d find it pleasant to work with him; he’s an abrasive character.”153 Takes one to know one, Nitze might have replied.
Rostow got the job, the Vietnam War escalated apace, and Nitze’s isolation continued until June 1967, when he was appointed deputy secretary of defense. This was the job he had accepted from Kennedy until the caustic, superconfident Bob McNamara had blocked it. In the summer of 1967, however, McNamara was a different man: emotionally broken over his part in escalating a war that he now viewed as unwinnable.
That times had changed from the optimistic Kennedy era might be seen in the fact that Nitze’s first job as deputy secretary was to prepare the Pentagon for a massive antiwar protest. Among the hundred thousand protesters who marched on the Pentagon on October 21 were three of Nitze’s children, “more out of curiosity than for protest,” he observed hopefully. Nitze made absolutely sure that the troops that defended the Pentagon carried no live ammunition in their rifles. Nonetheless, scuffles broke out, tear gas was deployed, red paint was poured on the Pentagon steps to simulate blood, and Yippies (members of the Youth International Party) led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin failed in their attempt to surround and “levitate” the Pentagon in a bid to cast out evil spirits. The marchers included the writer Norman Mailer, the godfather of intuitive parenting Benjamin Spock, and the poet Robert Lowell. Mailer wrote the fine “nonfiction novel” Armies of the Night based on his experience of the march and his subsequent arrest. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Alfred Kazin wrote that “only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive, so vivid with crowds, the great stage that is American democracy, the Washington streets and bridges, the Lincoln Memorial, the women, students, hippies, Negroes and assorted intellectuals for peace.”154 Nitze did not record his views of Mailer’s stylized depiction. He did mock the protesters for getting het up by “vaguely Marxist authors whom they then considered inspirational, such as Dr. Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky, [who] are no longer read.”155 George Kennan was ostensibly on the same side as the protesters, but he wrote a mean-spirited book, Democracy and the Student Left, mocking their methods and pretensions: “If the students think they are gloomy about the American scene, and fearful of America’s future, I must tell them that they haven’t seen anything yet. Not only do my apprehensions outclass theirs but my ideas of what would have to be done to put things right are far more radical than theirs.”156
Kennan’s assault on the student protesters was wide-ranging: they were naïve, work shy, drug addled, nihilistic, and spewed cant informed by an alarmingly shallow pool of knowledge. Writing in Commentary, the conservative Norman Podhoretz hailed Kennan as a resolute truth teller. Elsewhere he was denounced by the playwright Lillian Hellman, Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the poet W. H. Auden. “There is no one in public life for whose integrity and wisdom I have greater respect than Mr. George Kennan,” Auden wrote, but denigrating the protesters’ potential and purpose “is to deny that human history owes anything to martyrs.”157
Antiwar dissent grew fiercer throughout 1968 as it became obvious that the United States was killing and maiming its enemy to no political effect. A watershed moment arrived on January 30, 1968, when a combined force of eighty-four thousand NLF troops launched a coordinated assault on every significant town, city, and U.S. military facility in South Vietnam. In its greatest propaganda coup, NLF troops infiltrated the U.S. embassy in Saigon and killed two U.S. military policemen. It was a suicide mission—they were all eventually killed—but they stayed alive long enough for their efforts to make it onto American television screens, presenting a distressing image of the war that jarred with President Johnson’s hitherto upbeat assurances of steady progress. For the first time, the major newsweeklies—Time, Life, Newsweek—criticized the war. America’s most trusted news anchor, Walter Cronkite, observed with genuine surprise, “I thought we were winning the war.”158
Nitze was not as surprised as Cronkite by the Tet Offensive—so-called because the assault was launched on the eve of Tet, the lunar New Year. He had been consistently unpersuaded by the insistence of Walt Rostow and other optimistic hawks that the vast U.S. military effort had the southern insurgency on the back foot—that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” Clark Clifford had officially replaced a broken Robert McNamara as defense secretary on March 1, and Nitze began to lobby Clifford for a fundamental reappraisal of the war. Clifford had served as a naval aide to President Truman in the latter stages of the Second World War and played a key role in drafting the seminal 1947 National Security Act. He had served President Kennedy on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and advised President Johnson on the Vietnam War in 1965—when he sided with George Ball in opposing escalation. But after LBJ made the decision to Americanize the war, Clifford became one of the president’s staunchest supporters—a fierce advocate of winning wars once established. At the point of his replacing McNamara, Nitze described him as a “fire-breathing hawk.” But then Tet compelled him to change tack completely, as Nitze later described:
Clark’s [views] changed first and Clark switched 180 degrees, so Clark came to the conclusion the thing to do was to cut and run right away. Having been a “bomb ’em to pieces” fellow, he suddenly became “get out at all costs, any costs, just get out.” And that I thought was also wrong, so from that point on suddenly I found myself being not on the dove side, but on the firmer side. I thought it was just dreadful to just pull out.159
On March 4, Clifford briefed the president on his post-Tet recommendations and cast what he described as “grave doubts” on the sharp escalatory route—the dispatch of a further 206,000 American troops—urged by Walt Rostow and General William Westmoreland. Clifford observed that the president’s war policies had already done “enormous damage” to the country “we are trying to save.”160 He doubted whether “we can ever find a way out if we continue to shovel men into Vietnam.”161
Clifford’s assessment shocked President Johnson. Nitze was glad for his change of heart—he had threatened to resign from the administration rather than defend the Vietnam War before Senator Fulbright’s committee—but he now came to view the new defense secretary as mercurial and untrustworthy. So followed a remarkable month in American politics. On March 12, the liberal antiwar senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won 42 percent of the presidential primary vote in New Hampshire. Sensing LBJ’s political weakness, Robert Kennedy joined the race—on a similarly antiwar platform—to secure the nomination ahead of the sitting president four days later. Previously steadfast supporters of Johnson’s efforts in Vietnam shifted their position to outright opposition in the aftermath of Tet. During a tense meeting with Walt Rostow, Dean Acheson told the national security adviser “to tell the president—and you tell him in precisely these words—that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass.”162 During a meeting of the so-called Wise Men—establishment types like Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and Charles Bohlen—on March 25, each member counseled the president to disengage from Vietnam. After the meeting, Rostow wrote mournfully, “The American Establishment is dead.”163 The logic of NSC-68 had been given its last rites. On March 31, President Johnson announced a unilateral restriction on the U.S. bombing, called for substantive peace negotiations, and added, finally, that he would not seek a second elected term in office.
The remainder of Nitze’s service to the Johnson administration consisted largely of opposing Clifford’s efforts to concede too much to North Vietnam in the search for peace. President Johnson had appointed Averell Harriman to lead peace negotiations with North Vietnam in Paris beginning May 1. Both Clifford and Harriman wanted the president to order further restrictions on the bombing to facilitate discussions. Nitze joined Rostow in arguing strongly to the contrary. “I was convinced,” Nitze wrote, “that we would achieve nothing in Paris that was not won on the battlefield.”164 And so Nitze’s peculiar relationship with the Vietnam War continued right to the end of the Johnson administration. Advocates of escalation had always spoken the language of NSC-68, the hallowed text of Cold War interventionism. Yet Nitze was as indecisive in person as he was unambiguous on the page. Some conflicts cannot be refracted through a crystalline doctrine, offering a clear path to success. His scattershot take on Vietnam reflected this dilemma. Nitze refused to connect the amped-up language of NSC-68—a theory designed to guide the United States through the Cold War—to any foreign-policy misadventure that followed.
Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey—Johnson’s vice president, who fended off Eugene McCarthy’s challenge following Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June—in the general election of November 1968. Nitze yearned for a job in the new administration, but he had gathered too many enemies on the left and the right during the 1960s to make him a viable choice. Nixon’s defense secretary, Melvin Laird, sounded out senators from both sides of the political aisle on their willingness to confirm Nitze to an appropriate second-tier position. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 GOP presidential candidate, said no way. He blamed Nitze, unfairly, for the Democratic Party’s success during the election in portraying him as unhinged and quick on the trigger. Laird asked Senator Fulbright his thoughts on the same question, particularly in regard to Nitze becoming U.S. ambassador to West Germany. “My comment is that Nitze is an imperialist at heart,” replied Fulbright, “and would not be a good person to support U.S. troop withdrawals and, therefore, might be a good ambassador to Mali or some other equivalent position—but not Bonn.”165
Congenitally incapable of sitting around in a funk, in the spring of 1969 Nitze established a pressure group with Dean Acheson. The Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy lobbied for the continued development of Safeguard, a missile defense program that would allow the United States to shoot down incoming Soviet ballistic missiles. In the mood to reassert itself after being made peripheral through the Americanization of the Vietnam War, Congress had threatened to cut off funding for the program. Nitze was aghast that sore feelings about Vietnam might be allowed to imperil America’s defensive capabilities. He hired three of Albert Wohlstetter’s most talented graduate students at the University of Chicago to assist his lobbying efforts: Richard Perle, Peter Wilson, and Paul Wolfowitz.166 They combined well and Safeguard was spared by one vote in the Senate in August 1969. Thereafter Nitze’s team remained united in their opposition to defense cuts and any needless kowtowing to the Soviet Union. They began sketching a new strategic agenda for the next generation. When a year later Kennan met with Nitze in Washington, D.C., he found him “as serious as ever about the mathematics of destruction.”167