That one of my two subjects was a relative has, of course, affected my research. In the simplest respect, it has given me access to an archive of documents that no one has ever seen before. My favorite moment while reporting this book came one day in the spring of 2008, when I went to the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies where he used to keep his office. One Saturday morning when no one else was around, I asked a janitor if I could see his papers.
“Of course,” he said and took me toward the elevator. I expected to head to a familiar filing cabinet on the sixth floor. But he pressed “4,” took me down an unfamiliar hallway, opened a solid door at the far end, and then pointed at a gigantic boiler, humming loudly, with pipes sprawling everywhere. And behind it were fifty long-abandoned cardboard boxes containing the documents from much of Nitze’s life. Apparently, that janitor was the only person in the building who knew about them. In those boxes, I found many of the details and documents that inform this book.
My connection to Nitze has given me access to more than documents: I have also conducted many interviews with important figures from the Cold War who sat with me only because of my grandfather. For better or worse, my personal connection has also surely affected the way some of these people talked to me. While I was spending a week doing research at a conservative think tank, one of the fellows jubilantly introduced me to someone at a cocktail party: “This fellow’s writing a book about Paul Nitze, who was his grandfather, and George Kennan, whose grave we piss on.”
My relation to Nitze also undoubtedly affected the preconceptions with which I started the book. I grew up in a house with the ten-inch models of the Russian ICBMs that Nitze used to carry around in the 1970s, and I learned at an early age that George Shultz was a hero and that Jimmy Carter was a villain. Had I never known Nitze, I might have begun with the preconception that he was the hard-line demon so oft en portrayed in modern Cold War histories. That Paul Nitze—far less complex than the real one—would not have seemed worthy of a book.
It’s also true, of course, that writing about someone you knew and admired means that there’s always a faint sense that he is looking over your shoulder. Fortunately, I’m certain that my grandfather would chiefly have wished that the book be as rigorous and accurate as possible. As it happened, while I worked up one of my final drafts, in my mother’s old house in New Hampshire, I found the copy of my grandfather’s memoirs that he had given me when I was fourteen. A few years before, I had written a paper for a sixth-grade class about his arms control negotiations, which he claimed to like. “For Nicky / This may give you some ideas for further essays. Congratulations for all your good work. / Gramps.”
Despite so personal a connection, I have made every effort to hold nothing back. I have concealed no interesting secrets. If I have cut Paul Nitze slack, I have done so unconsciously.
George Kennan wrote far more books, letters, and essays than Nitze did. His memoirs are intensely revealing, unlike Nitze’s. Eight writers have produced full studies of Kennan’s life; two have done so for Nitze. More important, thanks to the generosity of Kennan’s family and his estate, I have been able to read decades’ worth of the private diaries and personal letters that he kept in his office and house, most of which have not been written about before. I feel, thus, that I have had about equal access to the two men’s lives.
The question I have been asked most often while working on the project is, “Who was right?” And my answer, even as I come to an end, is “Both of them.” Each was profoundly right at some moments, and profoundly wrong at others.
But I have learned two things for certain. First, no matter whether you think his ideas right or wrong, Paul Nitze set an example of how to live and work. He was knocked down endlessly, and each time he got up. He had a passion for everything he did in his life, right until the very end. “Each year I get is a gift, perhaps an undeserved one, but one I’m going to use,” he told me a couple of years before he died, as we walked to Stanley’s Fish Market in Northeast Harbor.
Second, no matter what you think of Kennan’s choices or views, no one felt deeper, thought harder, or wrote more beautifully about diplomacy. He spent an absolutely extraordinary amount of time in his 101 years with his mind focused, trying to understand himself and the world around him: from the remarkable teenage poet to the centenarian folding up bits of paper. He left behind a treasure chest of essays, books, letters, and ideas—deeply felt works that tell us much about a farsighted man, his country, and his epoch.
One cannot play the Cold War backward to learn how it would have turned out if neither Kennan nor Nitze had been born. Perhaps there would have been a final clash between the two superpowers. Perhaps the United States and the Soviet Union would never have entered into—or would have found a way to end—their ruinous arms race. But there’s one thing I feel confident saying after several years immersed in the worlds of these two men: America is a richer place because of the examples set by Paul Nitze and George Kennan.