Paul Nitze and George Kennan stumbled out of government into the wilderness of Eisenhower’s America together. They had arrived in Washington as young men on the rise. They had helped repair and rebuild the world. They had expected to stay in the State Department. And now, neither man knew what to do.
Kennan was forty-nine, Nitze forty-six. Each had four children, two off at school and two still at home. Each had dreams of striking a match to his public life—Kennan by heading to Europe, Nitze by returning to Wall Street—but their families did not want to move. Each man felt that his best work was yet to come. But each feared his chance had already passed.
Each man also now owned a farm—Nitze’s was in southern Maryland—to which he retreated and where he at first found bliss. “This period of unemployment has a great many virtues,” wrote Nitze’s wife in the summer of 1953. “Paul looks better than he has in fifteen years and is busy from sun-up till sun-down with farm chores.”
Each also began to spend time at a summer home. Nitze chose Northeast Harbor, Maine, close to the Rockefellers, Lippmanns, and Fords. Days were spent on the tennis courts and the trails of Acadia National Park. Nights passed dining on lobster, drinking red wine, and playing bridge. Kennan retreated to the Norwegian coastal town where his wife’s parents lived, and where few people spoke English. There he would sail his boat and sit quietly in solitude. He later wrote longingly of “the one meal a day, with unvarying boiled potatoes.”
And each toyed with elective office. One night, the doorbell rang at Kennan’s Princeton house. A Pennsylvania farmer had driven 150 miles to urge the former diplomat to run for Congress. Kennan had not registered with either political party and professed not to know the difference between them. He asked the man which he supported. “It turned out to be the Democrats. It would have made no difference to me had it been the other one.”
A sense of civic duty trumped electoral disdain; Kennan filed formal papers to enter the race for Pennsylvania’s Congressional 19th District. The party elders supported him, but not enough to clear the field. He would not only have to face a Republican; he would have to put the rest of his life, and his ability to earn money, on hold to campaign against other Democrats. Kennan decided that the job was not worth it unless he was appointed, so he dropped out. He was never the most likely of candidates. When Dean Acheson and Nitze heard about Kennan’s interest in running for Congress, they both burst out laughing at the thought of their former colleague on the campaign trail. And when a young Massachusetts senator named John Kennedy learned of Kennan’s decision not to run, he called a friend to crow about the failure of the wise man: even someone with that reputation for brilliance could not make it to first base in the complicated world of politics.
Nitze too decided to try his hand. He began making speeches, kissing babies, and giving money to local Maryland politicians. One day a top official from the state Democratic Party rang him up. Nitze’s pulse quickened at the prospect of an important endorsement. But no: the man wanted to know whether Nitze’s charismatic and gregarious wife had any interest in running for office. Jealous and surprised, Nitze snapped no, much to his later embarrassment and regret. He took it as a clear sign he should abandon his foray.
Instead of Capitol Hill, Kennan and Nitze each found something of a base in intelligence work. Both spent parts of the 1950s consulting for the CIA, with Kennan doing it for several years. But their real homes now were in academia. In an act of remarkable hubris and daring, Nitze and a cousin-in-law, Christian Herter, had founded the School of Advanced International Studies in 1943. Neither knew much about either education or international studies at the time. Born to a prominent family, and an aide to the U.S. delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference, Herter was nonetheless just a first-term congressman; Nitze had spent two years in the State Department and at the time was a mid-level bureaucrat dealing with minerals procurement. They both seemed closer to graduate students than to the founders of a school in a position to grant graduate degrees.
But impulse and vision triumphed over inexperience. In 1944, one year after the two kicked around the idea over coffee, the first students showed up for classes in a building on Florida Avenue in Washington. By 1950, the school had affiliated with Johns Hopkins. When Nitze left government, he began fund-raising and lecturing for SAIS. The school would grow and grow, becoming one of the country’s most important schools of foreign policy study. Nitze would long use it as a base, and he considered its founding to be one of his life’s great accomplishments.
Kennan, meanwhile, returned to the Institute for Advanced Study, which he had joined briefly before his appointment to Moscow. Run by Robert Oppenheimer, and only loosely affiliated with Princeton, IAS welcomed humanists and historians but was populated mainly by scientists and mathematicians. The aging Albert Einstein, with his frizzy white hair flowing, often walked with Kurt Gödel, black hair combed down. John von Neumann was busy building a supercomputer in the boiler-room basement.
What everyone had in common was intellectual rigor, or at least the appearance of it. Beth Straus, a friend of Kennan’s, remembers once going to an IAS dinner party where she sat beside two scholars who spent the whole time conversing past her in Latin. There was some initial resistance to Kennan’s appointment—von Neumann, for one, voted against it because the diplomat had not yet produced any scholarship of “exceptional character.” But Oppenheimer pushed it through. Kennan had an office, a salary, and quiet if not peace.
Describing a day during his first summer out of Washington, he wrote in his diary: “Behind me, figuratively stretched 27 years of foreign service; and behind that an almost forgotten and seemingly irrelevant youth and boyhood. Ahead of me, figuratively, was only a great question mark: somewhere between 1 and 30 years to live, presumably, and for what? I was numb inside and had little zest for the question.”
As the Eisenhower administration settled in, Nitze and Kennan found themselves in similar circumstances. But they were like two planets that orbit the same sun and somehow fall slightly out of sync—then spin endlessly away from each other.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER WON the presidency in 1952 while campaigning against the “negative, futile and immoral policy of ‘containment,’ which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism.” Instead of containing Moscow, we would roll the communists back.
Publicly mild-mannered and always responsible, Eisenhower did not really want to provoke the Russian bear—nor was he keen, once in office, to overhaul policies that he had helped the Truman administration design and implement. Within a few months of arriving in Washington, he was burying his campaign platform in a cemetery at the farthest edge of town. It was the start of a grand tradition in Cold War politics. Each time the White House switched hands after eight years being led by one party, the new president reverted toward the policies of his predecessor that he had denounced on the stump. Eisenhower started the trend. Kennedy campaigned on closing a missile gap that actually favored us. Nixon said he had a plan for peace in Vietnam. Carter declared that he would fundamentally change the arms race.
To come up with a new overarching strategy, Eisenhower’s top advisers decided in the spring of 1953 to begin a massive intellectual exercise. Dubbed the Solarium Project, after the White House sunroom where they conceived the idea, the plan was for three teams to present three different foreign policy strategies. Team A would argue for a continuation of containment. Team B would add a militaristic edge to containment: telling the Soviets that we would start a war if they crossed specific lines. Team C would argue for rolling the Soviets back.
The president summoned Kennan to run the first group. Nitze’s name was at the top of the initial list of candidates to participate, but somewhere along the way it vanished. In later years, he would assert that he passed up the opportunity because he wanted a vacation. An Eisenhower biographer, Richard Immerman, offers the more likely explanation that the president, firmly committed to limiting military spending, deleted Nitze’s name.
For Kennan, the Solarium Project was an opportunity for redemption. He worked hard with his team of six men throughout the early summer. Then, in mid-July, he got to stand at a podium and lay out a sweeping foreign policy before Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Dulles.
He started with his thesis from the X article that time was on America’s side. If the United States could maintain its power, eventually the Soviet Union would sink under its own weight. He then repudiated military aggression. Yes, we might need to resort to armed action from time to time, but rarely and locally. The Soviets were not likely to attack America now, and they would not likely do so as long as our policies remained steady and calm.
Kennan’s most dramatic proposal was a recasting of his and Nitze’s plan from the summer of 1948. Germany should be reunified, and American and Soviet troops withdrawn. In addition, he proposed overt and covert action to sow dissent in the Soviet Union and to build up indigenous forces in countries that the Soviets might target. If we moved wisely and cautiously, Moscow’s clients might slowly move toward our side. Sudden moves would backfire.
It was perhaps the most thorough and consistent presentation of the strategy of containment that he had pushed for the last six years. In his memoirs, Kennan describes the meeting as a triumph and a vindication. “At my feet, in the first row, silent and humble but outwardly respectful, sat Foster Dulles, and allowed himself to be thus instructed. If he then, in March, had triumphed by disembarrassing himself of my person, I, in [July], had my revenge by saddling him, inescapably, with my policy.”
But Kennan exaggerated. Eisenhower did settle on a policy of containment, but in a version that was very much of his own choosing. He agreed that the Soviet Union should be contained, not rolled back. But he also wanted American security to depend on nuclear forces, and he pointedly ignored Kennan’s recommendation to seek German unification. The policy paper that came out of the Solarium Project declared that the United States must maintain “a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage.” Kennan had surely not saddled the administration, inescapably, with that phrase.
For the most part, Kennan was a scrupulous memoirist, rarely succumbing to the temptation to exaggerate his influence. But just this once he indulged in self-delusion.
“IN WHAT CONNECTION have you known Dr. Oppenheimer?”
It was early 1954, and the anticommunist right was seeking more victims. The Soviets appeared to be churning out ever larger missiles and, in view of the USSR’s technological inferiority, someone’s treachery must have played a part. So now Senator Joseph McCarthy’s forces had their shotguns of insinuation aimed at the man most responsible for building the atomic bomb: Robert Oppenheimer. Called to the witness stand to defend him was George Kennan.
He entered a long, dark rectangular room in a building near the Washington Monument. Three judges sat behind a large mahogany table. When not testifying, Oppenheimer sat on a leather couch against one of the walls, smoking cigarettes or puffing on his pipe.
Oppenheimer was facing a panel from the Atomic Energy Commission seeking to establish whether he should lose his security clearance. Oppenheimer stood accused of befriending communists in the 1930s and 1940s, giving them money, and even once lying to protect someone who had approached him in 1943 about passing scientific information to the Soviets. The government had thoroughly investigated most of these charges before, and Oppenheimer had been cleared. But the environment in early 1954 was different. McCarthyism was at its apex; criticism of the arms race could be construed as disloyalty or worse.
Kennan spent some of his time on the stand disputing the specific charges—for example, reminding the committee that the Soviet Union had been an ally of the United States in the early 1940s. But his main argument was that Oppenheimer was a special person of unimpeachable integrity.
“I have the greatest respect for Dr. Oppenheimer’s mind. I think it is one of the great minds of this generation of Americans. A mind like that is not without its implications.”
“Without its what?”
“Implications for a man’s general personality. . . . I suppose that you might just as well have asked Leonardo da Vinci to distort an anatomical drawing as that you should ask Robert Oppenheimer to speak responsibly to the sort of questions we were talking about and speak dishonestly.”
Besides the specific allegations involving connections to communists, the panel’s biggest concern was Oppenheimer’s early opposition to rapid development of a hydrogen bomb. He had tried to persuade other scientists not to work on it, and he had spoken out eloquently against the arms race, declaring in 1953 that the United States and the Soviet Union “may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
Kennan was grilled repeatedly about what would have happened had the Soviets developed the hydrogen bomb first. Treading very carefully—perhaps for fear of inspiring a separate inquisition targeted at himself—Kennan asserted that a Soviet lead would not have mattered much. They did not view the world through the same prism of relative strength and would not have used their military leverage for political gain. Next he was asked repeatedly what would have happened if the Soviets had had the hydrogen bomb and we did not. The investigators pressed and pressed, trying to get Kennan to say that Oppenheimer’s views had made America weak, or that Kennan himself would not have wanted someone who had once had communist ties to serve in the Moscow embassy or on the Policy Planning Staff.
Kennan would not bend. Perhaps Oppenheimer had made mistakes when young. But he had made up for them and was a man of such talents and accomplishments that it would be utter folly to penalize him for small, probably irrelevant, indiscretions years ago.
“I do feel this,” Kennan replied, “that the really gifted and able people in government are perhaps less apt than the others to have had a fully conventional life.”
His interrogators latched on to that answer. Their task, they argued, was just to determine loyalty, not ability. That being the case, what did it matter that Oppenheimer was a genius?
“It is simply that I sometimes think that the higher types of knowledge and wisdom do not often come without very considerable anguish and often a very considerable road of error. I think the church has known that. Had the church applied to St. Francis the criteria relating solely to his youth, it would not have been [possible] for him to be what he was later. In other words, I think very often it is in the life of the spirit; it is only the great sinners who become the great saints.”
One of his questioners offered to summarize that complicated argument: “I think you stated in effect, or at least you implied that all gifted individuals were more or less screwballs.”
Kennan had been eloquent and brilliant, but he had not spoken in language appropriate to the circumstances. If anything, Robert Oppenheimer was on trial for being too smart: a man who had learned to read Sanskrit while studying physics was just the kind of fellow McCarthy did not trust. And comparing him to Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, was not going to help.
Several weeks of brutal questioning ensued; Edward Teller, called as a witness, turned against his old colleague. Eventually, the board rescinded Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance.
Kennan was crushed, as were many of his friends—including Joe Alsop, who yielded to no one in his enthusiasm for hydrogen bombs but knew an inquisition when he saw one. The investigators had wiretapped Oppenheimer, withheld crucial documents, and operated pretty much like a kangaroo court. Alsop wrote to one of the panel members, former army secretary Gordon Gray: “Since we have been friends, and since I intend to express my opinion to others, I must express it to you also. By a single foolish and ignoble act, you have canceled the entire debt that this country owes you.”
AS THE UNITED STATES TURNED on one of its sages, the Soviet Union turned on one of its savages: Lavrenti Beria. Head of the Soviet secret police, Beria had appeared ebullient (and rather intoxicated) at the mysterious scene of the dictator’s death. Stalin’s daughter was not at all surprised when told through one of his servants that Beria had danced upon getting word that her father was dying.
Beria was a vile man who took pleasure from torturing and murdering his enemies and innocent citizens alike. He used to send his bodyguards to pull women off the streets for him to rape. At the end of his life, his office contained a blackjack, piles of women’s underwear, sex toys, obscene letters, pornography, and eleven pairs of silk stockings. While she was alive, Stalin’s wife banned the “dirty man” from their house. Nonetheless, the great dictator promoted Beria steadily. According to Svetlana Alliluyeva, this was because “Beria was very clever to find my father’s weakness—he loved flattery, especially after mother criticized him so mercilessly.” When Stalin died, Beria thought he had a clear path to ultimate power: but he failed to realize that he had neither allies nor protection. “Nobody was hated more than this man,” Svetlana said.
With Stalin dead, Beria engaged in a brutal, but quiet, battle with three rivals for ultimate control over the country: Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. All were skilled political fighters, and all agreed that Beria had to go. One of the central objections that they discussed was his apparent consideration of the creation of a single, neutral Germany, out of U.S. or Soviet control. In June, three months after Stalin’s death, the secret police chief was arrested on charges of betraying the motherland. After being held and interrogated for six months, he found himself begging for his life to no avail, hands tied and a towel in his mouth, as a three-star general fired a pistol into his forehead. Few people grieved. According to Svetlana, the credit for Beria’s arrest belonged to Khrushchev, and “for that act alone, he should have a monument built to him.”
With Stalin and Beria both dead, Khrushchev slowly consolidated power. He took a hard line on Germany, but he also sought to calm the furies unleashed in Stalin’s final days. One of his moves was to make the country easier for Americans to visit—and one American eager to have a look was Paul Nitze.
For ten days in the summer of 1955, Nitze and his family stayed as guests of Ambassador Bohlen. The Soviet capital was the dark, militaristic place he had expected, but, driving in from the airport, Nitze gasped at the poverty and the “drab and somber” state of the city. The country that could turn the United States into a smoldering wasteland could not pave its streets.
Nitze almost tripped one day on a pipe rising from the pavement, which he was told was a vent for an underground bomb shelter. Later he went to a meeting of the Supreme Soviet and watched Khrushchev deliver a speech. The audience, he recalled, nodded off whenever the leader spoke of a new era of smoother relations with the United States. But people perked up and cheered whenever he used the word mir. The term is generally translated as “peace”—Tolstoy’s great novel is Voyna i Mir— but Bohlen told Nitze that in this context it meant something closer to subjugation under benevolent Soviet, socialist rule. People appeared to be cheering for a world under Soviet supremacy.
At the end of the visit, Nitze and his family flew to Leningrad. Along with his recollection of the flight attendant carrying vodka up to the captain, Nitze’s most powerful memory of the city was probably of the evening he spent at the Astoria Hotel. A jazz band began to play beautifully near the dining hall. Will you dance with me? he asked his wife. No, she said, there is nobody else on the dance floor. He turned to his eldest daughter. Will you dance with me? She, too, refused.
The next day, Nitze learned how instinctively wise his wife and daughter had been. The Communist Party of Leningrad, he was told, had recently banned dancing. If he had headed out on the floor, the musicians would have had to stop.
This joyless country, Nitze thought, was not the kind of place where anyone should live.
AS THE 1950S PASSED, Nitze refined his arguments about the correlation of forces and the possibility of achieving long-term peace through short-term strength. Looked at one way, the future appeared hopeless. Surely, sooner or later, something would go catastrophically wrong. If there was a 2 percent chance of war each year, then there was a better than even chance that war would break out sometime in the next thirty-five years.
But, Nitze reasoned, what if we could make it through the next decade? That would reduce the odds for the following decade. Surviving that second decade would reduce the odds of war during the decade after that. By staying strong, the United States might survive long enough to knock the odds down to zero. When Joe Alsop suggested to Nitze privately that maybe the United States should wage a preventive war and get the whole thing over with, Nitze heatedly rejected the idea. “I want us to have the best radar net in the world, the most potent Strategic Air Command, the most advanced guided missiles, the most ghastly atomic weapons, the strongest and most prosperous allies, and everything else. If we have these things, we may well deter the enemy from war long enough for the whole relationship to pass into another historic phase.”
If war did come, however, Nitze wanted the United States to know how to fight it. In a January 1956 article in Foreign Affairs, he expanded his long-developing argument that the United States could actually win a nuclear war. Of course, no one would win if both sides fired off all their weapons. But that would happen only if both sides acted irrationally. Why blast the other, if you knew you would only get it back harder in return?
If one assumed a certain amount of rationality, war would stop before total obliteration. In that case, the better prepared side would be “in a position to issue orders to the loser and the loser will have to obey them or face complete chaos or extinction.” The greater the United States’ advantage in nuclear weaponry, “the greater are our chances of seeing to it that nuclear war, if it does come, is fought rationally and that the resulting destruction is kept to the lowest levels feasible.”
Some of the research contributing to the paper came from a study group that Nitze had helped to lead in the previous months at the Council on Foreign Relations. He and a group of other distinguished foreign policy thinkers would meet about once a month on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York for tea at 5:15, continue through dinner, and then wrap up around ten. At the first meeting, Nitze had floated the idea that the United States would not have to unleash its entire arsenal in a conflict; it could use “tactical atomic devices in a limited war.”
Nitze elaborated the idea at early meetings. In response, the group’s director, thirty-one-year-old Henry Kissinger, pointed out an obvious flaw: “Once a war becomes nuclear, it is much harder to set any effective limits.”
But Kissinger ultimately overcame his own reservations and became a forceful proponent of the possibility of limited nuclear war. In due course, he used the group’s notes as the basis for a sweeping book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, published in 1957. Kissinger was clearly a man on the rise: he was already a lecturer at Harvard, and Nitze had inquired about trying to hire him for SAIS the year before. The book would elevate him to a new level.
The most remembered thesis of Kissinger’s provocative and alarming work was that limited nuclear war was not only possible but in some cases desirable. “With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of it in terms of traditional warfare.” Much as Nitze had done in Foreign Affairs, Kissinger argued that the United States could use nuclear bombs for other purposes than crushing an opponent; we could use them to push our adversary to the point where surrender appeared preferable to continued resistance.
Despite its dense prose, the book was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and ended up on the best-seller lists. Kissinger was the chaplain on the pirate ship, the man who could explain and rationalize all the sins committed by the United States when it made these terrible weapons. He seemed to have mapped a middle road between the permanent standoff that everyone hoped we had entered and the total obliteration that everyone feared.
Nitze hated the book. “There are several hundred passages in which either the facts or the logic seem doubtful, or at least unclear,” he wrote in a review. He scoffed at Kissinger’s math. He declared the conclusions oversimplified and Kissinger’s discussion of limited nuclear war profoundly flawed. No doubt, he was also unhappy that a man sixteen years his junior had parlayed an argument about limited nuclear war into fame. Nitze may not have had a patent on the idea, but he had certainly pondered it longer than Kissinger had. The stage was being set for a more dramatic clash a generation hence.
Asked fifty years later whether jealousy might have motivated Nitze’s critique, Kissinger said, “It’s a rational conclusion.”
THE LIFE of the scholar was not for Nitze. Kennan once proclaimed that writing history was “the common refuge of those who find themselves helpless in the face of the present.” That was a condition in which Nitze rarely found himself.
In the spring of 1956, Nitze’s love of the fray led him to jump into the campaign of Adlai Stevenson, the former Illinois governor who had lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and who hoped for better results this time. A longtime friend of Nitze’s sister, Stevenson was too soft on Russia for Nitze’s taste: one of his signature proposals was a ban on aboveground nuclear tests. But he was preferable to the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles ticket, and Nitze worked long hours through the summer, helping to prepare the Democratic Party platform.
Kennan did have the patience for history. In 1956 he published his first major work of scholarship: Russia Leaves the War, an account of American diplomacy between the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in November 1917 and their removal of Russia from the alliance fighting World War I the following March. It was a gripping, vivid account of ill-informed American diplomacy. Kennan packed it with detail—in part, he would later say, to impress fellow historians, around whom he felt insecure. No doubt with a sly smile as he typed, Kennan tucked in a thorough debunking of a book written by William Hard, father of the woman who had spurned him three decades before.
When Russia Leaves the War was finished, Kennan, too, began to turn his attention toward politics. He and Nitze had met in 1954 to chat about Stevenson. By the winter of 1956, Kennan had committed to supporting him, if grudgingly. “I admire Stevenson as a sensitive, intelligent, and valiant person,” he wrote in his diary.
I consider him the sort of man to whom the people of this country ought to entrust the administration of public affairs, and probably never will. Dulles, furthermore, has thrust me into a position where if I am to be an adherent of either party it can only be the Democratic. But what sort of Democrat am I? So far as domestic affairs are concerned, I am much closer to the Republicans. I think the protection of the farmer is mostly a lot of nonsense. I wish there were much more of what we have become accustomed to call unemployment. The labor union involvement in this country strikes me as shortsighted, reactionary, and partially corrupt.
I ought in truth to have nothing to do with either political party. . . . I hold no iron-clad brief for unity. I am not sure that we would not be much better off without California and Texas and Florida. By shedding our Latin-American fringe, we might have preserved something like a north-European civilization in the remainder of the country.
Ambivalence about his candidate aside, Kennan, like Nitze, found himself drinking the intoxicating elixir of political campaigns. Soon, he started drafting speeches for Stevenson, and getting very favorable responses. “How I wish I could write with the facility and perception that you do!” Stevenson wrote. “I may be uttering some of your words in a speech one of these days, and I hope you will forgive me if you detect no by-line!” Eventually, word started to circulate that Kennan was on the short list to become secretary of state.
One day in August, Kennan was staying with his twenty-four-year-old daughter, Grace, at his sister’s house in Chicago. The phone rang and a somewhat familiar voice came on the line: “This is Mr. Stevenson of Liberty, Illinois.” Grace dutifully took a message for her father about a dinner invitation—and was thrilled when she found out exactly which Mr. Stevenson had been on the line. Father and daughter headed over to the candidate’s white, wooden two-story house for dinner the night the Republican convention nominated Eisenhower for a second term. It was a lively evening, and the group kept the television on as Vice President Nixon gave his acceptance speech. When it came time for Eisenhower to talk, photographers showed up at Stevenson’s house, eager to shoot him watching his rival. Kennan and his daughter meanwhile quickly moved into another room. Most aspiring secretaries of state would have knocked over the wine rack to get into that photograph. Kennan hid.
At the end of the evening, Stevenson walked the Kennans out to where they had parked behind the house. “There was a bright moon, and the fields were in mist, and looked like a sea. We both felt intensely sorry for him: he seemed so tired and harassed and worn, he had so few people to help him; and his whole equipment for going into this battle was so shabby compared with the vast, slick, well-heeled Eisenhower organization,” recalled Kennan. “It is clear that regardless of the outcome of the election this country is still removed by decades, and by phases of vast suffering, from anything like enlightened government.”
A few weeks later, Kennan wrote Nitze, expressing despair at the political party both men supported. “I found myself disgusted by everything about the Democratic convention except Stevenson himself.”
IN FEBRUARY 1956, Nikita Khrushchev sent for Svetlana Alliluyeva. He had something he wanted her to read, something that might embarrass her. He handed her the text of a long speech he was soon to deliver at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.
She read silently and calmly through the sweeping, bitter, and brutal denunciation of her father. It began with a critique of the cult of personality around Stalin, and then detailed the methods of a man attached to “repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes.”
Svetlana did not agree with all of it, but she knew it was mostly true. Making no objection, she handed the manuscript back to Khrushchev and his deputy, Anastas Mikoyan. “We thought you were going to cry,” said Mikoyan.
Khrushchev delivered the speech in a closed session to Soviet delegates at the Congress. He spoke passionately for nearly four hours, and when he finished the silence was near total. The speech was a brave and dangerous move. He wanted to exorcise the demon of Stalin without destroying communism: yes, the past quarter century had brought pain and horror to nearly every Soviet family, but it was one man’s fault, not the system’s.
Khrushchev’s harsh words spread. Party members passed a little red booklet with the text through the Soviet Union. Moscow’s east European allies read it. Eventually the text ended up in the hands of Israeli intelligence, and from there it moved quickly: to the CIA, to the State Department, to the New York Times, which published a story about it in June.
The exorcism pleased many communists, who knew that Khrushchev had spoken the truth. But it riled others who knew all too well how much he had left out, including his own culpability in many of the crimes he denounced. That summer, people in Eastern Europe began debating the merits of communism with an openness unseen for the next thirty-three years. Was Khrushchev genuinely suggesting that different paths to socialism were possible? Eastern Europe would soon test the proposition.
Protests appeared in Poland in June, sparked by food shortages but also fueled by the new debate. In late October, students in Hungary began demanding economic reform, free speech, and limits to repression. Mass protests and riots broke out. On October 23, protesters tore down the statue of Stalin in central Budapest, leaving just a pair of empty boots—posthumous humiliation for a man sensitive about the size of his feet.
Kennan thought this could be the beginning of the fissure he had long believed would split the Soviet order. The empire was coming apart, just as he had predicted in the X article. Interviewed by Joe Alsop for the Saturday Evening Post, he sounded uncharacteristically enthusiastic.
When Alsop asked why his prophecy of an eventual breakaway from the Soviets by Eastern Europe was being so dramatically fulfilled, Kennan answered that the Soviet Union had always had a problem in the region. Its countries had enjoyed greater freedom and wealth than the Russians. Allowing that disparity to continue would cause severe difficulties at home. But reversing it would cause problems in the satellites. Second, Kennan said, “is the plain fact that the Soviet communist system is deeply wrong—wrong about human nature, wrong about how the world really works, wrong about the importance of moral forces, wrong in its whole outlook. For this reason, I have always doubted whether the Soviet system would ultimately survive in full totalitarian form, even in Russia itself.”
It was possible, Kennan argued, that the Red Army would squelch the protests. But that would only slow, not stop, the fundamental changes ongoing. Kennan predicted that Khrushchev would eventually lose power and the whole system would open up. “I think that the recent developments in Poland and Hungary are bound, sooner or later—and I don’t predict the timing—to mark the end of Moscow’s abnormal power and domination throughout all of Eastern Europe.” The Soviet leaders, he said, “never realized how terribly tightly the spring had been compressed and what impetus it would get if you loosened it a bit.”
In answer to Alsop’s question about American claims that the United States deserved some credit, Kennan told a Russian fable about a fly that spends a day riding on the nose of an ox. At the end of a hard day at the plow, the ox returns home and the fly proudly greets the village: “We’ve been plowing.” America provided a useful example of how free people could live but had done nothing directly to help.
Kennan, usually so prescient, made two errors that were very rare for him: he was too optimistic, and he misjudged the Kremlin. Even before the interview appeared in print—headlined “The Soviet Will Never Recover”—tanks had rolled into Budapest. The Hungarians fought back as well as they could, hoping desperately that the United States would come to their aid. Teletype messages sent from within Hungary to the Associated Press in Vienna vividly recounted the destruction of the dream.
RUSSIAN GANGSTERS HAVE BETRAYED US; THEY ARE OPENING FIRE ON
ALL OF BUDAPEST.
THE WHOLE PEOPLE ASK FOR HELP.
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE MAKING MOLOTOV COCKTAILS AND HAND
GRENADES TO FIGHT THE TANKS. WE ARE QUIET NOT AFRAID.
THE FIGHTING IS VERY CLOSE NOW AND WE HAVEN’T ENOUGH TOMMY
GUNS IN THE BUILDING.
WE NEED MORE. IT CAN’T BE ALLOWED THAT PEOPLE ATTACK TANKS
WITH THEIR BARE HANDS.
GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOD SAVE OUR SOULS. THE
RUSSIANS ARE TOO NEAR.
The fighting ended quickly. Thousands were killed, a new government was installed, and hundreds of thousands fled. The ox was gored and the fly could do nothing but buzz manically and then drift away. Kennan, consulting with John Maury, head of Soviet operations for the CIA, had no solution. A sudden war in Egypt’s Suez Canal surprised and distracted Eisenhower, with the British and French backing an Israeli attack on Egypt, which had nationalized the canal during the summer. No American troops would go to Budapest. Kennan, then fifty-two years old, was eighty-five when Eastern Europe opened again.
November 1956 was, for him, a month of triple defeat. Adlai Stevenson lost the election; the Hungarian freedom fighters lost their war; and Eisenhower undermined the British and the French in Suez by threatening to deny support for the pound sterling if the battle continued. To Kennan, the latter was an unconscionable betrayal of our oldest allies.
He wrote in his diary:
The events of these recent days have been so shattering that I am at a loss to know how to react to them, personally. . . . If war comes, as it probably will, I had best seek a military commission and serve wherever I am then asked to serve. I shall probably not survive it; one rarely really survives two world wars in responsible public service. Nor will it make much difference what I do; for a government so unable to use serious counsel in time of peace will scarcely be able to make better use of it in time of war. But by holding a commission I shall give my family a better break in a country which has no use for civilians in war time, and which prefers that people serve uselessly in uniform rather than that they serve usefully in civilian clothes.
IN EARLY 1957, the Kennans returned to Washington, moving temporarily into Nitze’s house while the two men prepared to give back-to-back testimony to Congress on arms and Middle East policy. In a reprise of their agreement over Plan A in 1948, both suggested that the United States try to work out a proposal for demilitarizing central Europe. CBS Radio made a thirty-minute program using their presentations.
Gradually, however, another issue was gaining ever more prominence in the American mind: the nuclear arms race. The Soviets appeared to be constantly gaining, and in the summer of 1957 they would test their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Worries about radiation and fallout continued to grow. In a British cartoon from the time, one wolf warns another not to chew on children’s bones because they contain strontium-90.
Nitze, as ever, used the escalation as an excuse to rethink strategy. And the conclusion he reached was that atomic weapons were not just weapons with which to wage war, or even to deter it. They were devices that could give you leverage in any conflict. If a dispute arose over Madagascar (or Berlin), the side with more weapons would be able to dictate its terms. “The atomic queens may never be brought into play,” he wrote, taking a metaphor from chess yet again. “But the position of the atomic queens may still have a decisive bearing on which side can safely advance a limited-war bishop or even a cold-war pawn.”
In the summer and fall of 1957, Nitze got a chance to present his views in the halls of government instead of in the pages of Foreign Affairs. The Eisenhower administration had formed a committee of prominent outside consultants to evaluate plans for civil defense. Rowan Gaither, a founder of the RAND Corporation, headed it. Nitze, being well known as a critic of Eisenhower, was initially excluded. But the committee gradually expanded its mission, and it would soon expand its membership. In September, Nitze wrote Acheson that he was going to join in “yet another agonizing reappraisal of our budget and defense position” and that, miraculously, the White House had not stopped him.
Through force of personality, experience, and technical knowledge, Nitze soon became a central member of the Gaither committee. When it came time to write a final report, he took over.
He worked intensively through a number of drafts, one of which began by declaring that the report would mainly be concerned with how the United States could fight a limited nuclear war. In other handwritten notes, he fretted about the environmental impacts of any nuclear combat. At one point, he described a meeting discussing “lethal northern hemisphere contamination” and the power of weaponry that would create it. Below, he scribbled, “Is this right?” in pencil. And farther below, in pen: “I doubt if anyone knows.”
Ultimately, Nitze and his colleagues ended up producing a document much like NSC-68. America, the committee wrote, was in peril. The Soviets were building their nuclear arsenal faster than we were, and our defenses were weak. If we did not act, then we would be “completely vulnerable” by 1959 to ICBM attack. But we could respond and, if the public were properly educated, we would. “The American people have always been ready to shoulder heavy costs for their defense when convinced of their necessity.”
The United States not only needed to spend more, the report declared, it had to change its strategic direction toward what later became known as “counterforce.” What mattered was whether America’s arsenal was structured so it could withstand, and retaliate against, a surprise Soviet attack. At present, Nitze wrote, a few direct hits could knock out the Strategic Air Command. But we could survive if we dispersed our weapons and planes, housed many of them in hardened shelters, and figured out how to shoot down Soviet missiles. The report also argued the necessity of arming more submarines with nuclear weapons. Our enhanced ability to respond to a Soviet surprise attack would deter the Kremlin from launching one.
Surviving a Soviet attack also meant protecting people, and much of the report focused on civil defense. Building shelters was not enough; we must train people in how to survive, physically and psychologically, living underground. “It would symbolize our will to survive, and our understanding of our responsibilities in a nuclear age.” The report did not mention it, but the government would soon construct a gigantic underground office complex in West Virginia, stocked with four photomurals showing the Capitol with appropriate seasonal foliage.
The report, nearly finished, gained new urgency when, on October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the first satellite into orbit. Suddenly, an aluminum sphere from central Asia was circling the earth, twinkling like a star as it passed over America. The Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space. The governor of Michigan composed a poem to mark the moment: “Oh little Sputnik, flying high / With made-in-Moscow beep/You tell the world it’s a Commie sky/and Uncle Sam’s asleep.”
One month later, on November 7, the Gaither committee presented its recommendations and analysis at the White House. They failed to impress Eisenhower. He did not want, he said, to turn his country into a “garrison state.” Dulles was outraged, cutting off the presenters and expressing his strong opposition to the civil defense proposals.
Ten days later, Nitze wrote the secretary of state a blistering letter. Without a “much more vigorous defense program,” as outlined in the Gaither Report, America faced the prospect of a Soviet attack that could “destroy the fabric of our society and ruin our nation.” The secretary’s policies, meanwhile, had failed and would lead us to “default on our obligations to ourselves, to all who have gone before us, and to the generations yet to come.” Nitze ended the letter with a piece of astonishing boldness: “Finally, assuming that the immediate crisis is surmounted, I should ask you to consider, in the light of events in recent years, whether there is not some other prominent Republican disposed to exercise the responsibility of the office of Secretary of State.”
Soon afterward, Nitze and several members of the committee met to discuss what to do next. Perhaps, someone suggested, they should leak the report—and apparently they did. Soon the Washington Post was sounding the alarm. “The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history,” began the author, Chalmers Roberts. The front-page piece detailed the report, the panel of distinguished men who had composed it, and Eisenhower’s initial reluctance to support its conclusions. If Eisenhower had thought he could bury the findings, he was wrong.
When Nitze was preparing his memoirs, one of his collaborators asked whether he knew who had leaked the document. “I’d rather not comment,” Nitze said. He then coyly added that a journalist like Chalmers Roberts “wouldn’t report it unless he had gotten it from several sources.”
IN MAY 1957, John F. Kennedy telephoned his friend Priscilla McMillan. “George Kennan is going to be furious,” the young man said.
Kennedy had just learned that he had won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for his book Profiles in Courage, and he assumed he had beaten out Kennan and Russia Leaves the War.
But both had won: Kennedy for biography and Kennan for history. Russia Leaves the War also won a National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize for literary distinction in the writing of history. A rookie scholar, Kennan had hit a grand slam his first time up. His book was vivid and original—and readers had noticed.
“There is no means, other than the cultivation and dissemination of historical knowledge, by which a society can measure its own performance and correct its own mistakes,” Kennan declared in his speech at the National Book Award ceremony. He also wrote, in a note with more than a slight personal touch, “Many a man has worn out the best years of his life in official endeavor, aware that his contemporaries will never fully understand the significance of what he has been doing, and cherishing no greater hope than that some day, when the entire record can be spread out, people will be sufficiently interested, and sufficiently dispassionate, to give him his due.”
Kennan’s next big task was to prepare a series of talks for BBC radio. He had accepted a one-year appointment to a special chair at Oxford and agreed to give the prestigious Reith Lectures, an honor bestowed in preceding years on Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Toynbee. That summer, mulling the task, he wrote, “To be fully honest, I should give the lectures on ‘Why there is no hope in the international situation.’” He then began to muse about his ideal agenda: merging the United States with Canada and Britain, eliminating Washington (“and very good riddance indeed”), creating a new capital near Windsor or Ottawa, and then splitting the new nation into four regions. This would be followed by population reduction, the banning of cars, and a touch of autarchy.
“The truth is that democracy in the Western world could be saved from itself only by 50 years of benevolent dictatorship which would, like a doctor, restore the patient to a reasonable state of origin and then put him on his own again,” he wrote.
Recognizing his flight of fancy, he added: “How would all this sound on the BBC?”
KENNAN DID EVENTUALLY choose his topics, labor over the preparation, and complete the scripts. Beginning in October, soon after the launch of Sputnik, he entered a glass-lined room at the BBC offices for six consecutive Sunday nights and, for twenty-eight minutes, sat in a chair at a long table with a microphone in the middle and tried to explain the world.
His first two lectures were smart, well-reasoned calls for the West to look at Moscow more soberly. The Soviet Union’s economic progress was not part of a zero-sum game. If the USSR got a dollar richer, it did not follow that the West was a dollar poorer. At the same time, communism had indeed warped the Russians’ views of America. But that meant we should deal with them patiently and calmly. The West should neither rush to war nor look to quick summits to solve its problems.
Kennan’s last two lectures were likewise uncontroversial. The United States should hesitate before offering foreign aid to any country and not let developing nations blackmail it by declaring that they would go communist if not paid off. A fixation on the strength of NATO should not be allowed to undermine the relationship with the Soviets.
But in the third lecture Kennan kicked over a beehive by revisiting German reunification. It was time, he said, for the West to start negotiating with Moscow for a mutual withdrawal from Germany in order to remove the Cold War’s central source of tension. “No greater contribution can be made to world peace than the removal of the present deadlock over Germany,” he said. He did not call for an immediate departure, but suggested the issue be seriously explored. Yes, Moscow would resist at first. But “until we stop pushing the Kremlin against a closed door, we shall never learn whether it would be prepared to go through an open one.” Nitze, commenting on the speech, said it was essentially a recapitulation of Plan A.
Kennan’s cool logic lapsed only in the fourth lecture. Here he turned to nuclear weapons, a topic that caused him at points to lose his sober tone. He began by savaging a straw man, describing what he asserted were the views of people like Nitze. “They 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; whereas, if we can only contrive to get a tiny bit ahead of the Russians, we shall in some ways have won; our salvation will be assured.” He then shifted, more eloquently, into a denunciation of the sort of civil defense measures called for in the Gaither Report. “Are we to flee like haunted creatures from one defensive device to another, each more costly and humiliating than the one before . . . concerned only to prolong the length of our lives while sacrificing all the values for which it might be worthwhile to live?” He ended by proposing that the NATO countries defend themselves through paramilitary units—groups of men trained to act like the French Resistance (except more effectively) if the Soviet Union overran their countries.
The response to the lectures was extraordinary. Front-page news throughout Europe and America, they may have been the most listened-to political addresses ever broadcast. Afterward, 72 percent of people in Britain were familiar with Kennan’s name. Many commentators responded with ferocious attacks. Virtually no one agreed with Kennan’s call for paramilitary units, and he would later profess regret at ever having mentioned the idea. His call for German unification did not go over much better. Even Nitze disagreed, arguing that the time for such ideas had passed: the amputated western part of the nation was now part of NATO and central to Europe’s security.
Kennan’s punishment for proposing disengagement from Germany came swiftly, and the most hurtful blow came from his old boss. “I am told that the impression exists in Europe that the views expressed by Mr. George Kennan in his Reith Lectures, particularly that a proposal should be made for the withdrawal of American, British, and Russian troops from Europe, represent the views of the Democratic Party in the United States. Most categorically they do not,” wrote Dean Acheson in a press release. “Mr. Kennan has never, in my judgment, grasped the realities of power relationships, but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.” In a later essay, Acheson described Kennan’s idea as a “futile—and lethal—attempt to crawl back into the cocoon of history.”
Acheson asked Nitze to join in the press statement, but Nitze declined. As he explained later, “I refused, saying I had served as Kennan’s deputy, was close to him as a friend, and although I agreed with Acheson’s criticism, I did not want to criticize [Kennan] in public.”
After the lectures, Kennan had characteristically fallen ill. He learned about the Acheson broadside from a newspaper while he lay in bed at a Swiss ski resort. He spent much of the rest of the day wandering around in the snow. “I am now in the truest sense a voice crying in the wilderness; and never, I think, have I felt a greater sense of loneliness.”
AS KENNAN ISOLATED himself, Nitze became increasingly embedded in the Washington elite. The contrast between the paths taken by the old friends came through during a meeting in 1958 of a Council on Foreign Relations study group on military strategy. Nitze helped guide the discussion, made quick but smart comments, and signed up to lead the session on how to maintain stability in the arms race. Kennan said nothing, and then interjected a long, passionate critique of the group’s premises. The rest of the group responded by roundly attacking him.
In 1959, Nitze journeyed to Africa and then reported back to John F. Kennedy’s Senate committee. He hosted parties, attended dinners, and befriended journalists. Each July 4, he invited what seemed like half the Democratic establishment, as well as most of the leadership of the CIA, to his Maryland farm. Cocktails flowed; fireworks exploded; guests ran footraces and played tennis. One year, Nitze dropped to the ground for a set of one-armed push-ups.
As the Eisenhower years wound down, Nitze would find his views ever more in demand. After Sputnik, America seemed weak and John Kennedy promised to close the “missile gap” with Moscow. The Democrats reasoned that they could win the election by blaming Ike and acting tough.
Nitze became a top adviser on foreign affairs to the Democratic presidential campaign. He knew that if the election of 1960 went his way, he could soon be back on the inside—a moment he had waited for through eight frustrating years. When a friend asked him how he was doing under Eisenhower, Nitze responded: “I have no problems that a little more responsibility wouldn’t cure.”