On October 21, 1967, Paul Nitze looked down from the Pentagon roof. The grounds resembled an enormous beehive, every inch covered and everything buzzing. Tens of thousands of people had come to protest the war in Vietnam. Under flapping Vietcong flags, speakers railed against American aggression. Norman Mailer was taking notes for what would become The Armies of the Night. The crowd took a moment of silence to commemorate the recent death of Che Guevara. “Out demons, out! Out demons, out!” chanted the crowd, hoping to exorcise, or perhaps levitate, the Pentagon.
Federal marshals surrounded the Pentagon. Behind them was another line, this one of troops. Radicals tried to provoke the soldiers by tossing vegetables at them; women bared their breasts. A group of angry demonstrators stormed the front of the building, dashing up the steps, pressing forward against the marshals’ swinging batons. Six got inside through a side ramp but were quickly ejected.
Nitze was finally deputy secretary of defense, a post for which he had yearned since Kennedy took office. But the promotion could not have come at a more difficult time. By now, the United States had fully Americanized the war in Vietnam and simultaneously created an explosive conflict at home. The protest this afternoon marked the beginning of a new kind of militant resistance to the war that had gone profoundly awry. Soon America’s campuses and cities would start to burn.
Organizing an orderly defense of the Pentagon was one of Nitze’s first tasks as deputy secretary. He was worried that the demonstrators would try to storm the building and that the guards would overreact. He fretted that radicals would self-immolate, as one protester had done in front of the building two years before. He and McNamara agreed that there should be a light ring of troops around the sprawling complex. Reinforcements would wait in the center courtyard, ready to spring out wherever needed. None of their rifles would be loaded.
The day was stressful, and protests continued throughout the cold night. Radicals and soldiers stared at each other, each seeing their own vision of human debasement. Inside the building, female secretaries on duty dreaded that the protesters would burst in and rape them. But when the protests ended the next morning, no one was dead either inside or outside the Pentagon—which had remained firmly on the ground. Nitze was relieved to be cleaning up beer cans, not bodies.
His interest in the protesters was rather more than casual. At about this time, Nitze became involved in a more secret undertaking. The goal, he recalled in his later years, “was to try and keep tabs on and undermine the radical anti-war movement.” His partner, he claimed in a late oral history (as well as in several conversations at different times with his younger son), was Warren Christopher, later Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state.
Warren Christopher and I share a curious past. We were appointed to this strange task force working against the radical anti-war movement in the late 60s. He had much more imagination and a more fertile mind in cooking up schemes to tie the other side in knots, to make fun of them, to get them ridiculed and generally to make a mess of the anti-war campaign. I was very proud of our success in that campaign but he found it inconvenient to acknowledge that he had ever had anything to do with it.
Christopher remembers that he helped to organize the defense of the Pentagon, which he describes in his memoirs. And he and Nitze were unquestionably at meetings where domestic intelligence procedures were reviewed, and both served on the Pentagon’s secret “303 Committee,” which oversaw covert operations. But Christopher says that he cannot recall at all working with Nitze on any secret countersubversion.
THEORETICALLY, GEORGE KENNAN was on the same side as the protesters. He, too, wanted to disengage America from South Vietnam; he, too, despised American consumerism.
But Kennan was a conservative, at least in the sense of being a traditionalist. He had a model for what a student should be. In the 1940s, he had proposed a Foreign Service school, with strict discipline and uniforms. Later he wrote that his ideal school would “take young men of high qualities of intellect and character, train them to great hardness of mind and body, to maturity and seriousness of purpose, and to a genuine understanding of our society with all its virtues and imperfections.”
This was an aspect of Kennan’s obsession with form, and of his bond with Nitze. No matter how much the two men disagreed, they had similar views about how civilized people should behave themselves. Nitze seemed like just the kind of person who could have emerged from Kennan’s ideal school. The students with shaggy beards throwing tomatoes and shutting down buildings in the 1960s would have been expelled immediately.
Kennan considered the radicals of this new generation misguided, as well as illiterate, drug-addled, and unhygienic. Like most American reformers, he considered them lamentable moralizers too. He would rail privately against them to friends and then in speeches. Eventually, he took his critique to the pages of the New York Times Magazine, where he published an essay titled “Rebels Without a Program” in January 1968.
Writing in the voice of a stern elder, Kennan classified the rebels into two categories: militants and hippies. He found the first group “full of hatred and intolerance.” They had an extraordinary certainty concerning their own rectitude and insight—a certainty neither earned nor learned and entirely out of place in a rapidly changing world.
For the hippies, Kennan’s feeling was “one of pity, not unmixed, in some instances, with horror.” Their greatest error was the belief that somehow, through passive stimuli, such as drugs, humans could release marvelous things from within themselves. “It is only through effort, through doing, through action—never through passive experiences—that man grows creatively.” He foresaw nothing but despair for those who sought an unattainable absolute freedom, instead of seeking such freedom as is possible within certain boundaries and rules. Artists and philosophers have known for centuries that serious liberty can exist only within restrictions. So-called free love, for example, would do nothing but destroy the bonds between people. “Love—and by that I mean the receiving of love as well as the bestowal of it—is itself an obligation, and as such is incompatible with the quest for a perfect freedom.”
Kennan was not just angry, or worried about the students for their own sake. He feared that their feelings and actions could lead to a societal breakdown. “There could be no greater illusion than the belief that one can treat one’s parents unfeelingly and with contempt and yet expect that one’s own children will some day treat one otherwise; for such people break the golden chain of affection that binds the generations and gives continuity and meaning to life.”
Here Kennan spoke from experience and from a frustrating realization that the old proverb is true: the son is more like his friends than his father. Two of his children were just at this moment rebelling. Christopher, the Kennans’ only son, had grown his hair long, wore sandals and tank tops, and had even pierced his ears. Worse, a graduate of Groton, he had transferred from Yale to Santa Cruz. The Kennans’ youngest daughter, Wendy, now a teenager, was starting to walk around the house barefoot and becoming more interested in boys than in her schoolwork. The children alarmed their parents, so much so that Kennan and his wife cracked open Wendy’s private diary. “I wonder whether his criticism of the students was really because of his frustrations with us,” reflected Wendy four decades later. Joan, the second-eldest daughter, says that the children’s rebellion, combined with the turmoil around the rest of the country, convinced Kennan “that the end of the world was near.”
At the end of the essay, Kennan proclaimed that he saw in the student demonstrators the same forces that had brought totalitarianism upon so many other troubled countries. If necessary, he would put his body on the line to stop them: “People should bear in mind that if this—namely noise, violence and lawlessness—is the way they are going to put their case, then many of us who are no happier than they are about some of the policies that arouse their indignation will have no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades.”
Hundreds of letters flowed in to the New York Times, most of them denouncing Kennan. He had struck a nerve, largely because of the style of his critique. The students were used to, and could handle, attacks from the right. They were also accustomed to arguing against liberals, many of whom longed for the students’ respect. But Kennan did not care what the protesters thought of him. He simply told the students that they had absolutely everything backward. They were not ushering in a happy, colorful new world. They were the better-off kin of the Russian nihilists who had paved the way for Stalin.
Kennan expanded the essay, along with a selection of the letters, into a book. Norman Podhoretz, the conservative editor of Commentary, described it as written in “an old-fashioned voice: cultivated, gentlemanly, poised, self-assured. There is strength in it, there is serenity in it, there is solidity in it, there is authority in it—but not the kind of authority that can easily be associated with repressiveness.”
Other intellectuals were less impressed. After Kennan—dressed in a gray suit and silk tie, with a gold watch chain hanging across his vest—spoke at a meeting of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, the playwright Lillian Hellman rose to defend the students. “God knows many of them are fools, and most of them will be sell-outs,” she said. “But they’re a better generation than we were.” Nearly everyone at the meeting agreed. Student leaders, Zbigniew Brzezinski (then teaching at Columbia), and Martin Peretz (future publisher of the New Republic) denounced Kennan. Outside the meeting, students chanted. Perhaps the only person in agreement with the guest of dishonor was an FBI informant, carefully taking notes of the exchange.
The most elegant critique came from W. H. Auden. “There is no one in public life for whose integrity and wisdom I have greater respect than Mr. George Kennan,” began the poet. Most of Kennan’s essay he agreed with. But he took great exception to Kennan’s assertion that the student protesters had made him question whether civil disobedience has any role in a democratic society. To oppose that principle, wrote Auden, “is to deny that human history owes anything to its martyrs.”
KENNAN, NITZE, AND THE FBI were focusing on the wrong target. As America’s youth burned their draft cards and smoked their peace pipes, the Soviet Union was undertaking one of the most damaging spy operations in U.S. history.
It started some time around the end of 1967 in front of a Zayre retail store in Alexandria, Virginia. “Hello, dear friend. Please do not turn around, but walk with me,” said a tall Russian to an American who held a folded copy of Time magazine under his arm. The American was John Walker, a navy warrant officer and communications specialist in dire need of cash. He had walked into the Soviet embassy two weeks earlier, offering to sell secrets. The day of his meeting in front of Zayre, he was discussing a contract and a shopping list of secrets that highlighted a document known as a keylist, which would describe the function of America’ s KW-7 military encryption machine. No one could read messages sent out by the device unless they had both the keylist and a KW-7.
Walker soon stole and copied the document. In early January 1968, he stuffed it in the bottom of a bag of trash he dropped in a prearranged location in another Virginia suburb. Now, to decipher America’s most secret naval communications, all the Soviets had to do was acquire one of the machines.
A couple of weeks later, on January 23, the U.S. intelligence-gathering ship Pueblo was idling in international waters off North Korea. On board was one of the top-secret encryption devices. All seemed quiet. Sailors chipped ice off the deck and read the NBA scores sent in from home. Suddenly, a North Korean warship appeared. Then two MiG fighters buzzed the ship and three more warships came into sight. After a brief firefight, the Pueblo surrendered: the first American ship captured during peacetime since 1807. North Korea held eighty hostages and some of the United States’ most secret signals equipment.
Back at the Pentagon, Paul Nitze “sweated peach pits” as part of the early response team deciding whether to strike back quickly. Should the United States try to sink the North Korean squadron before it could get the Pueblo into harbor? The options were limited because some of the planes nearest, based in South Korea, were loaded only with nuclear weapons. Nitze and the rest of the group decided they could do nothing.
Nitze found the incident vexing for two reasons in particular. First, there had been questions beforehand about whether the Pueblo’s mission was safe, but Nitze had personally approved it. The navy wanted to go ahead; Nitze later said he did not want “to be throwing dirt in [their] eyes.” Second, as a former navy secretary, he knew what losing the ship meant. His notes from the early meetings are full of concern about the KW-7. Even a glimpse of that marvelous device would help the Soviets. Had he known about Walker selling out the keylist, he would have sweated something worse than peach pits.
Ultimately, the seizure of the Pueblo and Walker’s ongoing espionage enabled the Soviets to track the movements of the American fleet. According to Pete Earley, a biographer of Walker, the betrayal ultimately allowed the Soviets to decipher “more than one million classified U.S. military messages.”
ROBERT MCNAMARA MARCHED confidently into the Pentagon in 1961; seven years later, he tumbled out, shattered. The day of his departure, Lyndon Johnson got stuck in an elevator right before the farewell ceremony, the microphone went dead, and it rained. Nitze stood beside the president and the secretary as water accumulated on McNamara’s famous eyeglasses. The White House ceremony rendered McNamara speechless. “Mr. President,” began the worn-out secretary, “I can’t find words to say what lies in my heart. I think I had better respond on another occasion.”
McNamara had come to doubt the war and Johnson had come to doubt McNamara. The human computer had feelings—and now they were of guilt, remorse, and confusion. Johnson packed him off to run the World Bank and called in a longtime friend, Clark Clifford, to be defense secretary.
Once again, a president had passed over Nitze. Time had listed him as one of the leading candidates for the job, even if “perhaps too old,” at sixty. Nitze, however, felt perfectly capable. “I am sorry that LBJ went further and missed the opportunity so clearly before him,” wrote Dean Acheson. “I do hope you get a chance at a top job. . . . You are so damned good!”
But Johnson and Nitze had never really gotten along. After the Texan’s succession to the presidency in 1963, he had called Nitze in for a meeting. The then navy secretary had prepared diligently. But Johnson asked no questions. Instead, he made Nitze sit on a couch while he himself went about his presidential business: placing phone calls, dictating to his secretary, watching the three televisions in his office. After several hours, Nitze was allowed to leave. Reflecting on the odd encounter, he decided it was a test: Johnson was trying to size him up and decide how loyal he would be.
Johnson’s biggest concern about Nitze was his supposed softness on the war. According to George Elsey, at the time a special assistant to the secretary of defense, “Clifford was acutely aware that Nitze was better prepared to be secretary of defense than he was and that Paul really deserved the job. But he did not get it because LBJ was a little worried about how tough a guy Nitze was.”
Nitze was deeply disappointed at the snub; his wife gave him two singing canaries to console him. But Clifford was now his boss, and Nitze would do his best. As he left a press conference the day Clifford’s appointment was announced, a reporter asked Nitze, “What are you going to do now?” “Going back to work,” he responded.
His first task was to educate the new secretary on the status of the war, a job that began each morning at 8:30 when the two men would join a small group. Clifford would begin the meeting by saying, “Paul, you’re on,” whereupon Nitze would speak his mind, generally about Vietnam.
Clifford believed the war was absolutely winnable. He was, remembered Nitze, a “fire-breathing hawk.” Nitze wanted to slow down and disengage. As he had consistently argued, the United States had to prioritize. Saving South Vietnam was not worth nothing, but it was not worth everything. A brutal Vietcong offensive during the Tet holidays in January had shown how strong the insurgency was. Nitze recommended halting our bombing and opening negotiations.
The big question facing the department was whether to accede to General William Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 additional troops. Two weeks into Clifford’s tenure, the Senate called for someone from the Pentagon to justify the contemplated buildup. Johnson thought Clifford too green to handle the job. Nitze would have to do it.
AT JUST THIS MOMENT, Kennan decided to involve himself in presidential politics for the first time since 1956. His candidate was Eugene McCarthy, the senior senator from Minnesota, who was running on a platform of peace in Vietnam. The preferred candidate of young left-wing idealists, McCarthy himself was a near analogue to Kennan. Soft-spoken and philosophical, McCarthy had studied in a monastery when younger. He took breaks from the campaign trail to read poetry. Like Kennan, he appeared frail but was physically strong. He had played semi-pro baseball and, after losing the election, would report ably on the World Series for Life magazine. Rather too obviously, he considered himself smarter than the journalists who covered him. He was a politician with a love for many things besides politics.
Kennan’s support offered the campaign respectability and depth at a time when it looked hopeless. He gave his elegant endorsement on February 29, 1968, Robert McNamara’s last day in office. He began with a long lament about the failures of America’s Vietnam policy and the probability that nothing would change if Johnson ended up running against Richard Nixon, the likely Republican nominee. It was time, he declared, to “register an electoral protest.” The New York Review of Books soon reprinted the speech. To Democratic intellectuals, Kennan’s endorsement made McCarthy seem a bit less like an imposter.
An electoral protest was indeed registered. On March 12, McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. Four days later, Robert Kennedy, sensing the president’s vulnerability, declared his own candidacy. Johnson both despised and feared Kennedy. His nomination was now clearly in doubt.
THE DAY KENNEDY entered the race, Nitze wrote Johnson a letter. He had spent a sleepless night thinking about having to testify and decided he could not do it. He did not believe in the president’s policy and could not bring himself to stand up for it in front of a Senate committee and millions of TV viewers. “I do not feel myself to be in a position properly to defend the Executive Branch in a debate before the Foreign Relations Committee,” he wrote in a letter. He offered to resign if asked.
First thing in the morning, he showed the note to Clifford, who read it and said: “I had no idea you felt so strongly about this.”
“Well, now you know.”
Clifford agreed to pass the letter on to the president. He asked only that Nitze drop the offer to resign.
Johnson was furious. A few days later, he called his former mentor, Senator Richard Russell, of Georgia, and vented as the White House tape recorder ran. The only thing saving Nitze’s skin was that he knew how to run the department and Clifford did not.
“You take Nitze,” fumed the president. “Refused to testify on the MAP bill on the military assistance. Just said he didn’t believe in the policy. Did not think we ought to be in Vietnam. Just wouldn’t do it. Just insubordinate. Wrote me a letter.”
“Well, I would have got him out of there the next day,” said Russell.
“Well, I would, but Clifford said he just can’t do it so quickly by himself . . .”
“Well, Clifford ought to know some good men he could bring in there.”
“Well, there are, but it is a question of just how fast you disrupt them until he can kind of get his feet on the ground.”
Clifford’s on-the-job crash course in Vietnam policy turned him against the war—with Nitze’s vehemence speeding the transition along. Between January and March of 1968, the percentage of Americans who approved of Johnson’s handling of the war had plummeted, from 40 to 26. And now one of the most formidable lawyers in Washington was arguing the doves’ case.
Not even Johnson could hold out against the pressure from both the public and his closest confidants. By the end of the month, he had announced the recall of General Westmoreland and declared that he would soon give a major speech on the war.
Nitze found the early drafts frustrating. He scrawled a memo to himself headed “Defects of old speech,” noting that it was just “more of the same” with no reference to negotiations or de-escalation. But Johnson kept revising. Gradually, he came up with a speech that described a substantial de-escalation. Most important, the United States would not send 206,000 troops. It would send 13,500.
But the biggest surprise came at the end.
With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
MANY PEOPLE’S FEELINGS about the Vietnam War seemed to travel on a long disassembly line heading in one direction: growing doubt, rejection, and then ever increasing disgust and opposition. George Kennan, Robert Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Stuart Symington, and Clark Clifford all took this journey. But, as so much of the country, and so many of his colleagues, flew past, Paul Nitze seemed to stay motionless. Eventually, the mere act of standing still turned him into, relatively speaking, a hawk.
During the last few months of Johnson’s tenure, Nitze was certainly to the right of his immediate boss. By the fall of 1968, Clifford had decided that a peace agreement was necessary for moral reasons—and political ones too. In early September, Johnson called Clifford and declared that he wanted the secretary to devote the rest of his tenure to working out a peace deal, partly to stave off the future denunciations of Richard Nixon, who would likely be the next president. “I’d like to let Nitze run the Department,” Johnson told Clifford. The secretary’s job would be to “try to figure out things that A—will give us some hope of success, that B—will at least be treating the American people fair, and C—that we’ll damn sure look good before an investigating committee in February when they say what in the hell did you do.”
To Nitze, this attitude took things a step too far. Yes, peace was desirable. But certain prices were too high to pay, and one such price was leverage with Moscow. Clifford, he would later say, had become “an absolute incontinent cut-and-runner.”
In mid-September, Clifford came to one of the 8:30 A.M. meetings and declared that he wanted to bring the Russians into settlement talks. The previous summer, the two sides had planned to engage in arms negotiation. But in August the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the nascent economic and political liberalization in that still communist country; negotiations were aborted. Now, Clifford was proposing a trade. If Czechoslovakia kept “quiet for a week” and Premier Kosygin pushed the Vietnamese to the negotiating table, the United States would reopen arms talks and stop bombing North Vietnam.
Nitze detonated. “It’s asinine—it’s ‘pissing’ away an advantage we have! It’ll undo the North Atlantic alliance if LBJ gets into bed with Kosygin.”
“C[lark] M[cAdams] C[lifford] grows irritated!” wrote the note taker. Nitze, the secretary pointed out, had long wanted the Soviets to help with the negotiations. Yes, said Nitze, but not now. The Soviets had made a terrible mistake by going into Czechoslovakia. World opinion was turning against them; other communist parties throughout the world were aghast. Why give any indication that we could countenance this outrage?
The secretary then declared, “I’m for anything that will get the president to stop the bombing!”
“No, I’m not!” Nitze countered. “Not if it means doing things contrary to our national interest! Wrecking NATO by playing footsie with Kosygin [would] do so!”
As the meeting wound down, Clifford scolded his deputy. “Do not deprecate the concept of finding the means of persuading the President to stop the bombing in the North and until we get it stopped we can’t get anyplace. I’m ready to take risks elsewhere, anywhere!”
“Nitze explodes again,” wrote the note taker. “I feel passionately,” Nitze told Clifford, “not to jeopardize U.S. boys, ever, any time, any place and there is no need now to play into Soviet hands.”
Eventually, Nitze’s position won out. No arms negotiations took place that fall.
IN HIS ESSAY on the student protesters, Kennan declared that they might one day see him on the “other side of the barricades.” In fact, he was already there. In the late 1960s, Kennan was actively working with the FBI, analyzing information sent to him about students and blacks who, as he saw it, threatened America.
It was a familiar role for Kennan. As a young Foreign Service officer in 1931, he had sent back to Washington a list of Americans residing in Moscow whom he considered possible communist sympathizers. While interned in Germany in 1942, according to his FBI file, he had reported back on seven fellow detainees “on whom there was some suspicion regarding their attitudes and loyalties.” As director of the Policy Planning Staff, according to other bureau files, “he had a weekly session with the FBI liaison representative and briefed him on the inside story of the Department’s activities. The Bureau in turn made available confidential information to him.” In 1951, a top aide to the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, wrote, “You will recall that George F. Kennan has always been friendly to the Bureau, furnishing pertinent and helpful information when in the State Department, etc.”
Kennan’s contact in the bureau in the late 1960s and early 1970s was William C. Sullivan, an assistant to the director for investigations. They had first met in 1963 and quickly struck up a friendship. Sullivan was a witty and well-read man with advanced degrees in both law and education. He quoted Santayana and Socrates in his letters and sent Kennan copies of his erudite speeches (one example: “Communism and the American Negro”). Ultimately, Sullivan became the third-highest-ranking official in the bureau; the New York Times described him as the only liberal Democrat ever to break into Hoover’s inner circle.
But Sullivan, like Kennan, did not take a liberal stance on all matters. He was in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, against groups it considered extremist in the late 1960s, and it was he who recommended bugging Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel rooms. After the 1963 March on Washington, Sullivan had written a memo declaring that the bureau “must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation.”
Like Kennan, Sullivan was extremely concerned about the student left. The two exchanged letters about the need to thwart the radicals, with Sullivan hinting of devious operations under way by his organization. By 1970, the Black Panther Party had become a focus of anxiety for both men and Sullivan frequently sent Kennan secret FBI files on Black Panther leaders. By 1971, Kennan had accumulated a large dossier, ranging from a collection of speeches by the Panthers’ leader Stokely Carmichael to campus flyers with titles like “Honkie Pig Chairman of Afro-American Studies Program.”
“I must say that I stand in amazement,” Kennan wrote to Sullivan in response, “at the fact that an organization can publish materials of this nature and still be permitted to carry on openly, and apparently legally, in our country.” Kennan suggested the speedy passage of laws to make this kind of speech illegal and to give the government maximum discretion in punishing it.
Any effective action to deal with these seditious factions in our national life, many of which operate on the very borderline between what is proper and improper, tolerable and intolerable, will require a series of rapid and fine decisions which the Executive Branch of the government ought to be empowered to take on its own responsibility, and for which it ought to be answerable only to the voters at the next election but not to the press or even to the courts.
In 1971, Sullivan was dismissed after running afoul of Hoover. The journalist Robert Novak, a close friend and confidant, recalls that the next year Sullivan told him that someday Novak “probably would read about his death in some kind of accident but not to believe it. It would be murder.” Gradually, Sullivan became a very public critic of the FBI: questioning Hoover’s mental stability in the director’s later years and airing some of the bureau’s dirty secrets before congressional committees. In November 1977, shortly before another scheduled appearance in front of a House committee, he was shot in the head while walking in the woods. The shooter, a young hunter, said that he thought he had seen a deer.
NITZE, NOW SIXTY-TWO, desperately wanted to stay in government when the Nixon administration moved in. Having worked for Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, he knew he did not have a chance at a top job. But he told friends that he would willingly accept a significant demotion. When nothing appeared immediately, he began to scratch out a draft of a possible memoir, beginning with the question “Has my generation . . . anything of value to pass on to the next generation?”
The answer, of course, was yes. And Nitze started by explaining how he learned to love his country and see himself as an American. He had not considered himself a patriot when he worked on Wall Street. But this changed when he arrived in Washington, met George Marshall, and learned that making decisions for the good of one’s country was “morally superior to what I had experienced before and also more effective.”
Nitze did not have a chance to elaborate on those thoughts. The new secretary of defense was a former congressman named Melvin Laird who had dealt with Nitze before and considered him a “hell of a good guy.” Wanting to find a place for him, Laird immediately called his friends on Capitol Hill to see whether Nitze could win confirmation to his old job running ISA. A firm answer came back from Barry Goldwater: no way. The Arizona senator believed, erroneously, that Nitze had been behind the famous “daisy ad” that Lyndon Johnson used against Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign—a spot showing a little girl counting daisy petals, followed by a mushroom cloud that implied that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for nuclear war.
The left shot down Laird’s other idea: making Nitze ambassador to West Germany. This time the fusillade came from Senator William Fulbright, a leading critic of the war who believed that Nitze had lied to him in 1967 about the Gulf of Tonkin attack. The senator apparently agreed with Carl Marcy, chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who wrote to Fulbright: “[You are going to be asked] if you have any objections to Paul Nitze being named Ambassador to Bonn. My comment is that Nitze is an ‘imperialist’ at heart, and would not be a good person to support U.S. troop withdrawals and, therefore, might be a good Ambassador to Mali or some other equivalent position—but not Bonn.”
Twice rebuffed, Nitze came up with an alternative plan. In the spring of 1969, he started with Dean Acheson the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy. The group was dedicated to protecting the funding for Safeguard, a system of missile defense designed to protect American ICBMs. As planned, radar would track incoming Soviet warheads and then Safeguard would fire up its own missiles to destroy them. Critics called it a waste; Nitze considered it a potentially useful line of defense against a Soviet first strike. Nitze’s first task was to hire some interns and research assistants. On the basis of friends’ recommendations, he settled on three promising young men—Richard Perle, Peter Wilson, and Paul Wolfowitz—with a fourth, Edward Luttwak, joining the staff soon after.
THE INTERNS WERE all unknown graduate students in their twenties who were connected to the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, a friend of Nitze’s. Perle had dated Wohlstetter’s daughter and then roomed with Luttwak at the London School of Economics. Wolfowitz and Wilson had studied under Wohlstetter. Nitze did not know much about them when they started: in a memo written before they began, he referred to Perle as “Pearl” and declared that he had hired “Jack Wolfowitz,” actually his recruit’s father.
But Nitze quickly got to know his charges and impressed them. Perle recalls: “I was blown away by the rigor of his thinking. I marveled at his ability to take a complicated issue and break it down. He also had extraordinary abilities as a raconteur.”
None of the four interns had quite found his identity yet. Luttwak—a new visitor to America who had been born in Romania and grown up in Italy and England—says he spent much of the summer chasing girls and learning about Washington’s social life. (“At most of the restaurants in those days, they served food that would be rejected by prisoners in Italy.”) Wilson, smart and sincere, would tutor Luttwak on the workings of American politics. Perle was a doctoral student in the process of abandoning his dissertation. Wolfowitz was scrounging for money.
Nitze’s work ethic inspired all of them. If a senator made a statement against the missile defense system at ten in the morning, Perle remembers, they would have a position paper circulating among their allies by noon. Their closest confidant was Dorothy Fosdick, Nitze’s old friend from the Policy Planning Staff. Now she was helping the four plot strategy aimed at winning over swing senators in what she knew would be a close vote on whether to fund the system. Appraising the odds early on, the group counted forty-one senators opposed, forty in favor, and nineteen undecided. They assumed their work would be tough, because few members of Congress found the topic of defense engaging. “Psychologically I think it is easier to get people emotionally involved in things that are expressive of macho,” said Nitze. “As far as macho is concerned, it is the offense which is most attractive; the defense suggests somebody that is sly, deceptive, dishonest.”
If Nitze impressed the interns, they equally impressed him. They churned out complex and sophisticated papers, many anticipating the great debates about missile defense to come. When opponents argued, for example, that missile defense was futile—no defensive system could stop every missile, and a single hit on a city could have utterly devastating consequences—they countered that the goal of Safeguard was not to protect cities; it was to protect America’s own missiles—a goal where 90 percent, or 50 percent, effectiveness could make a vast difference. When opponents suggested that we could obviate any need for missile defense by adopting a policy of “launch on warning”—firing our missiles when our radars picked up a Soviet attack—the quartet had a complex rebuttal. First, we would have to be sure that our radars had actually picked up missiles; second, we might not have enough time to launch, particularly if we double-checked to make sure we were not tracking geese; third, radiation from the incoming missiles could fry controls and prevent a launch.
The best argument, however, was that it’s hard to bargain away a system one does not have. Negotiations would soon begin with the Soviets, who were already constructing a missile defense array of their own. If we cut ours, we would lose leverage. This was an argument greatly appreciated by the White House and the State Department, although the new national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, fretted in a phone call to Secretary of State William Rogers that a future job given to Nitze would be seen as “payoff for his ABM testimony.”
Ultimately, Nitze’s side won by one vote. More important, four smart young men had just had a tremendous learning experience. Wilson would go on to become a defense analyst at RAND. Luttwak would quickly become a well-known strategic analyst, earning fame when his book Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook was found on the desk of a general who had almost succeeded in seizing power in Morocco in 1971. Wolfowitz and Perle would find themselves at the conservative center of almost every major foreign-policy debate through the second Iraq war.
In the middle of the Safeguard debate, Laird called again. He had a job that Nitze could fill, one that did not require Senate confirmation: the post of a negotiator in what would be called the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT. Moving back to the Pentagon, and a tiny windowless office, Nitze now had a chance to try to bargain away the system his charges were working so hard to save.
GEORGE KENNAN ALWAYS WANTED peace and quiet. When he got it, he used it to flagellate himself.
In the summer of 1968, as America convulsed and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, Kennan sat on his boat, off the Norwegian coast, and brooded.
The extreme unhappiness with which I confront the prospects of returning home arises not just from the hopeless profusion of my obligations and involvement but also from awareness of my own personal failings and the lack of success I have had in overcoming them. My congenital immaturity of bearing and conduct; my garrulousness; the difficulty I find rejecting hard liquor when it is offered to me as part of hospitality; the uncontrollable wandering eye—all these things are unworthy of the rest of me. They limit what I could make out of myself and what I could contribute in the final years of active life.
He then lamented how hard doing all that would be, but how necessary too. “What, after all, is the alternative? A long series of trivial gratifications, punctuated by moments of dull, frightening despair?”
His fears were personal, national, and global. His diary records dark dreams about losing his memory, a sense of profound helplessness over Vietnam, and a growing dread of nuclear calamity. The use of those dreadful weapons had become “in part a certainty and in the other part a near-certainty.”
When he returned to the United States, he kept his distance from politics. He met in October with Edmund Muskie, the Democratic vice presidential candidate. But Kennan stayed off the campaign trail. “I thought that if any president were to appoint me to office later,” he wrote in his diary, “my value to him and to the country would be greater if I were known to the public, and viewed by the public, as a non-partisan diplomat and academic person, rather than as someone to whom the president was in political debt.”
This judgment proved correct. When Richard Nixon came into office, Kennan suddenly had access to the White House again. Kissinger admired Kennan’s writing and thinking and called him in with some frequency.
Kennan was far from the most influential adviser, but in at least one instance he was the most perceptive. In the winter of 1969–1970, he told Kissinger that he had picked up a series of subtle signs that the administration was planning to open up relations with China. This was two years before the pair surprised the world with their triumphant accord with Mao Zedong.
AFTER BOUNDING DOWN the steps of her airplane at JFK, Svetlana had continued to charm. A few days after her arrival, she had given a live-broadcast press conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York. She came across as flirtatious, beautiful, and witty. Asked whether she would become an American citizen, she responded: “I think that before the marriage should be love. So if I love this country and this country will love me, then the marriage will be settled. But I cannot say now.”
She spent the next few months living on Kennan’s farm. He had left for a trip to Africa, but his daughter Joan had offered to help take care of Svetlana. So the former grand duchess of the Kremlin drove off to East Berlin, Pennsylvania, to spend a summer working on her memoirs, drinking peach schnapps, and living with a constantly changing mix of Kennan’s children and grandchildren.
With Kennan’s help, she had sold her memoirs for around $1.5 million and was wealthy for the first time in her life. But her relationship with America was not as happy as she might have wished. Knowing almost no one besides the Kennans, she suddenly had to deal with being a celebrity. “The public! There really is no such thing in the Soviet Union. There is no public opinion, no public information, no public reactions,” she wrote. “Now I had to get accustomed to something I found very difficult: this new sensation of life as on a stage.”
The KGB gave Svetlana the code name Kukushka—which means both “cuckoo bird” and “escaped convict”—and sent an agent to try to kidnap her. When the attempt failed, they began a disinformation campaign against her, claiming she was mentally unstable. The leader of Moscow’s Russian Orthodox church likened Svetlana to Judas. “How can one combine affiliation with a religion which teaches selfless love to fellow humans, with unnatural desertion by a mother of her children, with betrayal of her country and desecration of it?” Her two children, still living in Moscow, denounced her as well, possibly after KGB prompting.
The KGB then tried, unsuccessfully, to win her back. Donald Jameson, Kennan’s contact at the CIA, wrote to him about their efforts. “Two KGB officers in New York have mentioned her recently to contacts of theirs. In both cases, the content of their comments seemed to foreshadow an attempt to urge Svetlana to return to the Soviet Union for family reasons. Maybe some day they will learn that kind of entreaty is most effective when it precedes the shillelagh attack rather than follows it.”
Any possibility of a willing return to Moscow ended one evening when Svetlana was alone at the farm with some of Kennan’s young grandchildren and his seventeen-year-old son, Christopher. She called everyone together near a grill out on the veranda. The coals were still hot and she asked Christopher to run for some lighter fluid. “You are all present here to witness a solemn moment,” she declared. “I am burning my Soviet passport in answer to lies and calumny.” The passport flared up and Svetlana blew the ashes into the air.
When Kennan returned to the United States from Africa, he arranged for Svetlana to live temporarily in Princeton. They began to have tea and to dine together. He invited important friends over to meet her and helped her find an apartment to rent. They watched the 1968 election together. Throughout her life, Svetlana had befriended older men, and Kennan enjoyed the role of friend and guardian. Stalin had thrown him out of Moscow; now he was the protector of the tyrant’s daughter.
But the friendship was not an easy one. Svetlana was impetuous—she bought the first house a real estate agent showed her, on the spot—and temperamental. By the fall of 1968, she was also beginning to believe that the lawyer whom Kennan had secured for her, Maurice Greenbaum, had served her rather poorly. She was particularly angry that the copyright for her first book was issued in her translator’s name.
Eventually, the same impulsiveness that drove her from Moscow drove her from Princeton. While living in her new home, she began receiving letters from Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, widow of the famous architect and matriarch of the compound devoted to his memory, Taliesin West. Wright wanted Svetlana to come and visit. The letters were persistent and persuasive and eventually Svetlana gave in. She paid no heed when friends told her the place was “strange.”
Wright, it turned out, believed that she had found the reincarnation of her own daughter, also named Svetlana, who had died in a car crash. Her hope was that this new Svetlana would replace the old one. She got just what she wanted when Svetlana fell immediately in love with Wesley Peters, the first Svetlana’s widower, and married him within three weeks of her arrival.
But it did not take long for Svetlana, now forty-four, to realize that she could not tolerate life at the compound, where everyone was supposed to be totally subservient to Wright: to confess to her and to listen to her. A few months after the wedding, she wrote to Kennan, referring to him as her adoptive father, and said that she loved Wes but feared for her future. Olgivanna Wright seemed all too much like a man Svetlana had known and observed closely: Joseph Stalin. “I see [similarities] every day and every minute.”
The breaking point occurred when Svetlana became pregnant. To Wright, this was an unpardonable sin. No children had been born into the community since Frank Lloyd Wright’s death in 1959. His widow believed that a new soul would disrupt her communication with the dead.
Wright could not bring herself to confront Svetlana directly, so she telephoned Kennan and urged him to force Svetlana to have an abortion and put an end to “this folly.” She harangued him for forty minutes as he politely tried to reason with her; she threatened to travel to Princeton to make the case personally. Eventually, Kennan was able to signal Annelise to pick up another phone and declare that he had a guest and must end the conversation.
Svetlana soon left Taliesin West and divorced Wes. She had gained a beloved daughter, lost most of her money to Wes and the compound, and realized that even America could make her feel like she was living under totalitarianism. She headed back to Princeton.
