One moves through life like someone moving with a lantern in a dark woods. A bit of the path ahead is illuminated, and a bit of the path behind,” wrote George Kennan early in his memoirs. “We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant.”
Almost, but not quite. The boy who sat alone and deep in thought in Milwaukee in 1910 could have traversed those woods by many different ways. But from the far side, the route he ultimately took looks fairly straight. The frail, elegant figure who in 2003 soberly predicted the tragedy to come in Iraq seems indissolubly tied to that child. Likewise, the ninety-one-year-old Paul Nitze, hobbling out onto the tennis court, where he would hit one ball and then rest for a minute on a chair he had set up on the baseline, seems inextricably connected to the young Paul Nitze, darting through the streets of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
The two men had plenty in common. They were nearly of an age: Kennan was born in 1904, Nitze in 1907. They spent their midwestern childhoods just ninety miles apart and attended the same summer camp—Camp Highlands, in northern Wisconsin—though not at the same time. Both traveled east for college (Kennan to Princeton, Nitze to Harvard). Both were too young to be drafted into World War I and too old to enlist in the fight against Hitler. Their rites of passage—journeys to Europe; love; first heartbreak; first job; marriage; success; failure; success again—came at similar times and in similar places.
But just as they were very different men, they were very different boys. Kennan never fit in; Nitze always did. Until he became a successful writer, Kennan was often short of money. Nitze was born with some, earned a lot, and married more. Kennan’s recollections of youth are always about observations and feelings: what the young George thought when alone. Nitze’s recollections are fables and adventures, populated by friends, criminals, and historical icons. In his memoirs, Nitze makes his youth sound like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Kennan’s evokes East of Eden.
KENNAN’S LIFE BEGAN in tragedy. Two months after her only son’s birth, Florence James Kennan died of a burst appendix. As the story was told, the doctors could have saved her, had they not refused to operate on a woman without her husband’s consent—and Kossuth Kennan was out of town, fishing. His mother’s death left George in the care of several aunts, three older sisters, and, later, an indifferent stepmother whom he would remember as a “highly nervous woman, thin and uncertain of herself . . . sort of a sissy.” George’s father, a quiet tax lawyer, seemed more like a grandfather, peacefully sitting in his chair reading the Bible. He never talked about George’s mother. The only keepsake of her was a trunk on the third floor that held her clothes, her gloves, and long locks of chestnut-colored hair.
George’s beloved sister Jeanette, two years older and his closest companion, would say that their mother’s death scarred him. He admitted as much in later years, declaring that the event made him “in some way or another twisted.” He was quiet and withdrawn; Jeanette remembered him as a boy staring endlessly into his soup. “George, stop thinking,” his aunt once snapped.
It was, perhaps, appropriate that Kennan’s childhood home provided little natural light. It had been built the wrong way around, so that the windows of the main room faced another house, while the side without windows fronted an open yard. George went to Milwaukee’s Fourth Street School, across the street from the Schlitz Brewing Company, where one of his older classmates was Golda Mabovitch, later Meir. Even at a young age, he displayed a talent with words, writing this poem when he was nine:
I had a big cloth soldier
just made for a little boy
his arms and sword came off, you know
but he is the funniest toy.
He belonged to the German Army
But that doesn’t matter to me
I brought him back to America
Way across the sea.
He can lift his feet right up to his eyes
And up to his cap, that’s more,
He can’t salute ’cause his arms are off
And he could not salute before.
George skipped the eighth grade. Then his father packed him off to board at St. John’s Military Academy, expecting the school to exert some stern masculine influence. The austere, regimented place did that and more. The other students beat him up, dropped snakes in his shirt, and stole the cookies that Jeanette sent. The discipline did not make him happy; he twice tried to run away, and the yearbook listed his pet peeve as “the universe.” Nor did military school make him particularly tough. At Camp Highlands, his yearbook recorded him as a “quiet fellow,” and his most memorable moment came when he got in a scuffle with another camper. The two were taken behind the dining hall where all the other campers massed to watch them slug it out, but the boys merely circled each other, neither one daring to throw a punch.
Not surprisingly, his unhappiness seeped into his poetry. At fifteen, he wrote:
The net is drawn about him,
he is now a misanthrope;
all his friends they have forsook him;
he’ll do naught but grieve and mope.
He’s no longer independent
he must follow certain rules;
to his happy fellow fools.
Most of the young men of St. John’s headed off for West Point or other military schools. Kennan, though, had learned about Princeton from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, had applied, and had gotten in. He spent his undergraduate years struggling to relate to others—perhaps appropriately, given the famous remark by Fitzgerald’s protagonist: “I know myself, but that is all.” Always short of money, Kennan could not travel to New York with his friends or even buy tobacco for the pipe he smoked because cigarettes cost too much. At one point, he could not even afford a stamp for a letter to Jeanette.
At least once, though, he was caught up in typical college-years excitement. In a riotous 1922 letter to his sister, he described listening to a Princeton-Chicago football game on a shortwave radio. When Princeton won, George joined the celebration in the street. The next week, though, he started to fret. “Last year I felt so lonely, the day of the Yale game, that I tore loose after everybody had left on the train and I bummed my way up, arriving just when the game started. It was all very well except that I did not have a ticket, and late that night I got back to Princeton minus about ten dollars and plus nothing, not even the sight of the game.” Now he felt even less hopeful that he would attend the big game. “We play Harvard away, far away, several hundred miles, in fact, way off in Massachusetts.”
But a few days later an angel appeared. Returning home from a pep rally, Kennan found a note on his table telling him to report immediately to the athletic association. He hustled over and was given a round-trip fare on the Fall River boat line to Boston, a ticket to the game, and four dollars’ travel money. Some anonymous patron had smiled on him. “Now do you wonder I bubble over?” he concluded the letter to his sister.
He seemed eventually to fit in and even entered an eating club, a key to social success at Princeton. He became the club’s assistant manager to pay the fees. But that fleeting moment of social ease ended soon enough when he decided that weakness had led him to join. The better course would be to show internal strength and return to the wilderness with the unselected rejects. Soon he would join them, sitting in a dining hall in total silence, none wanting the others to think he could not bear the isolation.
NITZE’S MOTHER, ANINA Hilken Nitze, was a brilliant bon vivante. Famous men and women were her guests, and she shocked right-thinking people by smoking and arguing when she was supposed to be quietly keeping house. She befriended the dancer Isadora Duncan and once took out a mortgage to help raise bail for a client of her friend Clarence Darrow. She dressed her son properly, hiked up mountains with him, and showed him Europe. Paul Nitze would claim many decades later that she was “by far the greatest influence in my life.” She showed “absolutely immense vitality and warmth and wit and energy, and loved me beyond any normal maternal love; it became overwhelming. At times, I wanted to get away from it. It was too intense in a way.”
Paul’s father provided order. William Albert Nitze was one of the country’s great philologists. He taught at the University of Chicago for forty years, and a book he cowrote, A History of French Literature, was a classroom standard for decades. His Arthurian Names in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes was part of a renowned effort to trace the story of the Holy Grail through European literature. But he spent so much time in the ninth and tenth centuries that he often missed the twentieth. He worked in an office at home that he permitted no one else to enter: not his wife, not his children, not the woman who cleaned the rest of the house. His son remembered him scratching his pancakes and pouring syrup on his head. When he and Paul took walks, he sometimes entirely forgot the little boy beside him. When he did pay attention, it was often to correct. Nitze’s own son recalls once hearing the sounds of plates shattering against the dining room wall as the two older men argued. Why? the boy asked his grandmother Anina. “They’re arguing, and it’s not that Paul’s conclusion is wrong. It’s that his argument is insufficiently closely reasoned to be worthy of the family honor.”
Paul Nitze’s best friend, Glenn Millikan, the son of a Nobel laureate in physics, lived across the street. The two boys converted a room in Nitze’s house into a laboratory where they created a simple wire-telephone system to link their homes. They failed in their efforts to build a radio but had more luck with miniature bombs, which they set off all around the neighborhood. Tormented by other boys because of the elaborate Russian suits his mother made him wear—sent by her best friend, in Riga, and complete with patent leather belt and red short pants—Nitze joined a gang called the Scotti Brothers that controlled one of the neighborhood blocks. It was an early lesson in power relations: sign up with the strong kids and then no one else will knock you over. “You must have spent much of your youth fighting battles in defense of your sartorial virility, all to be blamed on our Mother,” wrote his older sister, Elizabeth, six decades later.
At fifteen, Paul got a summer job working in the engine room of a ship traveling to Germany. It was his first experience with manual labor and real adventure, both of which he professed to love. Joseph Conrad, already Nitze’s favorite writer, could have narrated the journey. The men he worked alongside were uniformly tough. “All of them had been in the war and nearly half of them had been prisoners of war,” he wrote his mother. “The most interesting man was the fourth engineer, the engineer on my watch. He asked me to come and drink coffee with him after the night watch. We would sit for three-quarters of an hour while he would tell me stories of typhoons, smugglers, Siberia, Bucharest, Paris, India, China, in fact everything.”
Still, Paul Nitze was not cut out for a career as Marlow or Nostromo. When he got back, his parents sent him off to Hotchkiss, an elite Connecticut boarding school where his most notable achievement was to start the “sequestration club.” Hotchkiss banned sports for students who earned three demerits, forced them to touch the wall with their arms wherever they walked, and required them to run a three-mile course around the campus “triangle” every afternoon. When Nitze was sanctioned for visiting a nearby girls’ school without permission, he responded by sending away to New York for little triangular medals bearing emblems of a man running. He gave them to the other sequestration club members, and all wore them with pride on their watch chains.
Paul was more than just a rogue, however. In a 1923 article for a school publication, he appeared to be both a dreamer and a rationalist.
If one looks at the stars for any length of time, they invariably fill one with a sense of awe and wonder. They seem so far distant, so unchangeable, and so vast that in comparison, we seem puny. Think of the vast multitude of stars, of their tremendous size, of their inconceivable age, and of the possibility of life on some of their planets. All these thoughts have but one effect, to make one feel quite insignificant. One thinks, in a universe of such immensity, what difference can the actions of a single human being make in the period of a lifetime?
If, however, we keep in mind the fact that for us the world is everything and that each one of us is the center of his small universe, we realize that we are not such an unimportant thing after all. . . . Each one of us has been entrusted with one life to do with as he thinks best. If he makes the most of his life, he may accomplish things which will not only bring him his reward but which will give an infinite amount of happiness and comfort to the rest of the world.
Finishing Hotchkiss, Nitze headed off to Harvard. Ambitious and clever, he nonetheless had no immediate path to social success. He was not an impressive athlete and, as the son of a professor, he did not have quite enough polish or social status for any of Harvard’s elite “final clubs.”
Not a man to dine alone, Nitze enlisted a friend from the freshman crew team, Freddie Winthrop. His ancestors having helped found Massachusetts in the 1630s, Freddie was a shoo-in for the most prestigious of all the final clubs, the Porcellian. (Theodore Roosevelt had been admitted but not so his cousin Franklin—a rejection FDR described to a friend as one of the most bitter of his life.) When Winthrop was asked to join, he declared that he would do so only if Nitze was invited too. The tactic succeeded, and the professor’s son joined an exclusive network. At one dinner of members and alums, for instance, Nitze ate with a group that included Leverett Saltonstall (a future U.S. senator), Nicholas Longworth (House Speaker), Richard Whitney (president of the New York Stock Exchange), and a new recruit named Joe Alsop.
Nitze drank martinis with his fellow club member Charles “Chip” Bohlen and kept a bottle of rum in his room’s chimney. Members adhered to the club’s motto, Dum vivimus vivamus (“While we live, let’s live”) and paid no attention to Prohibition. Nitze started writing home on Porc stationery, and not to recount his studies. In one letter, he describes hiding a car by shoveling snow over it until it disappeared. In another, he and a couple of friends dress up as nurses and have a baby-carriage race up and down Massachusetts Avenue. “We were the darndest looking bunch of idiots I have ever seen.” They also got drunk, hurled one another into the river, and tossed each other about in blankets. “The week has been a total loss as far as studies go. And I am afraid the next couple weeks will also be.”
After a terrible academic performance during his sophomore year, Nitze buckled down—more or less. He worked hard enough as a senior to graduate, and to earn a summa grade on his thesis, but in the process he drove himself to exhaustion and then came down with hepatitis. When he felt well again he got roaring drunk to celebrate the end of exams and took a bet that he and a friend could not canoe from Boston to New York City. Nitze spent the next eight days eating canned beans and paddling. Having won the bet, he decided to celebrate at yet another party in North Easton, Massachusetts, where he entered a sixty-yard dash, made it for thirty yards, and then collapsed. This time the hepatitis nearly killed him. He spent the next six months recovering, much of it at the house of a friend whose mother read Trollope aloud to the convalescent. “I am also feeling so sorry for you and Dr. Nitze,” wrote a friend to his mother, apparently thinking that Paul was done for.
GEORGE KENNAN AND PAUL NITZE would not meet for some years, but their paths crossed in the late 1920s. Kennan had finished college and joined the Foreign Service, which sent him to study Russian at the University of Berlin. He found the city gloomy and unappealing—haunted, he wrote, by “the unfulfilled pretensions of a bygone day.” The social life was empty. “Now in the high-ceilinged dining room, where Prussian officers once clicked polished heels on the polished floor, only a few dour foreigners eat their hurried meals in depressed silence.”
Kennan was lonesome and reflective.
In the freshness of the morning, I walk on damp paths, along the sides of a quiet, tree-lined canal. Ripples murmur placidly against stone embankments. An occasional barge, with its cargo of yellow bricks, moves unhurriedly under the bridges while the restless traffic pours overhead. Watching those slow-moving barges and the shimmering reflections of the trees in the water, I can almost feel again the spirit of the day when the world had time to dream and consider. But then, I turn up into the roar of the Potsdamerstrasse; the mood is ruined, and the twentieth century is on me again.
Nitze ended up in Berlin at about the same time, but he certainly was neither dour, hurried, depressed, nor silent. Having decided to work in finance, he had convinced a firm to send him to Europe to analyze the German economy. When he arrived in Berlin, he quickly befriended Alexander Calder, who was making wire sculptures, including one considered quite scandalous that would produce the figure of a Christ child if you dropped a French coin into it. The two moved in together at the Pension Naumann, a place described as “glorious” by Nitze. “Frau Naumann was a very jolly old lady and her idea to take care of the needs of the clients was to have three large carafes on the dining room table filled with vodka, and one with white wine and one with red wine at every meal including breakfast.”
Nitze and Calder arranged a “traveling circus” of friends who all bought bicycles and traversed Germany and then Holland, drinking, cavorting, and acting like puppies at a picnic. Back in Berlin, Nitze embraced upper-class German social life, toured factories, met leading businessmen, and traveled with a labor union official based at the University of Berlin. Through a friend at the Rot-Weiss Tennis Club, Nitze also became the temporary assistant manager of the star player Helen Wills Moody. Berlin, he recalled, “was full of life.” He passed through Paris too: romping, partying, falling in and out of love. “Five people came within an ace of having nervous breakdowns and nothing happened. I could write five volumes on it and still not make heads or tails out of it,” he wrote home. “I wouldn’t have traded those three weeks for an ordinary lifetime.”
Another friend, the artist Isamu Noguchi, would later say, “I didn’t think Paul was going to make much of himself in life.” Nitze responded, “I didn’t think Noguchi was going to make much of himself.”
IN THE LATE 1920s, Kennan fell in love with a woman named Eleanor Hard, the affluent, outgoing, and socially in-demand daughter of a respected Washington journalist. Kennan had had little experience with women and less experience with power. He did not love Eleanor deeply, but he loved the idea of who he could become if he married her. “I perceived in Washington, for the first time, that I could beat the people I had always envied at their own game. I saw I could become both respected and powerful,—that I, too, might someday make the very pillars of the State Department tremble, as I walked through the ringing corridors.”
The two became engaged. But Eleanor soured on the relationship, and her father had never taken to Kennan at all. Soon the wedding was off. Eleanor did not even return the ring Kennan had given her, which had belonged to his mother. “Go back to your teacups and fancy pants and safe obscurity,” William Hard told the younger man.
Kennan wrote Jeanette soon after the breakup and declared the debacle a learning experience. He would have to plot a new life course, far from his dream of the State Department’s inner councils but much happier. “I will probably never be vastly admired; I shall never achieve much personal dignity; my wife, if I ever have one, will doubtless be in no sense ideal and will be generally spoken of as an impossible person. Far from becoming wealthy, I will probably effectively lose what money I have.” But he would be independent. “Between 9 to 4, I belong to [the government] body and soul. I am an efficient consular officer of the United States during those hours, and I am reconciled to rendering in this manner unto Caesar all those things which are Caesar’s. But when the last visa applicant has left, and the accounts are done, and door of the Consulate closes behind me, I am George Kennan, and if the government doesn’t like it, it can whistle long and hard.”
Kennan’s pessimism about his prospects in marriage was belied when he fell for a quiet, beautiful Norwegian woman named Annelise Sorensen. They met in Berlin, through a friend of Kennan’s who had married her cousin. “She is simply phenomenally sweet and unspoiled. I can’t say enough for her. She has one of the most happy, unexacting dispositions in the world. She combines a childlike simplicity and sincerity and gaiety with a very mature common sense. She has enough dignity and discretion to be an ambassadress, and not a trace of conceit. Everybody loves her,” he wrote Jeanette. “Even the German minister’s wife, who hates me like poison, just melts when she sees her or talks about her.” He summed up, “She was simply born a lady and I hope that I’ll be a good enough husband not to spoil her.” George and Annelise married in 1931; they stayed together until he died, seventy-four years later.
NITZE’S FIRST SERIOUS girlfriend, Mary Ames, was born into the prominent Massachusetts family that made the shovels used to build the Union Pacific Railroad. The two began to date during his Harvard years and were brought closer together by the most horrible moment in Nitze’s youth.
Driving in his 1917 Pierce-Arrow from the Ameses’ house in downtown Boston on the night of November 23, 1928, with Mary in the front seat, Nitze crossed Beacon Street from Charlesgate West. Suddenly they saw two people walking arm in arm; Nitze slammed on the brakes, but not in time. He jumped out, pulled the two into his car, and raced to the hospital. The man’s leg was fractured. The woman, Victoria Stuart, was badly wounded; she died a few hours later.
Nitze was shaken by the accident and then by the suit brought against him by the families of the victims—a legal case that dominated his letters home for the next few months. He ended up paying lump sums of several thousand dollars to the man and to Stuart’s estate, an arrangement his lawyer thought much safer than going to trial. “I am convinced there was no good ground for a conviction, yet juries are so swayed by prejudice that the fact that a Harvard student in the company of young people of means and social position, on their way to a Back Bay party, [became] involved in a motor accident, might easily lead to conviction.”
Nitze kept his cool and acted wisely. Friends complimented his composure. His actions seemed to make Ames fall more deeply in love. Referencing his solo involvement in the suit, she wrote, “I can’t bear the idea of you all alone out there—having to face everything yourself. But darling—know you are strong and you have proved that to us already.” In another letter, she lamented, “You say I never tell you anything—I don’t—it’s time—last night I wanted to tell you I loved you. That I would marry you. But I could not. . . . You have so terribly much ahead of you—you are so far above me in every way—I didn’t think I could make you happy—would help you—I haven’t enough to give—I’m so young—and spoiled. . . . But I love you Paul—I do—I know I do now.”
Nitze, however, was less smitten. At one point, he told Ames that she was lazy, thoughtless, and self-indulgent. Soon after he graduated, they broke off the relationship, and Nitze headed to Europe.
A few years later, though, he met a woman he considered his equal in strength and wit: Phyllis Pratt, the glamorous daughter of Ruth Baker Pratt, one of the country’s first congresswomen. At one of his first appearances at her house, Paul, twenty-five years old and somewhat impertinent, got in a fierce argument over the causes of the Great Depression—with the governor of the Bank of England. Afterward, Pratt asked her daughter, “You are not interested in that young man, are you?”
“Perhaps,” said Phyllis.
“I am going upstairs to be sick,” responded Pratt.
She came down though soon afterward. “If you are interested in him, I’ll change my mind. I love you, Phyllis, and if you are serious, I’ll consider him a son of mine.”
Neither Nitze nor his family had any hesitation. “Prepare yourself for the good news,” he wrote his mother. “Phyllis Pratt seems to think that she can bear to see my sour face across the breakfast table for years to come and what’s more enjoy it. . . . Come East soon and see the paragon. Your son has really done a master stroke.”
At their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Nitze would reflect on a conversation that he and Phyllis had soon before they became engaged. He was driving her home along the East River and they parked to talk about whether they should spend their lives together. Nitze declared that he loved Phyllis beyond measure, but said he simply was not ready for marriage. He was too nervous, high-strung, ambitious, and temperamental. He was too interested in a career. But Phyllis said he had it all wrong. “I had arrogantly assumed it would all depend on me; if we got married it would depend on both of us. She was sure it would succeed.”
He and Phyllis were married until she died, fifty-five years later.
IN HIS LATE twenties, Kennan’s career in the Foreign Service began to soar. By his estimation, he earned promotions faster than anyone in his class. While serving in Moscow from 1933 until 1937, he made close friends inside the American embassy and in other European missions. He worked hard, mostly reporting back home on the Moscow political scene, and enjoyed life and debate with his friends. “Most of us look back on those days, I suppose, as the high point of life—the high point at least in comradeship, in gaiety, in intensity of experience.” His daughter would later compare his experiences in those years to a “first love.”
He left Moscow once in 1935, having become terribly ill three days after the murder of Sergey Kirov, a friend and rival of Stalin’s. Kennan spent several months in an Austrian sanitarium. As was often the case with him, he may have stayed in his sickbed longer than necessary. In later years, he would confess to his daughter that he found nurses strikingly comforting—and alluring, too. He surmised that this was because of his absent mother and because of the female nurses who had been such a large source of what comfort he was given in his childhood.
After his stint in Moscow, Kennan returned to the United States for a year and worked on the Russia desk of the State Department. In September 1938, he was sent to Prague, a capital firmly in the sights of a Nazi government now beginning to make territorial demands upon its weaker neighbors. On his third or fourth day at the legation, a gorgeous woman with long golden hair stormed in. Why wasn’t America doing anything for the hundreds of thousands of Czechs fleeing the Germans? she demanded. Kennan murmured that he could do nothing and wrote her off as an ill-informed do-gooder. Unknown then, the woman, Martha Gellhorn, soon made something of herself, both as one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives and as one of the century’s great war correspondents and letter writers.
Not long after his encounter with Gellhorn, Kennan had the irritating task of having to arrange for a visit by the son of America’s well-connected ambassador in London. Kennan found the request ludicrous and the timing absurd. But he reluctantly and diligently took the son around. Years later, that young man, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would make something of himself too.
In mid-March 1939, Hitler’s army marched in. As the Germans approached, Kennan thought about an obsession of his: good form. By looking correct and bearing oneself in the proper manner, he believed, one could hide, perhaps even diminish, all sorts of inner turmoil. The morning the Nazis rolled into Prague, Kennan made sure to shave extra carefully, so as not to give the impression of someone harried by Hitler’s triumph. Kennan maintained that kind of veneer throughout his life. Friends and colleagues would long note his fine sense of self-control and his extraordinary discipline. But underneath were stormy seas.
For example, three years after the Nazis arrived in Prague, during his internment in Bad Nauheim, Kennan confided to his diary that his fits of depression brought him closer to understanding reality than when he felt contentment. “There is only one solution. You have come to this conclusion over and over again. It is to abandon hope, to acknowledge one’s self as old and beyond these things. My God, man, you are no youngster any more. What do you expect?”
The next day, his despair increased.
What do I actually want in life? Which is within the conceivable realm of possibility? For myself I would wish (1) a happy, beloved personal life, and (2) work which I consider positive. The first of these is out of the question because of the tragedy that has occurred. The second is out of the question largely because I am an American. If a people were only deluded you might do something with it. But when it is biologically undermined and demoralized, there is no future for it—regardless of the outcome of the war—but to suffer the consequences of its deficiencies. . . .
The only solution then, personally, is gardening, or the sort of a glorified gardening called gentlemanly farming—that is the perhaps the only form of playing with toys which is not ridiculous in elderly men. And it gives me a chance to acquit our responsibilities toward at least a small section of that earth which—in the mean—we men have so abominably misused and disfigured. . . .
Why in the name of God, must I be pursued by misfortune in this relentless way? . . . I cannot face these people now. I am burning inside with rage and humiliation. To think that I, George Kennan, should be in the position of having to conceal anything. If I go away then and lead a normal life, and the thing later comes out, I have made myself a double hypocrite. I should have to withdraw from them anyway. Then I should rather do it now and anticipate them.
In a moment of weakness, he had sinned and done something so heinous he could not even name it in his diary, and something he would never speak or write about publicly. But the nature of his self-approbation points to marital infidelity. And two people close to him confirmed that the event causing so much anguish was an affair with another detainee.
PAUL NITZE’S PROFESSIONAL CAREER began with a lesson about discipline. Recently graduated from Harvard, Nitze walked into the office of Clarence Dillon, the head of the powerful Wall Street firm Dillon Read, bearing a letter of recommendation from a family friend. Within “about five seconds,” he wrote home, Dillon had figured him out. He was a young man floating on a cloud of self-confidence: the oldest son in a line of oldest sons dating back to the sixteenth century, who had rarely applied himself.
Dillon pointed to a spreadsheet lying in the office. “You see what I have in front of me?” he said. He was reviewing the fiftieth draft of a bond advertisement. “The most competent lawyers and accountants in New York have gone over this word by word, comma by comma, figure by figure,” Dillon said. “And you know what I am doing? I am going through this to see whether the arithmetic is correct, whether the grammar is correct.”
Lesson number one: pay attention to detail. Lesson number two: you will mean nothing to me until you have actually done something.
Still, Dillon saw promise in the young man, so he invited him to lunch with one of his vice presidents, a thirty-seven-year-old former naval aviator named James Forrestal. The two were trying to map out a merger that would create the most powerful bank in the country. “It was an extraordinary experience,” Nitze wrote home. “I left feeling very small and ineffectual. Forrestal impressed me as being very keen and forceful. A much finer specimen than anything I have seen for a long time.”
Dillon hired Nitze a few months later, right before the stock market crash that helped trigger the Great Depression. Nitze did apply himself, and he climbed fast. He was not a complete success, though. As with his investments throughout his life, Nitze lost big nearly as often as he won. For three years, he said, he became a “nonperson” in the eyes of Dillon after losing $1.5 million of the firm’s money in a failed effort to take over a utility company.
Nevertheless, a decade after joining Dillon Read, Nitze had earned a reputation as one of Wall Street’s ablest young men. He was again close to Dillon and he had become a confidant of Forrestal. But maybe his conversion from dilettante to executive had come too fast; at age thirty, he was tired of finance and convinced that he should do something he considered more important.
Nitze also knew that he had not lived up to his father’s expectations. William A. Nitze always wanted his only son to be smarter, more intellectually distinguished, and more bookish—perhaps a professor of Romance languages. He thought a career in business was a step down for the family. Writing home, Paul frequently boasted about what he had read. He was always seeking a certain respect, and he knew he would not win it with a job as what the old man called a “money-lender.” Years later, he would complain that no one had ever had a more demanding father.
But his father’s example also haunted him in a negative way. Privately, he considered the great scholar a partial failure. William Nitze and his University of Chicago colleagues were, Paul recalled, “the most admirable group of men one could imagine.” But, he added, “they were having no impact upon the things that were going on in the world that seemed to me to be the most tragic and important.”
In 1937, just before the economy plummeted again, Nitze left investment banking to spend a year taking graduate classes at Harvard in philosophy and sociology. But it did not work. He could not find the answers in stock tables, and he could not find them in a deep analysis of Spengler. He started his own firm: Paul H. Nitze and Company was a modest success, but running it was stressful, and he soon returned to Dillon Read. “It was kind of exciting working on [my] own,” he would later recall, “but your judgment is better and you can do it better if you associate with a group.”
He kept thinking he had more important work to do than finance. Then, one day, James Forrestal, who had become the firm’s president, gave Nitze exactly that opportunity. On June 22, 1940, as France began its surrender to Germany, FDR asked Forrestal to join the government as an administrative assistant. Forrestal had worked closely with Nitze in their years together at Dillon Read and he sent a cable immediately to the young man, who was then negotiating a deal in Louisiana. “Be in Washington Monday morning. Forrestal.”
Nitze bolted to the capital. His destiny was at last apparent: he would find his identity in service to his country. There remained just one obstacle to overcome: a black sheep in the family who would complicate Nitze’s ambition at several more points throughout his career.
AT AROUND ONE A.M. on July 30, 1916, a fire broke out aboard a barge moored at Black Tom Island, in New York harbor. An hour later, the barge’s entire cargo of munitions blew up. More explosions followed. The ground shook as though in an earthquake; a fireball filled the sky. Nearly every window in Jersey City blew out; the streets of Manhattan’s financial district were filled with glass. Even the windows of the New York Public Library, three and a half miles uptown, shattered. “City Is Terror Stricken,” declared the New York Times.
Five nights later, at the top of the Hotel Astor in midtown Manhattan, a stout, burly man walked up to a smaller, mustachioed fellow and triumphantly said: “How about that bonfire?” The smaller man asked for details on who had planted the explosives. “It’s better if you don’t know too much,” replied the other. The smaller man signaled his agreement and quietly handed over two $1,000 bills.
The conspirator making the payment was Paul Hilken, Paul Nitze’s uncle and the man for whom he was named. Hilken’s role in the sabotage of the munitions barge was to funnel cash from German intelligence operatives to the men who had pulled off the job. The aim of the conspiracy was to thwart U.S. arms shipments to Britain.
For years, Hilken kept his role secret, continuing his career as a successful Baltimore businessman. But in 1928 he decided to come clean, after being persuaded to do so by lawyers working a case brought against the government of Germany by American companies whose property had been destroyed in the blast. The lawyers had learned of suspicions of his role in the attack, tracked him down, and promised him that there would be no legal consequences for speaking out. Hilken’s ties to Germany had dissipated over the years and he agreed. At first, the results were disastrous. Hilken tried to prove that the German government had supported the conspiracy, but he lacked proof. Germany won an early round in the international court adjudicating the dispute. The press denounced Hilken as both the traitor he admitted to being and the liar he appeared to be.
On Christmas Eve of 1930, however, Hilken was rummaging in his ex-wife’s attic, looking for a place to hide presents for his daughter in the house he had lived in thirteen years earlier. He found a small hidden door that revealed a long-forgotten wooden box. In it were a number of old magazines that revealed the particulars of the conspiracy: the key messages had been written in lemon juice on their pages.
To read the messages, one had to take a hot iron to the paper, scorching the lemon juice and turning it brown. Four-digit numbers split up some sentences; Hilken remembered that dropping the first digit and reading the last three in reverse revealed a page number. The decoder would turn to that page, hold it up to the light, and look for pinpricks in particular letters. The pinpricked letters would then spell out a name to be inserted in place of the four-digit number. Hilken now had documentary proof of his own involvement as well as that of his co-conspirators’.
At first, the encoded messages were denounced as forgeries, but Hilken eventually persuaded the courts of their authenticity. Then, in 1939, twenty-three years after the barge exploded, and thanks to the long hard work of the prosecutor, John McCloy, a conspiracy was proven. The court ordered Germany to pay the United States $50 million.
The verdict vindicated Hilken but did not restore his good name. The next year, when his nephew headed to Washington, the FBI began an intensive investigation of his background. Not only had Paul Nitze’s uncle organized sabotage on behalf of Germany, but Nitze himself had also reportedly exclaimed at a dinner party in 1940 that he would rather live under Hitler’s Reich than the British Empire. The investigation was long and it was thorough. Meanwhile, Nitze could not be put on the government payroll: he began his career working for Forrestal on a Dillon Read salary.
Eventually, Nitze was cleared. He had made foolish comments about Germany—perhaps out of ignorance, or perhaps as part of his penchant for contrarian argument—but nearly everyone interviewed described his loyalty as unquestionable. His mentor played a particular role. “Forrestal indicated that he had known Nitze for many years and considered him one hundred percent American and neither pro-German nor pro-Nazi,” read the report.
Nitze could finally become an official employee of the U.S. government. He also now had an extensive FBI file, full of details of his uncle’s sins and the bureau’s unfounded suspicions that his mother was a Nazi supporter as well. His enemies would circulate this material repeatedly through the coming decades.
KENNAN, TOO, HAD a skeleton in his filing cabinet: an essay he wrote while in a very dark mood.
His problem was intellectual, and it stemmed from his disorientation upon returning to the United States in 1937 after nearly a decade abroad. He felt alienated in a land that had transformed itself culturally, economically, and politically since his departure. The quiet Midwest of his childhood seemed to be vanishing. Political bosses and ethnic lobbies dominated Capitol Hill during the fierce congressional election campaign of 1938. Not for the last time, Kennan felt like a man without a country.
He was working in Washington and living in Alexandria, a city he detested as full of “filling stations, advertising signboards, hot-dog stands, junked automobiles and trailer-camps. . . . Dirt, heat, rats and decay: that was Alexandria in the summer.” As he saw it, the United States had lost its independent spirit. Advertisers had turned people into dupes; modern magazines, movies, and fiction were turning minds to mush. Even American agriculture was broken.
Brooding in this foul mood in the summer heat, he wrote an essay he called “The Prerequisites.” American democracy and culture had fundamental flaws, he asserted. Government had to solve them, but could do so only by changing its entire nature. “The only solution to the problem lies along a road which very few Americans are willing to contemplate: along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.”
Kennan was no doubt influenced by his experiences in Austria in 1935, a country whose authoritarian rulers he considered completely benign. The same could happen here, he thought, and it might even represent what the authors of the Constitution would want if confronted by America’s current disarray. He did not want a dictatorship but, in full misanthrope mode, he declared that this dreadful country needed the firm hands of a group of young, dedicated, organized, and highly educated men. The new order would deny suffrage to immigrants, women, and blacks. Clear-sighted white men would make decisions wisely and quickly for the general good.
How would this group of elites come to power? Kennan did not say, but he was confident it could happen. He mentioned violent insurrection, only to declare it probably unnecessary. “If the present degeneration of American political life continues, it is more probable that power will eventually drop like a ripe apple.”
Fortunately, the apple did not drop. And fortunately for Kennan, no one saw the essay for decades. He never finished it, let alone sought to publish it. It gathered dust in his files for decades until C. Ben Wright, an enterprising doctoral student, dug it up in the mid-1970s, much to Kennan’s embarrassment. By then, it had become a relic: the youthful ravings, produced during a very dark and long-ago moment, of a man who had long since made his reputation.
IN LATE OCTOBER 1943, Kennan was on the final leg of the arduous five-day journey from Portugal to Washington, sitting in the dining car of a train headed south from New York to the capital.
He did not know what awaited him there. As chargé d’affaires in the American embassy in Lisbon, Kennan had been negotiating over U.S. access to the Azores islands, an ideal mid-Atlantic base. Kennan thought, as he usually did, that the U.S. government had handled the talks crudely and disrespectfully, so he had discarded his negotiating orders and given the Portuguese prime minister assurances that America had no intention of seizing the islands. After this act of insubordination, Kennan received a note summoning him home immediately. He feared a severe governmental reprimand.
As Kennan pondered his fate, another well-tailored young man approached him. Paul Nitze was always looking for conversation, whether in a Berlin guesthouse or a Washington-bound train. He found something compelling about Kennan and sat down across from him in the dining car. The pair started talking and Kennan told a story about a party he had attended where one of the guests, shooting rockets off on a hot, dry day, had started a fire that nearly burned up the land nearby. Kennan had organized a bucket brigade to put out the conflagration. “He found the episode hilarious,” Nitze recalled.
The junior man no doubt found it hilarious too. It was his kind of stunt. Every Fourth of July for decades, Nitze would host fireworks parties, inviting hundreds of guests to his Maryland farm. One specialty was a firework that looked like an American flag.
The two talked about politics in southern Europe and the dangers of Soviet communism. Nitze found his partner “charming, witty, and urbane.” At Union Station, they shook hands and parted ways. Nitze went back to the State Department to continue his wartime economics work. Kennan, hoping to rescue his career, hustled into a meeting with the secretary of war and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He then met with the president, who found the young diplomat brilliant and fully persuasive. Instead of being fired, Kennan returned to Portugal with a letter of presidential support. Less than a year later, the Azores would provide a critical wartime base for the Allies.
Kennan spent the rest of the war abroad and at its end stood over the Victory Day celebration in Red Square. Nitze ended up in Glücksburg Castle and then on Jones Beach, trying to write up his plans for a bombing campaign against Japan. The two did not meet again for several years, but they remembered each other’s names.