In April 1951, George Kennan’s diary took a very dark turn. “I should find it hard, even if fortune favored me, to adjust to the consciousness of the jeopardy in which I have placed the happiness of other people. And not being sure that the blow would not still fall, I would continue to feel myself half a murderer, to have horror of myself, and to place limitations, in my own mind, on my ability to be useful to anyone else in any personal intimacy.”
In a few days, he would depart for Chicago to deliver a series of lectures on the history of American foreign policy. He was nervous about how he would behave, and if he could tame the furies inside. “Here—there will be all the things that are difficult for me: a strange city, a hotel, solitude, boredom, strange women, the sense of time fleeting, of time being wasted, of a life pulsating around me—a life unknown, untested, full of mystery—and yet not touched by myself.”
When he arrived, he seemed calmer, but still troubled. “I have never been any good at training children or dogs; that is why I am no good at training myself.”
The next day he wrote: “Lay down in my room, to rest for the lecture. When I try, as I did then, to bring the spirit to a state of complete repose, shutting out all effort and all seeking, I become aware of the remnants of anxieties and desires still surging and thrashing around, like waves in a swimming-pool when the last swimmer has left; and I realize in what a turmoil the pool of the soul usually is, and how long it must lie untroubled before the surface becomes calm and one can see the bottom.”
He would later add: “If dislike for one’s self were really, as the religious teachers claim, the beginning of virtue in the sight of the Lord, then I should be on the verge of saintliness.”
Kennan did not explain where, specifically, the angst came from or what caused it. But misery often sharpened his mind. He wrote the Long Telegram while violently ill. (He “felt his mind functioned better when his body was in a horizontal position,” said his longtime secretary Dorothy Hessman.) His seventy-nine-page essay about the hydrogen bomb came as he lost faith in his country to do the right thing, and in himself to have influence. He wrote his brilliant letter to Acheson when despondent about Korea. In the decades to come, almost all of his finest work would derive in some way from what he called the turmoil in the pool of the soul.
And this time it was no different. The six Chicago lectures in April 1951 were classics. He collected them in a book titled American Diplomacy, which would stay in print for thirty-five years and become a standard university text. From now on, he would have no need to doubt his ability to maintain a reputation—or a bank account.
The slim, crisp volume is generally described as a broadside against—in Kennan’s own, uncharacteristically clunky, phrase—a “legalistic-moralistic” approach to international problems. The first word referred to his belief that international law, or organizations like the United Nations, could not resolve the world’s woes. The second word pointed to America’s tendency to sit in moral judgment over other nations.
To put it more simply, the book was a critique of American democracy and its influence on foreign policy. In the first five lectures, Kennan traced American decision making through major international events, running from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to World War II. In each case, Kennan asserted, American politicians had acted unwisely. They did not understand what other nations wanted, and they did not understand their own nation’s actual points of leverage. In large part because of poor leadership, the public remained indifferent until war began, whereupon hysteria followed.
The latter problem particularly infuriated Kennan. A conflict between the United States and another power could suddenly seem like an urgent necessity, even if it had been deemed not worth a single American life the day before. He declared:
I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment. He is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.
Kennan’s solution was to put manacles on our international ambitions. America was going to remain a democracy, and he preferred no alternative on offer. But if that made wise action in foreign policy impossible, we ought to have a less confrontational policy. Instead of grandstanding, warring, and constantly meddling in countries and cultures we did not understand, we should have “an attitude of detachment and soberness and readiness to reserve judgment.”
Political scientists would classify this viewpoint as “realism.” It was not new to Kennan: he had long doubted America’s ability to understand other nations and to act effectively in foreign affairs—with his doubts growing as his power receded. Until the very end of Kennan’s life, restraint was one of the pillars of his political philosophy. With rare exceptions, he would advocate that the United States leave other countries alone. His view derived partly from a feeling that no country could have decisive influence on another and partly from a sense that his country in particular would have only a baleful impact.
Paul Nitze saw the world very differently. In NSC-68 he had described the United States as “the center of power in the free world,” which “must organize and enlist the energies and resources of the free world in a positive program for peace which will frustrate the Kremlin design for world domination.” He never used such purple language again. But throughout his life he would believe strongly that the United States was indispensable, fundamentally good, and fully capable of changing the world for the better.
AS KENNAN MADE the transition to permanent outsider, Nitze grew into his role as head of the Policy Planning Staff, enjoying what he would later call “the happiest and most productive days of my life.” He worked closely with Acheson on matters ranging from the decision to let Germany rearm to the reluctant choice to offer some aid to French troops in their war in Vietnam. He was powerful and influential, if also somewhat anonymous. The economist Thomas Schelling, a young official working on the Marshall Plan in Europe at the time, remembers hearing about a “Nitze plan” and assuming that “N.I.T.Z.E.” was an acronym.
The years of 1951 and 1952 were relatively calm for the Truman administration. The immediate crises that followed World War II had ceased. Western Europe was not going to go communist and Germany was going to remain divided. The arms race had begun, and the Korean War was drawing to a close. The balance of power no longer seemed so precarious. But in winding down the era of colonial empires, World War II had caused ferment across the former subject nations from the Gold Coast to Indonesia. Eventually, those colonies all won independence, some professedly democratic and others communist. For the most part, however, they were nationalists. And for the most part America did not know how to respond.
Nitze’s first important engagement with the Third World had to do with Iran, an oil-rich country close to Israel and sharing a border with the United States’ biggest enemy. Right after World War II, Stalin had gazed at a map of his country pinned to a wall of his dacha. He commented favorably on the USSR’s northern, eastern, and western boundaries, then pointed southward, toward Iran. “But here I don’t like our border!” he exclaimed.
By 1951, Britain controlled most of the country’s oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and through the UK’s close relations with the ruling shah. That year, however, a fierce nationalist named Mohammed Mossadegh took power and declared that, henceforth, the Iranian state, not arrogant British executives, would run the wells. The move incited a boycott by global oil companies; without British technical skills, Iran’s oil industry began to collapse. Nitze’s job was to help negotiate a compromise that would get Britain involved and the oil flowing again. His first crucial assignment was to talk with the new Iranian premier when he visited New York for a United Nations meeting in October.
Nitze expected to meet a maniac. Mossadegh had a reputation as a strident anti-imperialist who often fainted dramatically on the floor of the Iranian parliament. He slept through cabinet meetings and wept while giving speeches. His skin was pasty, his nose long. His shoulders slumped so badly that one writer described him as resembling “a condemned man marching stoically toward execution.” When he met Nitze, he claimed to be ill, so he was taken to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda. When Nitze returned to talk, Mossadegh was wearing a brown mohair dressing gown. He insisted on remaining supine on his hospital bed.
Nitze was nonetheless impressed. He found the leader sane, rational, and always in control of himself. Nitze and his colleague George McGhee sat at the foot of the bed and argued over the terms of a potential deal to restart the oil industry. Nitze had boned up on prices, currency rates, and marketing patterns. He played the bad cop, pushing Mossadegh on every issue. The prime minister parried back and even used a little anti-Semitism to goad Nitze: “You know, I’m beginning to suspect that your name is Levy.”
Later, Nitze would drive out to Virginia with the prime minister for a day at McGhee’s farm. When the two began arguing about politics, Nitze realized that he was dealing with an elitist. America dreaded that Mossadegh would Bolshevize his country; instead, he wanted to reform its political system so that only the literate could vote. In Nitze’s view: “He was canny, witty, and hard to pin down, a shrewd and tricky politician, but in my view, far preferable to the Shah and his regime.”
Nitze’s other brief was to negotiate with the British, as well as with the American oil companies, which, Mossadegh insisted, should become part of a consortium. These talks continued, often secretly, throughout 1952. By December, Nitze thought he had a deal; he flew to London for some final negotiations. But news of his trip had broken to the media. Dozens of cameramen swarmed him at the London airport, and the papers were full of speculation. He dodged the brouhaha and continued the talks, quietly thrilled with the attention. “In England, I found I had become a famous, if mysterious, person,” Nitze wrote home.
The deal soon fell apart. Mossadegh decided the terms were not right, and the Americans had other plans for him anyway. In November 1952, the CIA had begun quietly plotting his overthrow. The following summer, mysterious riots would begin in Tehran. The agency hired thugs to run through the streets chanting pro-Mossadegh slogans, smashing windows, and causing mayhem. Soon they were in the heart of Tehran, sawing and chiseling down a statue of the shah. Then, another group of hired operatives arrived to “save” the situation by organizing counterdemonstrations. Just as planned, chaos resulted, which the agency fed by hiring circus performers, weight lifters, and jugglers to parade through the center of the city proclaiming their love for the shah.
The madness that day in August 1953 did turn the public against Mossadegh, and men began to surge toward the premier’s house. At the end of a bloody fight, Mossadegh, dressed in pajamas and holding a cane, surrendered. The shah was back in power.
Nitze did not like the outcome of the American subversion at all. Shah Reza Pahlavi was incompetent, corrupt, and weak. Supporting him was like taking out a long-term lease on a rotting building. For twenty-five years, Pahlavi maintained close relations with the United States, and with the American oil industry, until a revolution brought to power a regime far more reactionary and anti-American than Mossadegh’s—and one that relentlessly exploited the story of his martyrdom.
Kennan drew a different lesson from the CIA’s intervention. The United States had not merely supported the wrong leader; it should never have become involved. His political philosophy held that one country should be extremely cautious about involving itself in another—and acting covertly through the CIA made such action both more tempting and more dangerous. Worse, after the restoration of the shah and the CIA’s other supposed successes of the 1950s, Third World governments for generations blamed the CIA for every bad thing that happened to them. Every coup, every financial crisis, every power outage would be perceived as the result of a scheme cooked up by trench-coated men in the Virginia suburbs. A quarter century after the meddling in Iran, Kennan called his role in setting up the CIA’s covert operations “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
IN THE SPRING and summer of 1952, as Nitze negotiated with Mossadegh, Kennan was involved in his own bit of espionage, though he did not know it at the time.
Freshly appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kennan was alone in his study at the American embassy in Moscow, reading aloud scripts from Voice of America. (“Threats, bullying, trickery, treachery.”) His absence from government had not lasted long. One year after the Kennan-Malik talks, President Truman had summoned back the Soviet expert and former PPS chief. (“These were the bludgeons used mercilessly by Stalin.”)
Kennan’s family had not arrived yet, and meanwhile, to sharpen his language skills, he was reading aloud the VOA scripts regularly sent to him. They would help him remember the latest vocabulary connected to his work. He read the VOA propaganda calmly and precisely, practicing intonation and accent. Recalling the incident years later, he did not note which scripts he read, but those published that spring ranged from political diatribes to songs written by prison laborers.
Kennan sat and practiced in the embassy, wholly unaware that the wooden Great Seal of the United States that hung on his wall harbored a radio transmitter. Somewhere in Moscow, a KGB man listened carefully, no doubt wondering why the American ambassador sat alone, denouncing the Soviet Union in Russian deep into the night.
(“There are many animals which are infinitely more powerful than the Bolshevik cat. The yearning for freedom, the hatred for tyrants, the thirst for life, the awareness of right—all these are many times more powerful than Bolshevist tyranny. The main thing is the will to struggle.”)
KENNAN HAD ARRIVED in Moscow full of confidence. He said at one point that he believed he had spent his whole career preparing for this job, and the early days exhilarated him. Moscow was mysterious and mesmerizing. He felt he understood the men in power there; surely they understood him, too. They would know he was neither an enemy nor an ignorant dupe. He could work back channels and speak Russian man-to-man. Truman was not running for reelection, which meant that a new administration would arrive in January. Perhaps he could whack some sense into a relationship gone entirely insane. Off the record, he told reporters just before departing that he believed he could warm the chill between the two nations.
He wanted discipline, and he wanted to make a good first impression on his hosts. When he learned, before arriving, that two embassy underlings, Malcolm Toon and Richard Davies, had argued in Foreign Affairs that the United States needed to move past containment and try to detach Eastern Europe from the Soviets, he had them shipped out immediately. “Get those scorpions off the premises,” Toon remembers Kennan saying.
Kennan’s balloon deflated fast. He received no instructions from Washington, and the Soviet government showed no enthusiasm for conversation, in Russian or in English. Even the Russians he remembered from his younger days at the embassy averted their eyes. One official he actually spoke with was a young man who dashed into the embassy and told the ambassador that he could eliminate the Soviet high command if just given guns and money. Kennan threw the fellow out, assuming it was a Soviet trap—a suspicion that his biographer John Lewis Gaddis would later confirm.
Soviet handlers tracked Kennan everywhere, even when he went swimming. Thugs prevented his toddler son from approaching Russian children. The constraints were maddening and were made more so to Kennan because he believed them the response to amateurish American spy efforts. His colleagues were obsessed with photographing and recording and in general deploying various espionage gadgets of “a childish and ‘Boy Scout’ nature.” American intelligence operations were not garnering information; they were merely games that reduced Soviet respect for the U.S. mission.
With Kennan in place, Stalin even started a “hate America campaign,” which filled Moscow with lurid propaganda. “Placards portraying hideous spiderlike characters in American military uniform, armed with spray guns and injection needles for bacteriological warfare, stared down at us from every fence throughout the city,” Kennan wrote.
The atmosphere rattled Kennan; at one point, he requested and received cyanide capsules from the CIA. He told Gaddis he had requested them because he feared that he would be captured and “I would be asked—or put under torture—and asked to tell things which I didn’t want to tell.”
A quarter century later, Nitze would develop another theory. Hearing of his old friend’s request for cyanide pills, Nitze decided to investigate. According to a memo that Nitze kept in his files, his inquiries revealed that a CIA official named Hugh Cumming “carried the pills to Kennan—supposedly he got in trouble with some ‘dame’ and thought the Russians might in some way publicize it. They did not ‘and he’s been grateful ever since.’ ”
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, about four months into his posting, Kennan departed Moscow for a brief trip to London, where he planned to give a speech advocating that the United States soften its Soviet policy. His flight had a planned stopover at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport and, as they neared the city, Kennan pulled out a small notepad and jotted down answers to potential press questions. If asked, “Have you seen Stalin?” he would reply, “There has been no occasion for me to ask to be received by Premier Stalin.” He ran through a series of other questions and then wrote a note to himself. “Don’t be a boy and don’t feed the little ego. Be deliberate. Learn not to mind pauses and silences. Expect the lonely and the boring. Get use[d] to it. Never be a raconteur unless you are desperate.”
Unfortunately, he did not follow his own admonition. On the tarmac, a reporter asked if the embassy had many social contacts in Moscow. “Don’t you know,” asked Kennan, “how foreign diplomats live in Moscow?”
“No. How do they?”
“Well, I was interned here in Germany for several months during the last war. The treatment we receive in Moscow is just about like the treatment we internees received then.”
Martha Mautner, who had transmitted the document that made Kennan’s name, witnessed the act that now permanently blackened it. But she did not think the statement seemed so outrageous; she considered it, in fact, “obvious.”
Moscow, however, disagreed—or at least it did not want the obvious declared. Stalin could not possibly allow the American ambassador to compare him to Hitler. Kennan was declared persona non grata and barred from returning to the country, even to pack. His wife would have to arrange for their belongings to be shipped home. And the Kennans would have to live at their farm in Pennsylvania: they had rented out the house in Princeton, expecting to be abroad for at least two years.
Kennan got the news in Geneva, where his daughter Joan was attending school. He went straight to a movie theater, one place he knew the media could not find him and where he could compose his thoughts. Later, reporters finally ran him down at his daughter’s school and surrounded the campus. The director of the institution had to hustle Kennan out the back entrance.
He was now an international sensation. His oldest daughter, Grace, heard the news by way of a passing newsboy’s holler: “Kennan kicked out of Moscow.”
The former ambassador to the Soviet Union was despondent. He grabbed the same little notebook in which he had scrawled the advice for the press conference to write out a few lines from Shakespeare. “Nay then, farewell! / I have touched the highest point of all my greatness / and, from that / full meridian of my glory / I haste now to my setting / I shall fall / like a bright exhalation in the evening / and no man see me more.”
NITZE HAD GOTTEN the result he urged in NSC-68: with the Korean War, the United States massively increased its military spending. But that was not enough. For the rest of the Truman administration, he would push for more and then more again.
He was obsessed with what he called “the correlation of forces.” One could calculate some fuzzy, but still definable, comparison of U.S. and Soviet strength. How many weapons did we have? Who were our allies? Who did the rest of the world think was gaining power?
This almost mathematical notion would become the centerpiece of Nitze’s worldview for decades; he believed it the key to making sense of the Cold War. Any Soviet advantage would foster aggression on their part, and yielding on ours. An American lead meant stability. When talking about this topic, Nitze would often hark back to the Korean War, which he thought had come about because Moscow felt relatively strong. The world was like a giant chessboard and the correlation of forces revealed who had the strongest pieces in the most advantageous squares. The theory had a relentless logic that led to an exponential speeding of the arms race. If the Soviet Union was ahead, the United States had to redouble its efforts to catch up. If the United States were ahead, it should redouble its efforts to expand its lead.
For the next forty years, Nitze became something like a coach on the sidelines of a never-ending race, exhorting his athlete to run faster each time he completed a lap, whether ahead or behind. He wrote NSC-68 in the spring of 1950 because he feared we had fallen behind. One year later, he concluded that we had to accelerate our rearmament; the interval between our moment of weakness and our moment of strength was an opportune time for the Soviets to move. Six months after that, his message was the same: faster, faster! The next spring, with peace talks ongoing in Korea, Nitze worried that the Soviets might reduce world tensions, and thus persuade the “free world to let down its guard and neglect its armament effort.” A few months later, he perceived that the U.S. position had improved. His recommendation was predictable: a big lead in the arms race would give the United States ever so much more leverage.
But what if our redoubled efforts inspired the Soviets to work harder, too? Then a constant redoubling of effort would start a mad dash to disaster. Nitze did not agree with that line of argument. The Soviets wanted to destroy us and were working as hard as possible to do so, independent of our actions. America was reacting to their hostility, not inspiring it.
Most Soviet experts disagreed. In the summer of 1950, Kennan wrote in his diary about how easy it was for people to think of Stalin as a simple ogre, rather than to try to understand his complicated mind. In the summer of 1951, Chip Bohlen blasted Nitze’s latest call for rearmament. “My chief objection,” he wrote Nitze, “is the presentation of the Soviet Union as a mechanical chess player engaged in the execution of a design fully prepared in advance with the ultimate goal of world domination.”
Yes, Moscow was aggressive, Bohlen conceded. But not ineluctably. By acting cautiously during the Korean War, Moscow had shown it was not hell-bent on confrontation. “Soviet actions in Korea,” he wrote, “underline the extraordinarily pragmatic and opportunistic nature of Soviet policy and the absence of any fidelity to a blueprint, or even design.”
Nitze would have none of it, arguing that if his opponent agreed with his premises he must agree with his conclusions, too. Bohlen, Nitze said, believed that the Soviet Union was hostile and opportunistic. Accepting that, “it seems to me that the unavoidable conclusion is that the U.S.S.R. will exercise their capabilities at any time and place they conceive to be favorable.”
The two men slugged away at each other in memos and meetings, wearying Acheson. Eventually the secretary stepped into the ring and raised Nitze’s arm in the air. The long-running debate between the Soviet experts and the Policy Planning Staff was at a stage where, as a friend of his had said in another context, “you hold the sieve while I milk the barren heifer.” As Acheson later recalled: “The way to peace and action required separating the chief contestants for a cooling-off period. Accordingly, one stayed in Washington [Nitze], one went to South America [Kennan], and the third to Europe [Bohlen].”
That victory won, Nitze continued to push U.S. rearmament ever forward. Soon he got definitive news on the great issue over which he and Kennan had split. Three years after Edward Teller’s blackboard sketching, the United States exploded its first hydrogen bomb. At 7:14 on the morning of November 1, 1952, Elugelab was a pretty coral island in the Pacific, emptied of all human inhabitants. One minute later, it was a crater two hundred feet beneath the sea. The explosion vaporized birds flying within several miles of the island. If exploded in New York City, the bomb would have obliterated all five boroughs.
Kennan trembled. Nitze smiled. A few months earlier, he had written another memo arguing that the United States should press ahead with H-bomb testing. Negotiations with the Soviets would come to nothing unless the correlation of forces tilted America’s way. Only when well ahead could the United States talk about slowing down.
AFTER HIS EJECTION from Moscow, Kennan briefly put his tail between his legs. He flew to London, where it’s likely that the first American to greet him was Paul Nitze, who was in town working on his Iranian business. The ex-ambassador then stayed quietly in Europe for a while, under orders to spare the Democrats the political embarrassment of his return until after the election.
Kennan realized that he had little chance at getting a top job after the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the election and promised to bring along the hawkish John Foster Dulles as secretary of state. Kennan’s chances of getting any post at all vanished when he gave a speech in the middle of January 1953 to the Pennsylvania Bar Association arguing that it would be foolish for the United States to try to overthrow Stalin, a statement the press viewed as a direct repudiation of Eisenhower’s pledge during the campaign to roll the Soviet Union back. The next day’s Washington Post declared, “Dulles Policy ‘Dangerous’ Kennan Says.”
According to Robert Bowie, who was about to replace Nitze as head of the Policy Planning Staff, “this did not endear Kennan to Dulles.” FBI officials put a note in their files that Kennan had “murdered himself politically.”
Indeed he had. Dulles barely listened to Kennan’s apologies and made no effort to find him a new job. In mid-March, he finally summoned Kennan to Washington and told him that he could think of “no niche” for him.
Kennan would soon pack up his papers from the State Department, an institution for which he had worked his entire adult life. On his final day, he wrote in his diary: “Then I took the elevator down, as on a thousand other occasions, and suddenly there I was on the steps of the building, in the baking, glaring heat: a retired officer, a private citizen, after 27 years of official life. I was not unhappy.”
SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA was born in Moscow in 1926, Joseph Stalin’s third legitimate child and first daughter. She stayed close to her doting father until her teen years, but the relationship frayed badly in 1943 when she fell in love with a dashing Jewish filmmaker named Alexei Kapler. Thirty-eight years old, handsome, and worldly, he introduced her to poetry and to art. Her full brother, Vasily, always jealous because Svetlana was the favorite child, told their father about Kapler and claimed he had introduced the girl to something else as well. Stalin erupted. “Such a war going on, and [you’re] spending the whole time [fornicating]!” he screamed at her.
The relationship was off; Kapler was soon exiled and then sent to the notorious Vorkuta labor camp, north of the Arctic Circle. “My father thought that I was his girl. He wanted me to be his, and to always be with him,” Svetlana says now, adding that only then did she viscerally understand his power. “It was the first time as a grown woman that I realized that my father could send a person to prison.”
In December 1952, three months after Kennan’s ejection, she stopped by the Kremlin. Stalin was behaving erratically, and dangerously: purging his doctors and the secret service while preparing a massive anti-Semitic campaign. He had decreed a vast military mobilization, as well as a study of the possibility of invading Alaska. To his twenty-six-year-old daughter, though, he acted normally. She recalls that her father’s face had turned slightly red and that he boasted excessively about having quit smoking. Otherwise, he seemed fine.
Three months later, Svetlana had a feeling that her father was calling for her. She tried to reach the Kremlin but was told she could not see him. Disconsolate, she visited a friend who tried to cheer her up by taking her to a movie. Unfortunately, the theater was playing an adaptation of The Captain’s Daughter, in which a father is executed in battle soon after forbidding his daughter to marry the man she loves. Svetlana sobbed throughout the film. The next morning, men instructed her to head to her father’s dacha immediately.
The day before, Stalin had suffered a stroke. One of his guards found him lying near the cot he often slept on, dressed in pajamas and a white undershirt. He had wet his pants and could not talk.
His terrified servants had been slow to act; eventually, they summoned the dictator’s daughter and son, as well as the Kremlin high command. Stalin’s regular physician was in prison and no one could find his medical records. Svetlana remembered a chaos of people running, doctors applying leeches to her father’s head and neck, and a nearly blind nurse trying to give him insulin, unaware that she was about to push the broken glass ampule down his throat.
Conflicting emotions roiled Svetlana. Her father’s face seemed beautiful as he lay there on his deathbed, and she loved him more tenderly than ever before. But she also knew some kind of deliverance was on its way. His death would lift a burden from her, from her country, and from everyone over whose life his shadow had passed.
The end came soon, but it was painful for all. “His face altered and became dark. His lips turned black and the features grew unrecognizable. The last hours were nothing but a slow strangulation,” she recalled.
At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death. . . . He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.
WITH THE DICTATOR’S DEATH, Washington saw an opening. Now might be the moment to start a war, to make peace, or to press for concessions.
Eisenhower’s top advisers split into two camps. Some wanted to take immediate action and promote chaos in the Soviet Union. Bohlen, recently named Kennan’s replacement as Moscow ambassador, and Nitze, still head of PPS, led another group. They wanted to move slowly, the better to take advantage of the internal Soviet strife that would take a few weeks or months to manifest itself. Nitze suggested that the United States wait for a short while and then press for a settlement in Korea. Perhaps the new Soviet leader would willingly agree, ending that war and driving a wedge between his country and the Chinese.
Eisenhower made a different choice. He wanted to give a big speech about peace. Nitze was ordered to assist the main drafters.
Now one of the highest-ranking remaining veterans of the Truman administration, Nitze appears to have approached the task a bit like a parent who wants to encourage his child’s idealism, but does not want him to make an error. He helped craft the oratory, but he also worked to exclude specific proposals and concessions.
A few days before the speech, Nitze was summoned to the White House on a Sunday morning and directed to a meeting in the president’s quarters on the second floor. Opening the wrong door, he found that there, indeed, was Eisenhower—in the middle of changing clothes and clad only in his undershorts. The error did not amuse the president. “Once you’ve seen a man in his BVDs,” Nitze later said, “the awe recedes.”
The final speech was beautiful and passionate—and, as Nitze wanted, largely free of detail. At worst, the struggle between the United States and the USSR would end in atomic war. As long as the conflict continued, Ike said, the best we could hope for would be “a life of perpetual fear and tension.” The president noted that “the cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.”
Eisenhower entitled the speech “The Chance for Peace,” and he ended with a call for the United States and the Soviet Union to try to resolve their problems. Both countries had new leaders. Now was a time to end the madness.
Moscow responded encouragingly. Pravda criticized some of Eisenhower’s premises and noted the lack of specifics. But it also reprinted the speech accurately and in full. This pleased Kennan, whose last major task before leaving the State Department was to help analyze the Soviet reaction. “The present Soviet leaders are definitively interested in pursuing with us the effort to solve some of the present international difficulties.” Their essential message, Kennan wrote, was “Put out your feelers: we will respond.”
It seemed like an opportunity for a new and better phase in the Cold War—but Kennan and Nitze would both have to watch from the outside. Dulles had already thrown Kennan out. Nitze would soon feel a hand on his back, pushing him toward the door.
Eisenhower and Dulles had no respect for Acheson and thus limited patience for his allies. First, they replaced Nitze as chair of the Policy Planning Staff with Robert Bowie. Then, as Nitze prepared to move into a lower-profile job in the Defense Department, the Washington Times-Herald, a paper closely aligned with Joseph McCarthy, published a short article describing him as “the latest Truman-Acheson lieutenant contemplated for retention in a powerful position under the Eisenhower Administration.” A few days before, McCarthy himself had called the FBI and “asked that he be furnished any available information concerning an individual named Nitze.”
Almost immediately, Nitze was out. He had hoped to spend the next eight years continuing his work from the inside and helping to shape Eisenhower’s foreign policy. Now, like Kennan, he had no idea whether his career had just come to a close.