The Hawk and The Dove

11 DEADLY SERIOUS EITHER WAY

Paul Nitze picked up the phone in the library of his Washington house and heard the nasal voice of the president-elect on the line. It was late 1960 and Kennedy was offering his adviser a choice among three jobs: deputy secretary of defense, national security adviser, and undersecretary of state for economic affairs. “How much time do I have?” Nitze asked. “Thirty seconds,” replied Kennedy. Nitze picked defense.

It turned out to be a bad choice. Kennedy later appointed Robert McNamara, the president of Ford Motor Company, as secretary of defense. McNamara wanted to choose his own deputy, and he wanted an administrator. Nitze had a reputation as an ideas man. The White House revoked the original offer and Nitze was dropped down a level to serve as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (ISA).

Power in Washington usually relates inversely to length of title. But Nitze made his eight-word job influential. He brought on brilliant and energetic young deputies and created something like a Policy Planning Staff for the Pentagon. Their first topic was arms control. Were the two superpowers locked into a never-ending spiral, destined to compete forever over who could drop more kilotons of horror on more cities more quickly? Would other countries soon join the contest?

Nitze saw the job as an opportunity to think big, and one day in March he took out his pad and began to ponder these questions. He had spent years now on details, white papers, and theory. Now he actually had influence. The critic had become the artist, and there he sat: likely alone, likely looking out the window at his views of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. The early days of Kennedy’s administration were a time of profound hope and optimism about potential change. And Nitze wanted to do his part.

Reduction of arms an essential object for many reasons.

Arms themselves a primary independent source of tension . . .

Sad record of those who neglect to keep the peace . . .

Path, long, dangerous. Don’t rely on gimmicks. . . .

How do we prevent a world explosion. . . . Aren’t at a stage where we

know, or others know, the two steps or ten.

KENNAN DID NOT lobby hard for a job in the new administration. He had not worked for the campaign but instead had spent the summer traveling through Europe, and only happened upon news of Kennedy’s nomination while at a railroad station in Verona. In his diary that summer, he declared that his public life was dead and that he could conceive of no possible useful function in Washington. Even so, he was crushed when he was not summoned.

“It is now nearly two months since the election and I have heard literally nothing from anyone in Washington in or around the new administration,” he wrote in January 1961. “Most of the senior appointments in the foreign affairs field have been made—and to a large extent to people whom I thought of as friends: Dean Rusk, Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, Paul Nitze, Mac Bundy. There has been abundant newspaper speculation about Chip Bohlen’s future job. Concerning myself, the press has not printed a single word.”

He wrote to Walter Lippmann complaining about the lack of attention. “Had I taken a less prominent part, in recent years, in the public debates on questions of national policy, I could let this pass without drawing any drastic conclusions from it; but in the circumstances I can regard it only as a sign of deliberate repudiation.”

A few days later, though, Kennan’s mood brightened. The president had not forgotten him; in fact, he wanted to meet in a week. Soon Kennan was aboard Kennedy’s plane, briefing him on the USSR. Three days after the inauguration—during which the president famously stood bareheaded in the cold and told people to ask what they could do for their country—Kennedy called Kennan from the White House. Which embassy would he like: Poland or Yugoslavia? The U.S. Foreign Service wanted him back. Soon Kennan was packing for Belgrade.

JOHN KENNEDY STRODE into office appearing youthful and brilliant. Within two months he merely looked young—and the man responsible for this change of fate was a dictator ninety miles from U.S. shores.

Fidel Castro had seized power in Cuba in 1959, and one of the administration’s first goals was to oust him. The plan was to land a group of fourteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles on the island. Surging inland from the Bay of Pigs, they would inspire the rest of the nation to rise up against Castro’s rule.

On April 4, 1961, Kennedy met with his top advisers. The CIA organizers detailed the plan and then the president invited everyone to comment. One of the first to speak was William Fulbright, a senator from Arkansas who considered the Castro regime a “thorn in the flesh” but not a “dagger in the heart.” He spoke passionately and eloquently about his moral qualms. Nitze sat back, increasingly irritated by the lecture. He had long ago made up his mind about the morality of covert action, and he had no qualms about seeking to bring down a communist dictatorship. He dismissed Fulbright. Partly out of pique at the sanctimony and bluster, Nitze voted for proceeding with the operation.

Two weeks later, the exiles landed. They were quickly surrounded and either captured or killed. The survivors were sent to a sports stadium, where Castro berated them for four days. With TV cameras rolling, they applauded the man they had come to overthrow.

At their meeting before the inauguration, Kennedy had asked Kennan, the Office of Policy Coordination cofounder, his opinion of an exile-led raid of Cuba. He responded that the idea was fine, as long as it worked. “Whatever you feel you have to do here, be sure that it is successful; because the worst thing is to undertake something of this sort and to undertake it unsuccessfully.”

Another debacle soon followed. Kennedy and Khrushchev scheduled their first meeting for June in Vienna. Before the trip, the president asked Kennan’s advice. He told Kennedy to set his expectations low. Kennedy’s best hope, he said, was that the two would begin to create an environment of mutual trust.

Khrushchev, however, had other ideas. The night before the meeting, he met with his politburo and proclaimed that he was going to pummel the silver spoon–bred amateur. Mikoyan played the role of Kennan, urging the initiation of a reasonable dialogue. But Khrushchev snapped back. Kennedy was weak because of the Bay of Pigs, and he would take advantage of that fact.

“I heard you were a young and promising man,” said Khrushchev in greeting Kennedy, and the discussion started amiably enough. But then Kennedy allowed himself to be trapped in a discussion of Marxist theory, territory Khrushchev knew well. He had an answer for everything Kennedy said, and he gradually wore the president down. He denounced imperialism and railed against the American presence in Berlin. In a passage edited out of the official transcripts, he even declared that if the United States wanted war, it would be best to do it now. Why wait until both sides had developed even nastier weapons?

Afterward, Kennedy had a meeting at the American embassy with James Reston of the New York Times. The blinds were drawn and the lights turned off so other journalists would not spot Reston and envy the scoop. When the president arrived, he walked over to the couch, flopped down, and pushed his hat over his eyes. “Pretty rough?” asked the reporter. “Roughest thing in my life,” said Kennedy. For the first time, noted the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, Kennedy had “met a man who was impervious to his charm.”

The White House called Kennan in to read and analyze the transcripts. His verdict was not positive. Kennedy had failed to push back on obvious points. He had appeared like a “tongue-tied young man, not forceful, with no ideas of his own.”

Nitze had been one of just a handful of American aides to travel with Kennedy to Vienna. Afterward, he was handed a summary of the conversation with Khrushchev. Kennedy’s last point was that the United States “cannot accept Soviet view of inevitability of change toward communism.” Nitze scribbled in an addition: “This would not be possible if there were a further shift in the balance of power to the Soviet side.” In Nitze’s view, the United States could not afford to give an inch—a proposition that would be tested very soon.

THE MAN WHO bested the Harvard-educated, Pulitzer Prize-winning John Kennedy was semiliterate. Born in 1894, Nikita Khrushchev had grown up a peasant in Ukraine, so poor that he spent much of his youth barefoot. As a child, he had attended school for a total of two years; he could barely read and could not write at all. According to Dmitrii Shepilov, Khrushchev’s foreign minister from 1956 to 1957, the premier “signed his own name with difficulty, usually scrawling just the first [three] letters: ‘Khr.’ There his powers of penmanship stopped. His written decisions were communicated verbally to his assistants.”

The grandson of a serf and the son of a coal miner, Khrushchev toiled as a young man in mines and factories. Always energetic and witty, he joined the Communist Party out of his belief in revolutionary justice. Eventually he became an organizer and, in due course, friends with Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who introduced him to her husband, Joseph Stalin. Khrushchev shot up in the party: among other accomplishments, he supervised the construction of the Moscow Metro and directed the defense of Ukraine against the Nazis. By the time of his mentor’s death, he had risen almost to the top. A bit of scheming, and the liquidation of Beria, would put him there.

He was bald and shaped like a pear. Nitze called him an “ugly, little man,” but he had a definite roly-poly charm. He drank heavily and governed by instinct and improvisation. He did not grieve over friends and colleagues sent to the gulag. But, unlike Stalin, he did not live for intrigue and revenge. He was not “sadistic,” Kennan wrote, “just rough.” He was emotional and human. Bombastic and mercurial, he had close friendships and deep insecurities. “He’s either all the way up or all the way down,” said his wife in 1959.

He spoke in metaphors, very coarse ones. At one point, he pulled aside Moscow’s ambassador to Yugoslavia and declared that if you stripped the West German leader Konrad Adenauer naked and looked at him from behind, you’d see that Germany is divided in two parts. But if you looked at him from the front, you’d see that his view of the German question “never did stand up, doesn’t stand up, and never will stand up.”

Such anatomical metaphors were his strength. More than once, he declared that it was time to throw a hedgehog down the pants of Uncle Sam. And when he wanted to cause trouble in Germany, he declared: “Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”

After his meeting with Kennedy in Vienna, Khrushchev decided to do just that.

ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961, Paul Nitze was playing tennis in Northeast Harbor, Maine. John Kennedy was sailing off Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. And East German police were stringing barbed wire along the twenty-seven-mile border between West Berlin and East Germany.

That morning, men holding submachine guns began patrolling the crossings. Police lined up across the Brandenburg Gate to block traffic. West Berliners watched with curiosity and then rage. Two days later, concrete barriers replaced the barbed wire. Soon a wall would replace the barriers. The iron curtain had become a physical reality.

In the weeks and months before the wall went up, about a thousand refugees a day had crossed from the communist East to the democratic West, seeking jobs, stability, and freedom. In early August, the number had shot even higher. One of Khrushchev’s speechwriters joked that soon only the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, would remain.

The exodus was humiliating and devastating for the communists. Many of the smartest and most talented East Germans were fleeing. Unable to admit that, the communists christened the barrier the “democratic anti-fascist protection wall.” It was meant to stop invasion and the “perfidious, subversive aims” of the West.

The crisis over Berlin had been brewing for several years. On November 27, 1958, Khrushchev had given the United States six months to leave West Berlin. John Foster Dulles responded that he was not afraid. He was right for his nation—Khrushchev let the deadline pass—but not for himself. The secretary of state was stricken by a fast-moving abdominal cancer and buried in Arlington Cemetery on May 27, 1959.

Then, in June 1961, Khrushchev threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany before the end of the year. That move was expected to abrogate the post-World War II deal that gave the Western Allies access to West Berlin. The United States would then need to launch another airlift or save that democratic enclave by force.

One of Nitze’s aides telephoned him in Maine with the news of the wall’s construction. Nothing was happening in Washington, the aide said. “If nothing’s going on in Washington, I’m coming back on the next plane because something should be,” Nitze shot back.

Kennan happened to be there already. Just before the wall went up, he stopped by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s White House office. The situation in Berlin terrified him. “I am expendable, I have no further official career, and I am going to do everything I can to prevent a war,” he explained. “I have children, and I do not propose to let the future of mankind be settled or ended by a group of men operating on the basis of limited perspectives and short-run calculations.”

NITZE’S JOB upon his return was to perform exactly those short-run calculations. He was put in charge of a group that would map out a series of contingency plans for Berlin. If the Soviets did A, we would respond with B. That might lead to C, which would demand a response of D.

Nitze began with the premise that one could and should think through all the possible ways to use nuclear weapons. This line of reasoning, a continuation of his limited-war studies in the 1950s, also intersected with the increasingly popular field of mathematics known as game theory.

One reflexive response to the horror of nuclear weapons was to throw up one’s hands. As Kennan implied to Schlesinger, to go near the things was to tempt the most horrible fate. The inverse was to declare that the United States would launch its whole arsenal at the beginning of any nuclear confrontation. By 1961 this idea had become codified in American strategic doctrine in what was known as SIOP-62. In response to a Soviet nuclear attack, or as a preemptive strike, the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s first move was, essentially, to obliterate the Soviet Union. At the time of the Berlin crisis, this approach was official U.S. policy.

Nitze thought the doctrine rigid and dangerous; instead, he drew up a plan modeled on “flexible response.” The central idea was one known to gangsters everywhere: if someone shouts at you, raise your fists; if your antagonist does the same, pull a knife; if he pulls a knife, pull a gun. Ideally, you can settle the dispute without any of the weapons actually being used.

Nitze preached the idea of flexible response through the fall of 1961. In an early September speech reprinted in the New York Times, he warned the Soviets that we “have a tremendous variety of warheads which gives us the flexibility we require to conduct nuclear actions from the level of large-scale destruction down to mere demolition work.” Later that month, he spoke extensively about one of the most complicated moves in the sequence: demonstrating that we would actually use nuclear weapons in a conflict. One way to do that was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union, but in a place where it would cause little harm. According to the diary of Henry Brandon, a British journalist, in mid-September Nitze mentioned the possibility of setting off a bomb on Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic island that the USSR owned.

Unlike some proponents of nuclear game theory, Nitze did not seem enthusiastic about the possibility of testing his ideas. In a memo he wrote to himself during the crisis, he lamented Khrushchev’s posturing about Armageddon. “I supervised the engineers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Have followed these studies since. What would happen to Russia [if we dropped nuclear weapons of] 1000 megatons, 7000, 10000, 20000. Easy to make such threats but dangerous. Could lead to point of no return.”

On October 3, Nitze met in the White House Cabinet Room with a group that included the president and the secretaries of state and defense. They discussed the increasingly tense situation in Berlin. A central question was whether a limited nuclear strike would necessarily precipitate general nuclear war. “Do you think possible to use nukes without becoming gen[eral]. Would depend on situation at the time,” Nitze wrote on his yellow pad. One of the group’s most aggressive members was the normally steady secretary of state, Dean Rusk, whom Nitze records as saying that the United States should tell Moscow that we would risk destroying “Europe, U.S. & Russia.” He called that “pulling down house, because the house is lost anyway.” Kennedy did not offer opinions or issue orders. But his nerves were starting to fray: at one point, Nitze recorded, “pres[ident] banged desk.”

Tensions continued to rise. A few days later, Nitze visited the Soviet embassy in Washington to discuss the crisis. It was not a pleasant conversation. The Soviet ambassador had proclaimed that his country could utterly destroy Germany within ten minutes. Nitze said that might be so, but it “would not protect Moscow or Leningrad.”

Two days later, at eleven P.M. on October 10, the president and key members of his administration gathered again in the White House to discuss Nitze’s contingency plans. They all agreed that the first three steps made sense: probe, then harass, then attack with conventional forces. But then the president asked whether it was possible to have a demonstration strike or a limited strike without massive strategic bombing and general nuclear war becoming certain.

Secretary of Defense McNamara said yes. On this night, however, Nitze disagreed. He now thought a limited strike, or a demonstration, “would greatly increase the temptation to the Soviets to initiate a strategic strike of their own.” Because of that, we should “consider most seriously the option of an initial strategic strike of our own.” If we did that, “we could in some real sense be victorious in the series of nuclear exchanges.”

McNamara disagreed again. No one could win a nuclear war. Secretary of State Rusk, returning to his more traditional moderate position, added, “The first side to use nuclear weapons will carry a very grave responsibility and endure heavy consequences before the rest of the world.” The meeting adjourned with no decision made.

Forty-five years later, it seems that Nitze’s horrifying argument was correct. Asked about the incident, numerous Soviet military officials all uniformly responded that they would have responded massively to any American strike at all, whether in Novaya Zemlya or Moscow. “Our war plans assumed that full escalation would be automatic,” said Vitalii Tsygichko, a longtime Soviet war planner.

MEANWHILE, KENNAN WAS ALSO ENGAGED in clandestine negotiations. As tensions mounted in the summer of 1961, he began quiet talks with the Soviet ambassador in Belgrade. Perhaps the two men, speaking alone together in Russian, could quietly create a useful back channel. The White House agreed. Soon, Kennan began slipping over to the Soviet ambassador’s house, without telling the U.S. embassy staff. The two men would meet in the ambassador’s living room, drink tea, and chat.

In September, Khrushchev declared that he thought the back channel was not working well enough. “Unfortunately, however, I see from the dispatches of our Ambassador that they are spending too much time in, figuratively speaking, sniffing each other.” He respected Kennan but wanted the talks to move at a faster pace.

I never met Mr. Kennan but, so far as I can judge by the press, he is, to my mind, a man with whom preparatory work could be done, and we would accordingly authorize our Ambassador. But evidently in that case our Ambassadors would have to be given firm instructions to start talks on concrete questions without needless procrastination and not merely indulge in tea-drinking, not walk round and about mooing at each other.

Firm instructions never came; Kennan was frustrated, too. He reported to the United States that he had told his negotiating partner it seemed the Soviets had no interest in peace. Then he decided the same thing about the U.S. government. Why had his country not offered Moscow some concrete proposals? “Unless the West shows some disposition to negotiate,” he wrote, “the hard line is going to be pursued in Moscow not only to the very brink but to the full point of a world catastrophe.”

His back channel was soon cut off.

FORTUNATELY FOR THE WORLD, Kennedy never had to choose between McNamara’s view or Nitze’s in the debate over nuclear war. By the night of October 10, Khrushchev, well aware of his relative weakness—and probably aware of the contingency plans through the work of a canny KGB agent in NATO—was searching for a way out of the confrontation. On October 17, he backed away from his ultimatum: he would not sign a peace treaty with East Germany before December 31, and he would not cut off access to Berlin. The crisis briefly spiked one week later when a minor border dispute put American and Soviet tanks nose to nose in Berlin. But the tension dissipated quickly. The city was to remain divided and peaceful for the rest of the Cold War.

With the Berlin crisis defused, the Kennedy administration turned to smaller, less pressing issues. In early November, Nitze met with the president again. The subject this time was a potential U.S. troop buildup in a small nation in Southeast Asia.

Vietnam had not seemed to matter much when Kennedy took office. A communist government in the northern half of the country had been trying unsuccessfully to unite the country for nearly a decade. Eisenhower had engaged in a limited way, sending arms, aid, and a few advisers to help the south. Kennedy kept to the same course at first. The country was distant and poor; more important, Kennedy had long argued that fighting communism in places like Southeast Asia required building strong, free societies, not just blasting the communists.

But the pressure to intervene mounted. Vietnam was one of the few hot spots on the globe and the northern guerrillas infiltrating the south gained strength late in the Eisenhower years. In the spring of 1961, Kennedy decided to ship more advisers and more money—and to study the possibility of sending in troops. In October, his favorite military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, traveled to Vietnam to report on the situation. When he returned, the president and some of his top aides met to discuss the options. Nitze’s handwritten notes likely represent the only record of this November 10 meeting.

McNamara declared, “We need troops,” and Rusk followed up by saying that adding three thousand men would give the United States a chance to knock back the insurgency. The conversation turned to ways to make the ineffectual government of South Vietnam, run by Ngo Dinh Diem, “more palatable.” But the discussion came back to troops, and here the president was firm. “Don’t say we commit. Don’t want to put troops in,” reads Nitze’s summary of his statements. “Proceed with caution. Not putting in combat troops.”

At the end, the president agreed to offer Diem some technical assistance. He then suggested that we ask our allies to share even this burden. “Make it multilateral. They have the same commitment.”

Gradually Kennedy’s caution eroded. By the end of the year, the commander in chief had sent in pilots and special forces teams. Combat troops, and then more combat troops, eventually followed. Nitze’s notes on the November meeting end with a fateful remark by Rusk: “Our prestige is already involved.”

KENNAN’S TWO YEARS in Yugoslavia proved to be both the end of his diplomatic career and a microcosm of it. He began with great enthusiasm and promise. He displayed wisdom and foresight in analyzing and understanding a distant land few Americans had penetrated. But he never comprehended the basic workings of American politics, and from that came his undoing. Too fragile and easily hurt, he was like Chiron, the wise and immortal centaur of Greek mythology who is shot by an arrow and develops a wound that never heals. The posting ended in disappointment and melancholy.

Yugoslavia had been a fresh start for Kennan. He was returning to the Foreign Service and to power. He mused that, if the job worked out as expected, he could have the formal and pleasant official retirement that John Foster Dulles had denied him. Belgrade was no Moscow, but it was not Ouagadougou. Yugoslavia was the only country to have split from the Soviet bloc, and its leader, Josip Broz Tito, was a formidable man worthy of study. Having declared himself “very happy at this time to merge my views” with those of the Kennedy administration, Kennan left, via ocean liner, to assume his post in May 1961. Young Foreign Service officers were thrilled to have the great diplomat coming to their embassy. The local town council near Kennan’s Pennsylvania farm proudly named a new fire truck after him.

Like many curious people arriving in foreign lands, he was overwhelmed by the smells, sounds, and history. He went horseback riding, took long walks through Belgrade, and rapidly gained fluency in the language. He explored the countryside, met the people, and pondered the past of this immensely diverse land. He would ask his staff to write up little historical papers, which they would then gather to discuss.

The ethnic tensions that would destroy Yugoslavia decades later were suppressed during Kennan’s tour. Everyone treated him with respect and openness, whether shepherds in the hills of Montenegro or elderly men in the churchyards of central Serbia. His experience provided a wonderful contrast with his time in Moscow during Stalin’s paranoid final days. After one memorable luncheon, he brought to the ambassador’s residence a peasant from southern Serbia dressed in traditional attire, complete with fur hat and leather shoes with turned-up toes. The episode demonstrated one of Kennan’s odder traits: at home, he looked down on the working class, on non-Protestant ethnic groups, and in general on people unlike him. In Russia and Yugoslavia, all these groups fascinated him.

Only a few months into his tenure, Kennan experienced his first setback. In 1959, Congress had passed the Captive Nations Resolution. It was nonbinding and unimportant—the sort of thing the Hill routinely produces whenever a situation is too complicated for real action. One week a year, the president was required to voice his support for the day when all the “captive nations of the world” would achieve freedom and independence. Congress had named the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a member of the great communist conspiracy, even though it had broken with the Soviets in 1948.

Kennan considered it bad form to be technically committed by a branch of his own government to the overthrow of the government of the country in which he served. He had high hopes that the Kennedy administration would end the useless ritual of Captive Nations Week. But that did not happen.

A few months later, it was Tito’s turn to anger Kennan. The Yugoslav leader hosted a conference in Belgrade for nonaligned nations, meaning those tied neither to Moscow nor to Washington. The event took place in September 1961, just as Khrushchev decided to resume atmospheric nuclear testing after a two-year hiatus. That move angered most of the world, but Tito declared at the conference that he “understood” the choice. He also took the Soviet side in the debate over Berlin.

An outraged Kennan, feeling personally betrayed, denounced Tito in the press and in memos home. He declared that Khrushchev could have written parts of Tito’s speech. Henceforth, he asserted, we could no longer consider Yugoslavia “entirely a friendly or neutral nation.” Other embassy officials reported that the Yugoslavs thought Kennan was overreacting. One month after the conference, a U.S. official wrote back to Washington that the Yugoslav assistant foreign secretary “last night inquired laughingly, ‘is the Ambassador still angry at us?’ ”

A year later, Kennan got his comeuppance. In the summer of 1962, Congress decided to revoke trade and aid privileges to Yugoslavia. Kennan thought the action shortsighted. Trade with Yugoslavia mattered little to the United States economically, but it was important for the Yugoslav economy. Why should we penalize the peasants making little baskets by hand to sell in American supermarkets? Kennan showed absolutely no awareness that his own overheated reaction to events in the fall had helped stir anti-Yugoslav sentiment at home. According to Lawrence Eagleburger, who later became secretary of state and was then a junior official in the embassy, “he didn’t realize that if he burned the base of the ladder he was standing on, eventually it would come crashing down.”

In July 1962, Kennan returned to the United States to lobby for a reversal of the trade bill. He went on TV. He worked the halls of Capitol Hill. His energy, however, could not compensate for his lack of tact. Instead of seeking compromise, Kennan seemed shrill and condescending. Just before arriving, he complained of the “appalling ignorance” of Congress. From Washington, he wrote a letter to the New York Times, proclaiming the trade issue an example of why Congress should not interfere in foreign questions. “The issue is whether the Executive Branch of the Government is to be allowed sufficient latitude to handle intelligently and effectively a delicate problem of international affairs.” While presenting this argument, sure to unite the whole legislature against his suggestions, Kennan expounded on his own “most careful thought” and “considered judgment.”

In late September, back in Belgrade, Kennan decided to ask Kennedy for help. He must have expected the phone conversation to go well, for he decided to use an open line, which he knew the Yugoslavs would be monitoring. To set up the call, he summoned his butler, a White Russian later revealed as an informant for the Yugoslav secret police. Even if he did not already know this for certain, Kennan was too savvy not to have suspected it at the time. Clearly, he wanted the Yugoslavs to know what he was about to do.

The president came on the line immediately. Good. This provided a demonstration of Kennan’s standing.

The ambassador made his impassioned plea against the congressional provision. But President Kennedy was noncommittal, and he then transferred Kennan to the office of Congressman Wilbur Mills, one of the bill’s chief advocates. Mills, too, came on the line quickly. But he was gruff, and he briskly dismissed both the ambassador and his arguments.

With that, Kennan had publicly demonstrated his passion—and his complete ineffectiveness. He had overreacted to Tito’s sins, overreacted to Congress’s follies, and then overestimated his own ability to resolve the crisis.

As Robert Cleveland, then one of Kennan’s principal subordinates, put it: “He was a better writer than ambassador.”

ON THE NIGHT of Monday, October 15, 1962, Nitze was attending a State Department dinner for the West German foreign minister. He spent much of the evening arguing with a German intelligence officer about Soviet plans to take the whole of Berlin. The German said Khrushchev had no such designs: the risk of war was too great. Nitze countered that the Soviet leader might provoke a crisis somewhere else to gain leverage in Berlin.

Secretary Rusk left the argument momentarily to take a call in another room. When he returned, Nitze noticed that his normally imperturbable face had turned pale. After a short while, Rusk asked Nitze to join him on a terrace looking out over the glittering lights of Washington. He had grim news. American spy planes had photographed Soviet offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Secrecy was essential. Top officials would have to keep to their schedules to prevent journalists from sniffing out the crisis. The next day, as planned, Nitze flew to Knoxville to give an address on the now uncomfortably appropriate topic of civil defense. When he returned, he joined ExComm, President Kennedy’s top advisory group. At some of these meetings, Nitze was the only one taking notes. These notes, including those of conversations not in range of the secret White House taping system, survived in his personal papers.

Everyone agreed that the missiles were dangerous and provocative. Khrushchev was in a position to both taunt and threaten the United States. The first question at that meeting was whether to strike immediately. Unprotected and not yet operational, the missiles made juicy targets.

But the United States did not know for sure how many weapons had arrived. The spy photographs had spotted some missiles, but the Cubans and Soviets could have hidden more. Nitze’s notes reveal that the ExComm group believed that “63 boxes, not like any we have ever seen” had come in through Cuba’s ports. Did they contain other missiles that would hurtle toward New York soon after American planes took out the photographed sites? Acknowledging the potential for a massive conflict, someone proposed that all American women and children be evacuated from communist nations bordering the Soviet Union.

Nitze floated the idea of an air strike in which the United States deliberately hit only offensive missiles, the ones set up to destroy America, while leaving the defensive missiles designed to protect Cuba from invaders. But then he added, “Can you stop after 50 sorties or 400 sorties without invasion”?

Nitze was arguing both sides of a debate he had been having off and on for six years. Could a limited war stay limited? Dean Acheson replied that the consequences were “deadly serious either way.”

MOSCOW FELT a strong emotional attachment to Havana. Khrushchev had known little to nothing about Castro when he came to power. But the bald five-foot-three-inch Ukrainian and the bearded six-foot-four-inch Cuban bonded immediately. More important, Cuba was the first country where communism had flowered without requiring Moscow’s fertilizer and shovels. Anastas Mikoyan had visited the island in 1960 and reported back enthusiastically on the revolutionaries. He would later tell Dean Rusk: “We have been waiting all our lives for a country to go Communist without the Red Army. It has happened in Cuba, and it makes us feel like boys again.”

But Cuba, ninety miles off Florida, was a part of American mythology as well. Teddy Roosevelt had fought in its hills and Ernest Hemingway had drunk in its bars. Until 1959, when Castro swept down from the Sierra Maestra and into power, American businessmen held sway there. Of more immediate importance, the Kennedy brothers were personally tied to it by the humiliation at the Bay of Pigs and they sought revenge. In November 1961, Nitze had sat in on a meeting on clandestine sabotage operations there; “all plans vague, grandiose,” he jotted. In January 1962, Robert Kennedy described overthrowing Castro as “the top priority in the U.S. government. All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”

That same month, Khrushchev had also given a speech about humiliation—his being the retreat in Berlin that fall. Vindication required brinkmanship, daring, and the amassing of strength. “We should increase the pressure, we must not doze off and, while growing, we should let the opponent feel the growth.”

By the spring of 1962, Khrushchev had settled on the location for his next move. That summer, Soviet ships sailed across the Atlantic. Military gear was kept belowdecks; decoy agricultural gear, like tractors, was kept conspicuously above. Once the ships approached the outer range of U.S. air and sea surveillance, men were allowed on deck only at night and only in small groups. Few knew where they were going. Each ship carried a small sealed envelope that the senior troop commander, the ship’s captain, and a KGB officer would open at an assigned spot in the Atlantic. Only then would they learn their destination.

IN THE MOST famous photograph of the ExComm meetings, Nitze sits in a big leather chair at the end of the table in the White House Cabinet Room. A portrait of George Washington hangs on the wall directly across from him, an emblem of the republic now suddenly so vulnerable. John Kennedy, two flags draped behind him, sits in the middle of the table to Nitze’s right. Papers cover the table and Nitze leans slightly, but intensely, forward.

Early in the debate, it became clear that the president had two main options. An air strike could take out the Soviet weapons and set up an invasion to remove Castro. Alternatively, a naval blockade could turn back the remaining Soviet ships and signal how seriously America took the crisis.

The group was split, and so were its members. Early on, Robert Kennedy announced that his brother would launch no “Pearl Harbor.” But Robert had his hawkish side too. “It would be better for our children and grandchildren if we decided to face the Soviet threat, stand up to it, and eliminate it, now,” he said. Secretary of State Rusk stayed quiet much of the time. But Nitze’s notes also record a moment when the secretary recalled a line of T. S. Eliot’s about how the world will end. Instead of going “down with a whimper,” Rusk said, it would be “maybe better to go down with a bang.” Chip Bohlen, present at the early meetings, threw in a dictum of Lenin: “If you encounter mush, proceed. If you encounter steel, withdraw.”

Nitze would later recall his most productive meeting during the crisis as one he had with U. Alexis Johnson, deputy undersecretary of state for political affairs, on the night of October 19. Tired of the back and forth in the ExComm meetings—which he later compared to “a sophomoric seminar”—he and Johnson constructed a to-do list. His notes from that night reveal a classic Nitze logic chain, full of bullet points and potential countermoves. How would the Soviets respond to the announcement of a U.S. blockade, and how should the United States respond to the response? In the end, the men decided that the two main options did not conflict. Everyone wanted to get the missiles out with minimum risk. First we should try a blockade. If that failed, we should order an air strike. If that failed, we should invade. In short, Nitze developed a strategy of controlled escalation, just as he had done during the Berlin crisis.

The next day, Kennedy came back from a campaign stop in Chicago and guided ExComm to consensus. The United States would implement the blockade.

Nitze agreed with the decision and wrote out his views in longhand that evening. He believed it made sense to “follow the blockade route,” but after giving that two or three days, he wanted an air strike to “eliminate the main nuclear threat.” A retaliatory attack by the Soviets was highly unlikely, he wrote, given that our air force was now on high alert.

If the Soviets did retaliate, Nitze believed the United States should escalate: from a nonnuclear invasion to a quick strike against Soviet territory to whatever it took to get rid of the missiles. “If we permit the Cuban missile affront to go unanswered in an effective way, I see no possibility of negotiating with Khrushchev except on his terms. In other words, I believe we will have accepted his version of communist co-existence.”

Underneath, as though leaving a note for posterity, he wrote his name: “Paul H. Nitze.”

ONE MAN IN THE UNITED STATES was not afraid of war: Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay. To President Kennedy, he called a blockade the equivalent of appeasement. “I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention right now,” he pronounced on Friday, October 19.

Men like LeMay created another grave worry for Kennedy: some over-enthusiastic brass hat could start the war on his own. The president fretted particularly about a set of American nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles on bases in Turkey. If the United States hit Cuba, the Soviets might hit the Turkish bases. Should that happen, Kennedy did not want a rogue commander starting Armageddon.

On Monday, October 22, at a meeting in the Cabinet Room, he interrupted a briefing that Nitze was giving on Berlin to ask him to order the Joint Chiefs to make this point particularly clear to personnel at the American bases.

As a frequent sparring partner of LeMay, Nitze must have understood Kennedy’s concern. But he was nonetheless reluctant to carry out the order, and he pointed out that the chiefs would consider it redundant. Everyone already knew that they could not shoot off nuclear weapons without a directive from the commander in chief.

That did not satisfy the president. He wanted the order reinforced. “Can we take care of that then, Paul? We need a new instruction out.”

Nitze responded quietly and without enthusiasm. “All right. I’ll go back and tell them.” His voice made it clear that the chiefs would not be happy. Nitze trusted that commands and regulations would be followed. Procedures would remain orderly. Why offend someone’s dignity by suggesting otherwise?

“They object to sending a new one out?” asked the president.

They object to sending out a new order because it, “to their view, compromises their standing instructions,” Nitze responded.

Surely a message could be sent, argued National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Rusk. Perhaps they could just say the president was directing attention to the issue again.

Nitze pushed back. “They said the orders are that nothing can go without a presidential order.”

Kennedy was now frustrated. The men handling the missiles in Turkey did not know everything that he knew, and he did not want anyone there to “fire ’em off and think the United States is under attack. I don’t think we ought to accept the Chiefs’ word on that one, Paul.”

Kennedy probably intended the use of Nitze’s first name as a reproach. But Nitze stubbornly refused to yield and carry out the command. It was a strange and damaging moment for him: he just did not seem to understand that this was a moment for accepting orders, not for fighting back. “But surely these fellows are thoroughly indoctrinated not to fire. This is what McNamara and I went over . . . and they really are indoctrinated on this point.”

“Well, let’s do it again, Paul.”

Finally, he relented. “I’ve got your point.”

ON THE EVENING of Monday, October 22, John Kennedy appeared on television, calm but firm. “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.” As he spoke, nearly two hundred nuclear-armed planes dispersed through the night. The Strategic Air Command was following the longtime advice of Nitze and many others. If you might be hit soon, spread out.

Throughout the crisis, Nitze tried to remain focused on the tasks at hand. He had a small staff from ISA working around the clock for him, turning out position papers in between meetings. One of his aides, Daniel Ellsberg, spent some nights sleeping on Nitze’s couch. In a note scribbled to himself the day of Kennedy’s broadcast, Nitze jotted down: “In light of present stakes, minor issues really are minor, and that with respect to major issues there is no way of avoiding choices and accepting the substantial risks and costs involved.”

The first major risk was that the Soviets would try to break the blockade. When ExComm met on October 24, Soviet ships and submarines were still, as far as they knew, speeding across the Atlantic. At one point the CIA director, John McCone, left the room to get the latest position update. Imagining the lead ship approaching, President Kennedy asked what would happen next, “If we have this confrontation and we sink this ship,” and then the Soviets answered with some action against U.S. forces in Berlin.

Nitze responded that the logical response would be to shoot down Soviet planes over Berlin. If the Kremlin followed with a further escalation, the United States would have to decide whether to attack Soviet missile sites and bases.

As Nitze spoke, McCone returned. We now know that the Soviet ships had begun to retreat the day before, but he believed that they had just now stopped dead in the water or turned around. War had been avoided—at least for the moment.

The Soviets still had an array of threatening missiles in Cuba, and the United States had to get them out. The next day, Nitze had lunch with Secretary of Defense McNamara. It is not clear who suggested the idea, but Nitze’s notes indicate that at least one of them was considering whether the United States should tempt the USSR into starting a war. “Escalate blockade/ provoke an attack/ direct an attack,” read the notes.

AS NITZE AND THE REST of the high command in Washington debated their options, George Kennan was far away and entirely out of the loop. As the CIA planes snapped the photos that would start the conflict, he was taking a long, brooding walk around Belgrade, thinking about whether to resign in the wake of his failure in the trade debate. His wife urged him not to quit and he agreed to stay on at least a little while longer.

The next day, he drove to Italy for a vacation. During the first frantic meetings at the White House, he was in Bellagio, reading Serbian history and working on lectures about the Marquis de Custine, who wrote a famous account of his travels in nineteenth-century Russia. He heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis when the president appeared on television.

Soon Kennan was back in Belgrade, addressing the embassy staff and their spouses about the crisis. He gathered the group in a club room on the ground floor of the embassy and gave a talk that Eagleburger remembered as “brilliant” and a “tour de force.”

“We are now in [the] most serious world crisis since 1939,” he began. He then explained the history of the Monroe Doctrine—the position, first articulated during the presidency of James Monroe, that the United States should remain the master of its own hemisphere. He added that the Soviets should have known that the United States would retaliate when it discovered the missiles. As for Castro, Kennan had no sympathy. “One of the bloodiest dictatorships [the] world has seen in entire post-war period. Not for a moment can we concede it reflects feeling of Cuban people.”

The ambassador was calm and reasoned. He explained the historical background of the missile crisis and gave a passionate defense of Kennedy’s decision to act. He ended the talk by drawing parallels to the Nazis’ entrance into the Rhineland in 1936.

THAT VERY DAY, Saturday, October 27, everything almost went to hell. Kennedy received a belligerent note from Khrushchev, who in turn received a belligerent letter from Castro. The Cuban leader had stayed up all night and decided that the USSR should respond to any American invasion by “liquidating such a danger forever.” Cuba shot down a U.S. spy plane, killing its pilot. Another American plane strayed into Russian territory after getting lost over Alaska and was almost knocked down too. Nitze met at the office of Undersecretary of State George Ball again. His notes begin with Ball’s grim summary: “Unless we can return to political arrangement we will all fry.”

But on Sunday, Khrushchev decided to end the game of thermonuclear chicken. He had spent one night sleeping in his clothes and was as shaken as his opposite number. He had become convinced that the Americans actually were going to attack, and military and scientific advisers had briefed him on just how terrible a nuclear war would be. As he had done during the Berlin crisis, he decided to seek a way out.

He found one during a meeting that morning. Shortly before, without telling Nitze, or many of the other members of ExComm, Robert Kennedy met with the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and offered to withdraw the American missiles from Turkey in a few months if the Soviets would pull out of Cuba. (Like many in the Kennedy administration, Nitze did not learn about the trade for many years—and when he did, he was furious, both because he had been kept out of the loop and because he thought the quid pro quo unnecessary.) The attorney general told Dobrynin that their deal had to remain secret. He might run for president one day and did not want it known that he had compromised.

Khrushchev was presiding over a frantic and frazzled cabinet meeting when he received word from Dobrynin of the possible deal. Soon Radio Moscow broadcast the deep, sonorous voice of Yuri Levitan. “The Soviet government,” declared the man who had announced the end of the Second World War, “has given a new order to dismantle the weapons . . . and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.”

Reflecting on the crisis years later, Nitze explained that the central lesson was the importance of the correlation of forces between the two superpowers. The crisis started because Khrushchev sought to increase the USSR’s strength and it ended because he knew his country was weak.

To Kennan, the crisis was an anomaly. The correlation of forces had stopped mattering when both sides acquired the ability to annihilate each other. Appearing on Meet the Press ten months later, Kennan said: “Nothing that has gone on in the Soviet Union in the last two or three decades is as puzzling to me as the motives which caused Mr. Khrushchev to put these missiles into Cuba.”

In retrospect, and thanks to recently revealed documents of Khrushchev’s, we know Nitze was right about the correlation of forces. But what we now know casts grave doubt on his view that a limited war could have stayed limited. The United States had grossly underestimated the number of Soviet troops in Cuba, and Castro had no qualms about starting a war in which, at worst, he would die a martyr. Soviet missiles were aimed at American cities, not just at weapons silos. Most terrifyingly, at the time of the crisis, and for nearly forty years afterward, the United States had no idea that the Soviets had hidden scores of smaller nuclear weapons on the island. A U.S. invading force would almost certainly have met a nuclear response. Learning this, and learning of Castro’s willingness to use the weapons, “sent a chill down my spine,” wrote Robert McNamara in 2002.

FOR NITZE, the immediate consequence of the crisis was a push away from the Kennedys’ inner circle. Many people gained the president’s confidence during those thirteen days, but Nitze lost it. In a 1965 interview, Robert Kennedy would claim that Nitze had been too much of a hawk. That does not seem to have been the real problem. McGeorge Bundy was far more hawkish, and the Kennedy brothers’ esteem for him rose.

More likely, Nitze’s real problem was that he did not work well with the Kennedy team. He was slow to take orders; he was impatient with the way Robert and John Kennedy’s minds worked. They wanted to discuss and to mull. Nitze wanted to press ahead and take action. Bundy was at least compatible with them stylistically.

The issue was not a new one. Nitze had never done the things that would have endeared him to the president. He did not go to parties at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod or let Robert Kennedy’s children throw him into their pool in Virginia—and he thought rather less of the people, like Robert McNamara, who did. Years later, talking about the Kennedys, he said, “I knew them all, and from time to time went to these things, but you know [my wife and I] don’t like to become parts of somebody else’s group.”

Nitze’s punishment was twofold. He immediately lost some of his influence. And then, when the Kennedys and their confidants provided journalists and others with accounts of the crisis, Nitze was portrayed as one of the men ever eager to get the country into war. As the tapes and his notes reveal, he was conflicted about whether to strike. But the classification of people into hawks and doves (or, essentially, good advisers and bad advisers) depended partly on their closeness to the Kennedys. Robert, the ardent hawk of the early days, became “a dove from the start,” according to his biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Nitze suffered the opposite fate.

Removed from the inner sanctum, Nitze returned to the big issues that had occupied him early in the administration. In February 1963, he proposed, in a memo titled “Basis for Substantive Negotiations with U.S.S.R.,” that America agree to substantial arms reductions, limiting NATO and its communist counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, to a total of five hundred nuclear missiles each. Since the United States was well ahead in the metric, that part of the deal benefited Moscow. But in return, the Soviets would have to allow West Germany to absorb East Germany.

It was a bold and well-timed proposal. The missile crisis had spooked and matured Kennedy. In June, he would give an eloquent speech in Vienna calling for a reduction in Cold War tensions. Nitze’s memo could have been a useful starting point. But no one noticed it; Nitze did not even mention it in his memoirs.

Just a month after he floated his peace plan, Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric announced that he would soon be leaving his post. By all rights—experience, knowledge, and the promise given during that half-minute phone call from the president—the job should have gone to Nitze. “Kennedy expected to name Nitze to Gilpatric’s post in Pentagon,” declared the New York Times. But it was not to be. In the fall of 1963, the secretary of the navy was caught in a financial scandal. Kennedy had to fire him fast, and he needed a replacement. He turned to Nitze, who had no particular ties to the navy and who considered the secretaryship a demotion. But Kennedy twisted his arm and promised a more suitable post within a year. Nitze had no choice but to say yes.

GEORGE KENNAN’S REPUTATION had taken a beating, too. He had turned the conflict over Yugoslavia’s trade status into a battle royal. The issue was marginal to the U.S. economy, to the balance of power, and even to Tito. But Kennan had damaged the administration’s relations with Congress over it. Carl Kaysen, a presidential aide, remembers Kennedy becoming agitated when talking about Kennan after the fight in the fall of 1962. “The man doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the president exclaimed.

In January 1963, Rusk summoned Kennan to Washington. The two talked about his future and agreed that he should resign. Two years was long enough for him to serve in the post. Kennan lobbied for a reversal of the trade bill one more time that month—he even paid a visit to Nitze at the Defense Department to plead the case—but the battle was lost. In the spring, news of Kennan’s impending resignation leaked to the press. That summer, he came home.

Kennan harbored no ill will. He still found the young president both glamorous and wise. He recognized the difficulty of finding a way to smooth our terrible relations with Moscow. In the fall of 1963, he wrote to Kennedy: “I am full of admiration, both as a historian and as a person with diplomatic experience, for the manner in which you have addressed yourself to the problems of foreign policy with which I am familiar. I don’t think we have seen a better standard of statesmanship in the White House in the present century.”

He may have sent the letter partly out of self-interest. Rumors swirled that Rusk might soon be forced out, which would shake the apple tree and perhaps drop a new job into Kennan’s lap. But the feelings expressed were most likely genuine. Kennedy had had a terrific year, starting with the Cuban Missile Crisis and building with his much lauded Vienna speech.

Kennan mailed the letter on October 22 and got a charming handwritten note back. Less than a month later, the president was assassinated in Dallas. His death sent Kennan into a mood of profound sadness; his secretary remembers him pacing somberly. The day after, he did something very uncharacteristic for George Kennan: he stayed home and just stared at the TV.