Paul Nitze spent the mid-1970s scaring the hell out of people. His message was simple and he took it everywhere: the Soviet Union had become a mortal threat, and the United States needed to get stronger fast. He hammered out papers and op-eds. He gave speeches, formed organizations, testified incessantly before Congress, harangued the president, consulted secretly, and appeared on TV. His hair was white now and he seemed always to stare intensely from behind his dark-rimmed glasses. He became a hero to some people and a dangerous villain to others. Now he was not just a man but the embodiment of a movement.
His main argument began with a hypothetical. Tensions could rise somewhere. Provoked, the rivals might begin threatening each other. What next? America had long counted on the strangely comforting doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Neither side would start the fight because both knew it would end in ashes. Even the most committed Soviet hard-liners knew that America could hit back three ways: with ICBMs fired from the battery of silos spread over the country; with bombers; and with nuclear-armed submarines. Knock out a leg of that triad and we would still have two devastating ways to strike back.
But then Nitze—with his charts, his legal pads, and his experience that dated back to Hiroshima—would say: Hold on. Let us imagine that the Soviets did strike. Their arsenal had become so powerful that they could launch an overwhelming salvo and destroy most of our ICBMs while crippling our bomber and submarine fleets. At the same time, they would crowd their people into their vast shelter system. The United States would still have a few ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and bomb-carrying planes. But could we really retaliate in a meaningful way? The Soviet air defenses could shoot down many of our bombers, and submarine-launched missiles were notoriously inaccurate. America had designed its ICBMs for precision, not maximum destruction, so they would be particularly ineffective in this desperate scenario. Most important of all, if the United States hit back, the USSR would have enough weapons remaining to blast what was left of America into oblivion.
Nitze put the point plainly in an article titled “Deterring Our Deterrent,” published in Foreign Policy. Henry Kissinger had declared that nuclear war was “unthinkable.” Nitze argued the opposite: it had to be thought about. He backed up his position with graphics depicting the Soviets’ superiority in throw weight and their ability to respond to an American strike. Nitze had no formal training in mathematics or science, but the paper had an air of technical expertise. “The crucial question,” he declared, “is whether a future U.S. president should be left with only the option of deciding within minutes, or at most within two or three hours, to retaliate after a counterforce attack in a manner certain to result not only in military defeat for the United States but in wholly disproportionate and truly irremediable destruction to the American people.”
The answer, of course, was no. And if the Soviets really believed they could force America into such a terrible corner—a shuddering president with his finger poised above the red button, choosing between total surrender and futile, genocide-inducing counterattack—then Moscow might just launch.
RICHARD NIXON RESIGNED the presidency three months after Nitze resigned from the SALT team. In came Gerald Ford, who was an improvement from Nitze’s perspective—though not a big one. Ford kept Henry Kissinger in charge of foreign policy and did not seem to see the state of the arms race as one of urgent peril.
A few months into his tenure, Ford traveled to Vladivostok where he, Kissinger, and the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, worked out an accord in which the two adversaries pledged to equalize the total number of launchers and missiles with MIRV capabilities in their arsenals. The United States agreed not to penalize the Soviets for having larger weapons; the Soviets agreed not to count the weapons held by America’s NATO allies.
To many historians, this was a high point of Cold War harmony. Brezhnev fought desperately for a deal, fending off a seizure early in the talks and screaming at his defense minister that concessions must be made. On the final day, he grabbed Ford’s hand, looked him in the eyes, and told him that they had an obligation to protect all mankind. Touched, Ford gave the Russian leader his brand-new Alaskan wolf-skin coat. Soon after the talks ended, Brezhnev collapsed completely; after his convalescence a few weeks later, he could barely read. “Brezhnev exhausted himself in the struggle for peace,” recorded his close aide Anatoly Chernyaev in an October 1975 diary entry.
This all left Nitze cold. As far as he was concerned, America had been rolled again. The Vladivostok deal gave the Soviets a huge advantage in throw weight, leaving the U.S. arsenal in an inferior and thus threatened state.
In 1976, Nitze’s old friend and fellow SALT opponent Scoop Jackson ran for president. But Jackson had lost four years before, and Nitze, not giving him much of a chance, decided to roll the dice on someone new: a peanut farmer, nuclear submarine engineer, and governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter whose foreign policy views were all but unknown. Nitze sent Carter a big check and stamped a bumper sticker on his Mercedes. He had carefully worked through the politics of the race, determining that a fresh face would prosper in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, and mid-recession summer of 1976. Carter’s naval background would also allow him to talk about peace while looking tough. Nitze figured that this was his last chance to get the cabinet position he had long coveted. And he knew that an early endorsement would improve his odds, since in some ways politics resembles finance. Payout is maximized if you invest early.
At the outset, the plan worked. Nitze offered advice to the campaign, and the candidate cited him in speeches. Nitze’s goal seemed to be to convince Carter that, like Kennedy, he could win the presidency by being the Democrat who accused the Republicans of being soft.
In July, after wrapping up the nomination, Carter summoned Nitze, along with seven other leading Democratic foreign policy figures, to the house the governor had built for his mother in the pinewoods out side Plains, Georgia. Four of the guests were young up-and-comers; four were older men who had worked together in the Johnson administration and were now vying for the positions of secretary of state and defense: Nitze, Harold Brown, Cyrus Vance, and Paul Warnke.
Nitze was confident as the meeting approached. The morning of his trip to Georgia, he overslept and had to race to the airport at breakneck speed. Once in Atlanta, he and the other guests were put on a bus, given cold fried chicken, and driven three hours south to Plains. Nitze sat next to Brown and got in a fierce argument about American vulnerability as the Greyhound bounced along the Georgia roads.
The meeting convened in the living room, with everyone seated in a circle. Carter asked everyone their views on foreign policy and relations with the Soviets. When it came time for Nitze to speak, he pulled out a full presentation, along with charts. Gesticulating fiercely for effect, he spoke about America’s vulnerability, Moscow’s ICBM buildup, and Soviet civil defense. He was the most senior and experienced man in the room, and he played the part too aggressively. The others found the performance awkward, and neither Carter nor the other elder mandarins bought his argument.
Nitze, usually a gracious and socially skilled person, missed the mark not only in substance but also in tone. “He was a lion in a den of Daniels,” recalled Walter Slocombe, one of the up-and-comers. Another of the young invitees, Barry Blechman, recalled that Nitze “was giving a presentation when the idea was to have a discussion.” Nitze also forgot that he was talking to someone on the edge of the presidency. Throughout his career, young people would say that one of his great virtues was that he talked in the same hyperlogical way with everyone, whether an aide fresh out of graduate school, a peer, or a presidential candidate with a 25-point lead in the polls. Carter found the habit less endearing. “Nitze was typically know-it-all,” the president recalled dismissively a decade later. “His own ideas were sacred to him. He didn’t seem to listen to others, and he had a doomsday approach.”
When Nitze returned home, he declared that everything had gone just as he had wanted. In reality, he had utterly blown it. Vance became secretary of state. Warnke became head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as well as the lead SALT negotiator. Brown became secretary of defense. All the major spots were filled.
While reorganizing the department, Brown expressed an interest in bringing Nitze in as an undersecretary: despite their differences, the two men always held each other in high intellectual regard. But Carter had no interest in having Nitze anywhere in his administration: not in the cabinet, not in the Pentagon, not in the mailroom. Seven of the eight visitors to Plains that day received high posts. Nitze got nothing.
AT ALMOST EXACTLY the same time, George Kennan stumbled in almost exactly the same way. The stakes were lower, and the issue was in some ways the opposite. But in the summer of 1976, the intensifying national debate over nuclear weapons led Kennan to act in a decidedly indecorous and uncharacteristic way.
A thirty-two-year-old historian named C. Ben Wright provoked the tantrum. The author of a dissertation on Kennan, Wright had meticulously researched his subject’s early ideas. Now he had written an article for Slavic Review, “Mr. ‘X’ and Containment,” in which he argued that Kennan’s initial conception of containment placed much more emphasis on armed force than the Kennan of the 1970s would have people believe.
Wright was an admirer. While researching a dissertation on U.S.-Canadian relations during World War II, he had read Kennan’s memoirs. Inspired and awed, he changed the course of his studies.
Nonetheless, and despite Wright’s respectful tone, this particular charge was an arrow aimed at Kennan’s belly. Totally discomfited by America’s arms buildup and worn down by the crude misconceptions that spurred the Vietnam War, Kennan wanted no ancestral responsibility for the state of American politics in 1976.
It was his term “containment” that had framed American policy for the past thirty years, but he had long distanced himself from the prevailing definition of that word by repeating vigorously the distinction that he had first firmly made in his unsent letter to Walter Lippmann twenty-eight years before. There was political containment—economic aid, diplomacy, building up morale, influencing elections (perhaps even covertly); and there was military containment—making big weapons, threatening others with them, and perhaps ultimately firing them off. He had urged using the broadest possible civil and political measures, but emphatically not more, and it was his life’s regret that he had not made the distinction clearer in the article. Now the two concepts had blurred. Tellingly, in the latter decades of the Cold War, top Soviet officials translated “containment” with the same Russian word they used when translating “deterrence.”
But Wright had scrutinized Kennan’s writing and speeches between 1944 and 1947 and found evidence suggesting that he had not always opposed the application of some level of violence. Kennan had seemed at least partially convinced that thwarting Soviet expansion would require military strength and that a clash might be unavoidable. In a talk at the Air War College in 1947, he had told his audience: “With probably ten good hits with atomic bombs you could, without any great loss of life or loss of prestige or reputation of the United States as a well-meaning and humane people, practically cripple Russia’s war-making potential.” He was not advocating such a policy, but he was musing about the acceptability, under certain circumstances, of this startling strategic act. And three months earlier, during a study session at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kennan had suggested that America’s then nuclear monopoly could supply political leverage over Moscow—very much the advantage Nitze was to continue pressing America to maintain.
The editor of Slavic Review sent Kennan an advance copy of the essay, to which he promptly responded with a private letter choked with rage, demanding that the quotations be removed. His ostensible concern was for security and protocol: Wright had found the Air War College transcript in a collection of personal papers that Kennan had given to the Princeton library and Kennan claimed that he did not recall receiving permission from the Air War College to declassify the talk. He demanded, too, the deletion of his remarks before the Council on Foreign Relations. “These discussions are confidential and the council would be deeply shocked, and very annoyed with me, if they were to be cited in print.”
The editor of Slavic Review passed Kennan’s letter to Wright, urging him to drop the offending passages. Wright refused. He noted that Kennan had not objected to other, less personally compromising, quotes that presented similar questions about their classification. He then contacted both the Air War College and the council and received explicit permission to use the quotes. The only person deeply shocked, and very annoyed, was George Kennan.
Wright’s article appeared in the spring of 1976. It was smart and well reasoned, if not ultimately persuasive. Yes, Kennan was less pure than he claimed. But political containment was indeed the fulcrum of his thinking throughout the 1940s. In the clearest test case—America’s debate about how far to support its Greek clients during the civil war of the late 1940s—Kennan had come down cleanly in favor of a political solution and against military commitment. Even during the controversial discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kennan emphasized political resistance and made the same vague call for moral uplift with which he ended the Long Telegram. “Mr. Kennan said that no ‘get-tough policy’ was called for,” recorded the council’s note taker. “But rather that we should take a dignified and self-assured position in the world. As long as we show that our purposes are decent and that we have the courage to follow them through, the Russians will never challenge us.”
Wright’s piece was measured and calm. Kennan’s rejoinder read like something from the pen of Dean Acheson on a very angry day. “I stand, as I see, exposed,” Kennan began. “With merciless scalpel, and with abundant use of scraps of language from my writings, Mr. Wright has stripped me of my own pretenses and revealed me as the disguised militarist he considers me to be.” Kennan asserted that Wright had quoted him selectively—a claim Wright obliterated in a follow-up response—and ended with a dark and condescending admonition. The bending of language “presents, no doubt, a powerful temptation for the younger scholar. But his mentors and reviewers should warn him against it. It is too easy. Good history is not written that way.”
If the reply carried echoes of Acheson, Kennan’s next move reeked of Nixon. He pulled from the publicly open section of his papers in the Princeton library the documents Wright had cited, along with several others that were potentially explosive. These documents would remain unavailable for thirty years.
Not surprisingly, the long-hidden papers include a few passages that might have further tarred the image Kennan cultivated in the late 1970s. For example, at an October 1946 meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, he contemplated atomic war and seemed to support civil defense. “He felt that it was a mistake to assume, as was often done, that Russia was necessarily less vulnerable than the United States to atomic warfare,” wrote the note taker, summarizing Kennan’s argument that Russian industry was concentrated and thus exposed to attack. Kennan also appeared to advocate civil defense and said that we should not “reject plans to make our cities less vulnerable [just] because such plans can never attain perfection. He emphasized particularly the need of taking into consideration the possibilities of slum clearance and city planning.”
Kennan was no militarist, then or later. But he was determined to prevent historians from uncovering anything that could be unfavorably interpreted or that might complicate his effort to distance himself from America’s current militant posture—even if it meant sealing his own archive.
AS KENNAN TRIED to scrub away statements he wished he had never made, one of his closest friends decided to admonish him for things he had not done.
“I think I still should tell you something, what has been so many times on my lips, in these recent years,” began Svetlana Alliluyeva in a letter that Kennan received soon after he read Wright’s article. “[There is something] I always wanted to express to you (somehow, some time, in some possible way), I must put it in a very short simple message: Dear George you are unhappy—and this is very obvious—because you constantly betray yourself.”
After leaving Taliesin West, Svetlana had spent four years in Princeton, near the Kennans and in constant touch with them; she even lived for a short spell in their house. But she grew restless, as she always did. She was bored living the sedentary, suburban life, and so she decided to pack up her daughter in 1976 and move west again, this time to California. “I do not miss Princeton. Last four years there proved to be not good times,” she wrote to Annelise.
Safely out of the same city as Kennan, she now decided to be brutally frank; the letter she wrote was one of the most penetrating he ever received. Svetlana peeled back several layers of his personality, both praising and striking at the inner man.
You constantly do not allow yourself to be yourself. . . . You’ve put yourself—and all your life—into the pattern of (pardon me, please!) that deadly Presbyterian Righteousness which looks “good,” only in pronouncements from the pulpit; which is based on human experiences of different era; different people; different social milieu, than yours.
You are one of those—naturally by birth—great American idealists, to whom artists, Utopians and Politicians belonged just as well. People like Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Frank L. Wright (yes! yes! . . .), Thoreau, and many others—were born to be constantly misunderstood; to suffer through their lives of great discoveries, fighting with miserable middle-class mediocre mentality of their own compatriots, and of the rest of the world; people whose genius would be recognized too late.
Kennan’s great mistake, she told him, had been to choose the wrong path in life. He might think himself born to be in politics. But no—he was a failure at such things.
You are a writer. Not that academic type of historian who (no doubt about that!) collects awards every year from all important institutions of the world. Did these awards make you happier? . . . You could have written great number of books—of your own philosophy. It would be—by some—the most perfect, 100% American philosophy. . . . It was your own fault that you never allowed yourself to be what you are. To be what you’ve been born for.
My dear George . . . I wish you not to be ever so frustrated, hopeless and sad about yourself. You could just allow yourself really the way of life you want it—in Scotland or elsewhere—where you could totally separate yourself from the killing vanity of [your home in Princeton]; from that depressing Norwegian narrow practicality; from constant calls from Washington, D.C. which only frustrate you, and remind you that you are a “retired ambassador.”
You do not need another award from some Historical Society. You have them all. One thing that would make you happy would be a book, where you could freely express yourself, your philosophy of history; your view of your own fellow Americans; your love to them all.
She advised him to move somewhere remote, abandon all other commitments, and spend his time thinking. “George, you deserve to be happy, you deserve more than anyone else to live your way. Then—and only then—you will be really giving others as much as you really can—and should.”
paul nitze had worked under every Democratic president since Roosevelt. But Carter stopped calling him after the debacle in Georgia. By the time the governor won a paper-thin victory over Gerald Ford, Nitze rightly feared that he would sit this administration out.
He was not one to put his tail between his legs, though. On November 5, 1976, three days after the election, he was back at it, browbeating a group of men and women who, he felt, underestimated the dangers facing the United States. This time, his victims were a team of young intelligence analysts sitting across a conference table in a meeting room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Hard-liners had long believed that the CIA was underestimating Soviet strength, and they had pressured the Ford administration into appointing a panel of skeptics to evaluate the agency’s work. Nitze was a key member of this so-called Team B, a group of elder statesmen and scholars led by the Harvard historian Richard Pipes. They had spent the late summer and early fall poring over raw intelligence as well as the CIA’s annual National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) of Soviet intentions and capabilities. They were specifically instructed not to make a so-called net assessment, a reevaluation of the entire balance of power with the Soviet Union. Instead, they worked through a set of detailed questions about Soviet intentions and arsenal composition. In October, Team B and Team A, which comprised the CIA experts, had exchanged drafts. Now the two teams were getting together to talk.
The meeting was a mismatch and a mauling. Early on, a young analyst named Ted Cherry began to argue that to understand Soviet military strength, one had to examine the entire strategic balance. As he talked, appearing overconfident and presumptuous to members of Team B, Nitze peered over his glasses and interjected in a withering tone, “You mean do a net assessment?”
“Cherry’s mouth froze and he couldn’t say anything,” recalled Pipes. A long silence fell. Pipes eventually felt obliged to break in to limit the embarrassment. “It was a killer moment.”
The older, more seasoned men continued to dominate the younger people. Team A had not prepared for a confrontation, which made the clash that much bloodier. “It was like Walt Whitman High versus the Redskins,” one CIA analyst told the arms control specialist Anne Hessing Cahn. “We were overmatched,” another said. “People like Nitze ate us for lunch.”
After the meeting, the two teams retreated to their corners to revise their reports. Team B’s second draft was a withering indictment of the CIA’s understanding of the Soviets. Most important, they argued, Team A did not understand the way the Soviet leadership thought about nuclear war. The men in the Kremlin did not want such a destructive war, of course, but they knew it could happen, and they believed they could survive as victors.
After laying out that argument in great detail, the report followed with ten explicit and technical critiques of the assumptions used in the NIEs. Partly written by Nitze, this section alleged, for example, that the agency had underestimated the Soviet Union’s civil defense efforts, its ability to track U.S. submarines, and the range of some of its bombers.
In December, both teams presented their final reports before the upper echelons of the agency and its new director, George H. W. Bush. By then, Team A’s conclusions had shifted in the direction of Team B’s—partly, according to one of the analysts who worked on the report, because they felt pressure from Bush to accede. Not long after the presentation at Langley, the full story of the Team B exercise appeared in the press. A firestorm immediately erupted.
Why, liberals asked, had there not been a Team C, filled with experienced people like George Kennan? Why had only hard-liners like Nitze received classified material? Soon congressional committees began investigating. Henry Kissinger gave a press conference in which he dismissed Team B and its assertion that the Soviet Union was achieving nuclear supremacy. People who claimed that, he said, “are not doing this country a service and not doing mankind a service.”
The story behind the Team B exercise became downright mysterious a year later, when a boat washed ashore in the Chesapeake Bay. The boat belonged to John Paisley, the agency’s designated liaison with Team B—and, according to his son, the man who originally leaked details of the exercise to the press. An expert on Soviet weaponry, he had handled such tasks as delivering classified material to Team B. And his empty boat was full of false identification documents and sophisticated radio gear. It also carried a briefcase full of (unclassified) documents relating to Team B.
A week later, a man’s body was found floating in the bay, with a gunshot wound in the back of the head and diver’s weights attached to the midsection. The police declared immediately that it was Paisley and that he must have committed suicide. But the body had decomposed beyond recognition and it appeared to be that of a man who had stood five feet, seven inches; Paisley was five eleven. If the body was his, and if he had done himself in, he had chosen an awkward method. Paisley was right-handed, but he would have had to have attached the weights, leaned over the side, and shot himself, execution style, through the left temple.
In the decades since the body’s discovery, its identity has never been established. John Paisley was never heard from again.
A CENTRAL CLAIM OF the Team B report—and of Nitze’s many articles in the 1970s—was that the vigor with which the USSR was building its arsenal was an index of its malevolent intentions. Why would the Soviets be constructing so many heavy weapons, if not to put themselves in a position to threaten a devastating strike against the United States?
In retrospect, however, blackmail seems to have been fairly low on the Soviets’ agenda. They were much more concerned to assuage their sense of technological inferiority, to prevent an American first strike, and to feed their sprawling military-industrial complex. The strongest evidence for this position comes from an extraordinary collection of interviews of twenty-two Soviet military planners and strategists commissioned by the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment between 1990 and 1994 and long kept secret.
According to these interviews—the substance of which was confirmed by conversations in Moscow in 2009—weapons manufacturers drove decisions at least as much as the defense establishment and political leadership. According to the Defense Department interviews, a Soviet weapons manufacturer once came to Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov to ask him to requisition a few dozen more missiles. “What will I do with them?” Ustinov asked, resisting the request. “But if you don’t [order them], how will I feed the workers?” the manufacturer responded. Ustinov ordered the missiles built.
The military-industrial complex in the Soviet Union, it now appears, had even more power than its equivalent in the United States. At least the air force and navy—and Boeing and Lockheed—competed with each other. And they faced a constant (if quiet) chorus urging restraint. In Moscow, “everything was militarized,” said Vitalii Tsygichko. “The whole country worked with weapons. We just had to keep feeding the machine. We couldn’t stop it.”
Team B was correct to assert that many Soviet leaders believed they could fight and win a nuclear war. Andrian Danilevich, one of the principal Soviet war planners, echoed the Team B report in a 1992 interview. “We considered that we held advantages in certain areas, such as throw-weight, land-based systems, in control systems, in silo protection, in number of weapons, so we thought we could win a nuclear war.”
But the Soviets’ war plans were entirely based on retaliation. They expected that America would start the war, and then that the Kremlin would respond massively. “We never had a single thought of a first strike against the U.S.,” Danilevich reflected. “The doctrine was always very clear: we will always respond, but never initiate,” Tsygichko said.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in Nitze’s worldview at this time was his sense that the Kremlin’s leaders were far less humane, and far less worried about nuclear war, than their American counterparts. The United States, he believed, would never launch a nuclear weapon, except as a last resort; the Soviets appeared much more ready to do so.
Recent interviews with Soviet war planners give a very different impression. And Danilevich, for example, offered a striking story demonstrating the point.
Some time in 1972, Brezhnev’s defense advisers briefed him on the consequences of a massive out-of-the-blue nuclear strike by the United States. Eighty million Soviets would be dead; the armed forces would be reduced to a thousandth of their current strength; the European part of the Soviet Union would be laid waste by radiation. The country would be ruined, and yet the general secretary—assuming he had somehow survived—would have to respond.
The scenario “terrified” Brezhnev, according to Danilevich; what came next rattled the general secretary even more. As part of their presentation, Brezhnev’s advisers staged a drill, during which he was to press a button that would launch three real ICBMs with dummy war-heads. As the time came, Brezhnev was “visibly shaken and pale and his hand trembled.” Standing next to Defense Minister Grechko, he asked, several times over, whether his next action would have any real-world consequences. “Andrei Antonovich, are you sure this is just an exercise?”
The Soviet leaders, it now seems, were human.
AS THE CARTER administration came in, Nitze decided to try a new approach to influencing policy: instead of just working the bureaucracy, he would rile up the public. With that object in mind, he sat down with friends in Washington’s Metropolitan Club and created one of the oddest, and most successful, citizen-lobbying groups of the Cold War: the Committee on the Present Danger.
It made its public debut in November 1976, and it lived up to its name: its mission was to convince the public that there was a danger, and it really did run as a committee. Almost equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats filled its roster, from President Kennedy’s secretary of state Dean Rusk to future president Ronald Reagan. Other members included Saul Bellow, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, and Bud Zumwalt. Nitze served as chairman for policy studies. The committee did not have much money, in part because it refused to take a dime from defense contractors. “I have nothing to market but my reputation for probity,” Nitze said then.
Three constituencies supplied most of the support: establishment hard-liners of the sort who, like Nitze, lunched frequently at the Metropolitan Club; conservative Jewish intellectuals, who until recently could not have gotten into the club; and John Birch conservatives, who would have wanted no part in it. The organization was a holding pen for the men and women later called neoconservatives. It provided one of the first opportunities for Scoop Jackson Democrats to bond with Barry Goldwater Republicans, helping to forge the coalition that would shape American politics for the next thirty years.
Nitze did not really care who was with him, or why. At this point in his life, the ends justified the means. He had become so fixated on convincing his country of the need for immediate action against Moscow that he would have worked with almost anyone. He had even reconciled with Henry Kissinger. He just wanted to win.
The committee’s first fight occurred in the winter of 1977. The opponent was an old friend of Nitze’s: Paul Warnke. The two Pauls had served together in the Johnson Defense Department and together had tried to slow the Vietnam War—Nitze, because he thought it was disadvantageous; Warnke, because he thought it wrong. In those days, they had found themselves in agreement—mostly. Leslie Gelb, a mutual friend and colleague, remembers sitting with them one day at the very end of the administration. Nitze had his feet on his desk and was drawing on a giant cigar. “It was a foot long, and he was puffing up so much smoke that he could barely be seen.” They were drafting a speech and Nitze was unhappy with Warnke’s suggestions. “No, No. I don’t want to say those things,” he shouted. Warnke stood up from a chair in front of the desk and went to the window. “It’s us and the world,” Gelb remembers Nitze saying. “It’s about who gets who first.” For Gelb’s benefit, Warnke held his hand up to his head dismissively, but Nitze looked up at just that moment and caught the gesture through the cigar smoke. “The expression on his face changed. Things were never the same after that.”
Through the early 1970s, Nitze and Warnke still saw each other at parties, and they remained publicly amicable. Warnke became a high-powered Washington attorney, forming Clifford & Warnke with Nitze’s old boss. But then in the spring of 1975, Warnke published a piece in Foreign Policy entitled “Apes on a Treadmill.” The striking central metaphor was a response to the argument that this country was losing a nuclear arms “race.” In Warnke’s view, we were actually “jogging in tandem on a treadmill to nowhere.” Two years later, Warnke’s argument had seeped into elite thinking and Carter offered him the leadership positions at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the SALT talks—positions for which Paul Nitze was extremely qualified.
The president had hoped for expedited approval of Warnke’s nominations. But as soon as Nitze learned that, he laid his body across the tracks. He sent a letter to the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee outlining his concerns and then called Scoop Jackson. There would be hearings, and there would be a showdown.
On February 9,1977, Nitze stepped up for his first day of testimony. He was direct, but measured and calm. He took Warnke’s ideas seriously. He said that he would support his former colleague if he was confirmed. He also declared that he wanted to stimulate a national debate about arms policy so that the Carter administration would not negotiate a deal that the Senate would later reject.
On February 28, he returned to the Hill, but this time he came in anger. Anonymous attacks on his earlier testimony had been circulating on Capitol Hill, and he had concluded that Warnke was dissembling in his testimony. Friends remember Nitze having an angry gleam in his eye in the days leading up to his return to Capitol Hill. “We’re going to get him,” he said. A passerby who happened to ride in an elevator with Nitze the day of the testimony remembers thinking that he seemed to be hyping himself up like a boxer as he got ready to walk into the hearing room.
On this day, Nitze’s tone was fierce. “I think [Warnke] talks about numbers without knowing what the numbers mean.” “I [don’t] think his understanding runs deep enough to know what it is he wouldn’t have an understanding about.” “I think he has great ability at confusing people.”
Eventually Nitze was pinned by one of his interlocutors, the liberal New Hampshire senator Thomas McIntyre.
The senator began by reminding those present that some senators had personally attacked Nitze during his navy confirmation hearings in 1963. Perhaps, McIntyre was suggesting, there was a certain irony to today’s proceedings: this time Nitze was the predator, not the prey.
“Mr. Nitze, in your opening statement you stated that your disagreement with Mr. Warnke was not of a personal nature, because you both like and respect him.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I valued him as a former colleague.”
“Well, if you valued him as a former colleague, it makes it pretty clear that you don’t really basically object to Mr. Warnke’s character.”
“It does not. I said I have valued him. Frankly, I cannot understand the things he has been saying in the last few days. I do not think they are proper.”
“Are you saying that you impugn his character as an American citizen?”
“If you force me to, I do.”
“That is very interesting. Do you think that you are a better American than he is?”
“I really do.”
It was a terrible moment for Nitze. He had lost his cool and attacked the patriotism of an honorable and intelligent former friend. Nitze was a fiendishly competitive and passionate man, but he was usually calm in tense situations. This time he lost it. And without a doubt, the explosion was sparked in part by his jealousy at Warnke’s nomination and his pique at Carter for passing him over. Asked about the incident many years later, Harold Brown compared Nitze’s behavior toward Warnke to Edward Teller’s questioning of Oppenheimer’s loyalty. “[Nitze] tended to look for fights with any superior who was in a job he thought he should have had,” Brown added.
Nitze’s description of the incident, in his memoirs, is perhaps the most tortured and absurd paragraph he ever wrote. “[McIntyre] asked me whether I thought I was a better American than Warnke. I hesitated to answer but finally said ‘I really do.’ What I meant to say was, ‘I really do take exception to what I believe to be inconsistent and misleading testimony by Mr. Warnke.’ ”
Even Nitze’s friends were furious at him. And Warnke never forgave him. Immediately after the hearings, he removed a photograph of Nitze that he had long kept on a wall of his house, inscribed “To my co-conspirator” in acknowledgment of their work together on Vietnam. From then on, Warnke’s wife would be reluctant to remain in the same room as Nitze.
Knowing he had blundered badly, Nitze sent out the transcript of his opening remarks to a number of friends, including George Kennan. His hope, no doubt, was to show that his concerns had rested on substance, not mere animus. “Dear George,” he wrote, “I know that you hold an opposing view, however, I do hope you will find the time to read the enclosed copy of my opening remarks. . . . With warm regards, Sincerely, Paul.”
Kennan replied with one of the kindest letters Nitze ever received.
Dear Paul,
We have our differences of outlook, which is not surprising; but you know, I am sure, that I have never questioned your complete sincerity and intellectual integrity; and that no differences of this nature affect in the slightest degree the confidence and affection I feel toward you as a friend.
Sincerely, George K.
EVERY FEW YEARS, Kennan announced to his close friends, his family, and his diary that he had had it. He would not speak out in public anymore. His voice was not wanted; no one comprehended him; he would always be misinterpreted. From now on, he would only write history. And for a short while he would keep his resolution. But soon enough the wounded recluse would be stirred by the yet deeper conviction of the soundness, and importance, of his views.
The spring of 1977 was just such a time. Kennan’s generous letter about the Warnke hearings provided no hint of his profound anxiety. Nitze was alarmed, but Kennan was afraid—a very different thing. The fate of the world had never before seemed so precarious. The country now appeared to face “a real and crucial parting of the ways: one road leading to the total militarization of policy and an ultimate showdown on the basis of armed strength, the other to an effort to break out of the straightjacket of military rivalry.” It seemed to Kennan to be “a case of ‘speak now or forever hold thy peace.’” He decided to make one more cry for reason and understanding. A few months later, he published The Cloud of Danger.
With its sweeping statements about people, politics, and his philosophy, the book suggests that Kennan had taken Svetlana’s bracing advice, at least in part. But it was not the masterpiece she had demanded. He claimed to have written it “in one breath,” and it read that way—hurried, even deliberately aimed at alienating his readers. The dedication read: “To my wife, Annelise, whose lack of enthusiasm for this and my other excursions into the realm of public affairs has never detracted from the loyalty with which she supported these endeavors.”
The Cloud of Danger began with a long, withering critique of the United States—starting with the Constitution. Recent blunders, like the war in Vietnam, were not just the fault of a few shortsighted men: they were the inevitable result of a flawed system that gave Congress far too much power. Coming after Vietnam and the heavy-handed Nixon administration, this was an odd complaint. Kennan seemed to have Claude Pepper in mind, not William Fulbright.
Having dismissed the nation’s founding documents, he then turned on its personal habits. Cars were wicked and pernicious. We must reverse the industrial revolution. More centralized planning was required. The media needed a spanking. Labor unions must stop striking. He sounded like a grumpy uncle, denouncing his entire family from the living room rocker.
Having begun in a way sure to upset most of his readers, he then conducted a tour of international relations, stopping off at nearly every region of the world. In both form and content, The Cloud of Danger closely resembled a document he had written for the Policy Planning Staff in 1948, “Review of Current Trends: U.S. Foreign Policy.” In both, Kennan broke the world into discrete chunks and then prescribed disengagement from all of them except Western Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The Cloud of Danger is often distinguishable only by its slightly more worn-down tone. In 1948, he had written of Asia, “Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability.” In 1977, he wrote of South Asia, “Surely, if there are any peoples of which it may fairly be said that we have nothing to hope from them, it is the peoples of that unhappy region.”
But there was one country toward which his attitudes had altered dramatically: the Soviet Union. In 1948, he had written that the men in the Kremlin
are an able, shrewd and utterly ruthless group, absolutely devoid of respect for us or our institutions. They wish for nothing more than the destruction of our national strength. They operate through a political organization of unparalleled flexibility, discipline, cynicism, and toughness. They command the resources of one of the world’s greatest industrial and agricultural nations.
In 1977: “The Soviet leadership must be seen, then, as an old and aging group of men, commanding—but also very deeply involved with—a vast and highly stable bureaucracy.” They were aware of the economic and technological backwardness of their country.
Even if the Soviet leaders had wistful ideas of pressing for some sort of a military contest or showdown with the West, they would not wish to proceed in this direction, or even to hasten the arrival of such a situation, until they had progressed much farther than is the case today in overcoming of these various inadequacies, inefficiencies, and elements of political vulnerability in the situation at home.
The discussion of the Soviet Union was the book’s sharpest; Kennan began to sound reflective instead of reflexive. He argued that the United States should not hope for the collapse of the Brezhnev regime: what, after all, would take its place? He asked why hard-liners always declared that we should look at Soviet military capabilities, not their intentions. After all, they simultaneously declared that Moscow should believe in our benign intentions. He assailed the United States for not including our NATO allies when counting our arsenal size. “I see no reason to suppose that twenty-nine NATO divisions, eleven of them armored and several of them German, supported with nearly seven thousand of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, look to [Moscow] like the pitiable and hopelessly inferior force they are constantly depicted as being to the Western Europeans and American public.”
James Reston called the book “very wise” in the New York Times. Ronald Steel dubbed it “alternately irritating and sensible.” Unhelpfully for Kennan, Pravda declared that his “views have substantially evolved in the direction of common sense.”
After several years out of the spotlight, Kennan was once more a public, and polarizing, figure. Then, in November of that year, he gave one of the most controversial talks of his life. The setting was the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kennan began the speech simply enough, lamenting the “melancholy notoriety” of the X article, now thirty years old. Next, he recapitulated his arguments about the Soviet Union. The men in power were “ordinary” and “perhaps the most conservative ruling group to be found anywhere in the world.” They were “suffering greatly under the financial burden” of their “bloated arsenal.” He professed confusion at the logic motivating the opponents of détente. He did not specifically mention Nitze, but seemed to have him clearly in mind when he talked about “my friends” who seemed overagitated by the Soviets and who “lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of what I might call military mathematics.”
Kennan proposed a gathering of men of goodwill and knowledge of the Soviet Union. They should lay aside their prejudices “and all the arguments about who could conceivably do what to whom if their intentions were the nastiest” and just talk. It would be a time for policy makers to listen humbly to people with experience in, and knowledge of, Moscow.
The legendary diplomat David Bruce and Nitze’s confidant Charles Burton Marshall were both sitting near the front. After Kennan finished, Marshall leaned over to Bruce with a wry smile: “George didn’t leave much doubt who should chair the council of elders.” Bruce smiled broadly. Kennan appeared to be writing a job description that fitted only him—much as he had done in a policy planning paper in which he had suggested that the U.S. problems with Moscow could best be solved by an able diplomat fluent in Russian who also had knowledge of Russian history and culture.
The Washington Post reprinted the speech and Kennan soon faced attack from all sides. Richard Pipes, writing cogently and with an even temper in Commentary, noted that “a debate between two parties, one of which regards the military relationship as crucial to the understanding of the ‘real nature and situation’ of the Soviet Union, cannot begin by placing this topic out of bounds.” Eugene Rostow, one of the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger, came in with a more personal critique, describing Kennan as “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.” His “policy is old-fashioned nineteenth-century isolationism, diluted occasionally by flashes of nineteenth century irritation.” In the New Republic, Henry Fairlie accused Kennan of “senility.”
Nitze’s typed copy of the speech is marked up throughout. He set a big question mark under the phrase “man of peace,” which Kennan had used to describe Brezhnev. Later he underlined “total rejection and hostility from our side,” “hard-line opposition,” and “chauvinist rhetoric.” In a marginal note toward the speech’s end, Nitze appeared completely perplexed that Kennan would profess that “the uncertainties [the arms race] involves are rapidly growing beyond the power of either human mind or computer.”
BY THE LATE 1970s, Kennan and Nitze had become the diplomatic equivalents of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson: competing icons who admired each other and who would be forever linked. Kennan had become a co-chairman of the American Committee on East-West Accord, an organization dedicated to reducing tensions between the two superpowers. Nitze, still the face of the Committee on the Present Danger, was hard at work doing the opposite. Each man appeared on talk shows and before Congress. The old sages were cited in the papers with similar frequency. From the beginning of 1977 to the end of 1980, the New York Times and the Washington Post mentioned Kennan 102 times and Nitze 108. In May 1978, the New York Times Magazine placed the names of the two men on the cover, across from a picture of Brezhnev. “Can Carter Handle Him? Two Opposing Views.” Nitze contributed an essay and Kennan gave a long interview. Kennan’s answer to the question posed by the magazine was a hedged yes. Nitze’s, of course, was no. In the photograph accompanying his article, his eyes were wide open and he seemed to be pointing at the photographer, apparently ready to jump out of the magazine onto a million breakfast tables in order to mobilize the nation against the Soviet threat.
The fundamental difference between Nitze and Kennan was grounded in two long-running disagreements. The first was whether the United States, or anyone, could handle nuclear weapons. Nitze had always believed the answer was yes, from the Strategic Bombing Survey, through his arguments over limited war, to today. Kennan, forever scarred by Hamburg, believed it was no. Nuclear weapons were far too dreadful to leave in any human hands.
The second disagreement was perhaps more important, and it came from their differing views of the United States. Nitze’s goal was to make the U.S. arsenal more survivable. He wanted our nuclear stockpile to be harder to destroy and he wanted the Soviet arsenal to be less well equipped to launch a first strike. Both principles, he believed, served the cause of peace. The United States would never start a war, but the Soviets might. The whole point of Nitze’s work was to make such an attack less likely to succeed and thus less tempting.
Kennan, by contrast, had never subscribed to Nitze’s vision of American benevolence. He considered his country fully capable of starting a war, either through malice or through folly. As important, Nitze might believe that our arms buildup was merely defensive. But Moscow would not see it that way. Each weapon we added was one less city that could survive an American strike. Tensions would rise. And with everyone armed and on edge, a minor incident could initiate a massive conflict—as had happened with World War I.
Neither attacked the other personally in the Times articles. Nitze simply asserted that Kennan seemed to believe in “accommodation” and left the charge at that. Kennan did not invoke his former colleague’s name, but he did engage in dismissive psychoanalysis. Asked why the hardliners were so worried about Moscow, he responded, “It sometimes seems to me that people have a need for the externalization of evil. They have the need to think that there is, somewhere, an enemy boundlessly evil, because this makes them feel boundlessly good.” Kennan, perhaps fearing Nitze’s teeth in his calf, tried very hard to depersonalize the disagreement. “I shall soon be seventy-five years of age,” he wrote Reston in 1978. “My means and energies are obviously limited. For me to try to involve myself in public disputes with Paul Nitze and others would merely mean to get myself chewed up in controversy.”
Privately, though, both men could let loose. Listening to the glowing introduction given to Kennan at a Colorado banquet in the spring of 1977, Nitze began to flex his cheek muscles and clench his fist. Swinging toward one of his neighbors, he “unleashed a tirade,” wrote Strobe Talbott. “For more than thirty years Kennan had been idolized; he had been the darling of the intellectuals. It apparently made people of almost any ideological stripes feel virtuous to praise Kennan’s supposed virtues as a sage and a statesman and someone who knew what the Russians were all about and how to deal with them. Well, Nitze was getting tired of it. Where had Kennan’s way led? It had led into the current mess, into a world in which the United States was weak and almost willfully letting itself get weaker.”
When Kennan was roused, his usual response was something closer to a pained lament. Speaking with his biographer John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan said:
[Nitze] has the characteristic view of the military planner. . . . Who is the possible opponent against whom you’re supposed to plan a war? What do we assume on his part? We assume that he wishes us everything evil. We don’t inquire why he should wish this. But, to be safe, we assume that he wants to do anything evil to us that he can do. And, secondly, then, when we are faced with uncertainties about his military strength, about his capabilities, we take the worst case as the basis for our examination. These things, I suspect, enter into Paul’s views.
And you see, then, that one of the differences is that he is dealing with a fictitious and inhuman Soviet elite, whereas I am dealing with what I suspect to be, and think is likely to be, the real one.
Kennan had become close to Gaddis when the latter was working on Strategies of Containment, a book describing all the ways Kennan’s views of containment had been modified (and distorted) by his successors. Kennan found it brilliant; Nitze considered it less so. Gaddis recalls fondly an episode when he and Nitze were supposed to appear in 1979 at a conference at the Wilson Center to discuss papers they both had written about NSC-68. At the last minute, an illness prevented Nitze from attending. But he sent along a note to the chair of the session and asked that it be read aloud. “Whatever Professor Gaddis says about NSC-68 will be wrong and should be disregarded,” the note said in toto.
NITZE LIKED TO USE models to demonstrate Soviet military supremacy. He would carry around re-creations of Soviet ICBMs, ten inches long and black. The American models were five inches long and white. Sometimes, in speeches or meetings, he would arrange the black missiles to point upward while laying the white ones horizontal.
The models served his primary mission in the late 1970s—derailing the SALT II agreement. As in the past, Nitze’s argument was that size did matter. Based on the Ford and Brezhnev deal of 1974, SALT II limited the two sides to an equal number of missiles and launchers. But it did not take into account throw weight. The Soviet Union would once again deploy a brute supremacy.
For the next five years, the two sides discussed the treaty, with Nitze fighting it all the way. He gave speeches and interviews. He prepared meticulous charts and studied the treaty until he knew it as well as anybody. He wrote an eighteen-part series for the Committee on the Present Danger eviscerating the proposals being negotiated.
Carter tried to stroke him at first. He called a meeting at the White House with the members of the Committee on the Present Danger in the summer of 1977, in the vain hope of winning their support. He did not succeed. As the president declared that the American public would not support a massive arsenal buildup, Nitze began to shake his head and mutter, “No, no, no.”
“Paul,” the president snapped, “would you please let me finish?” In June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed SALT II, and Nitze redoubled his efforts. He testified sharply on Capitol Hill, hoping to block Senate ratification. The administration knew who its biggest opponent was. “Paul Nitze is worth 100 bureaucrats,” one Carter strategist told the Washington Post while glumly assessing the treaty’s chances. If ratification were to fail, said the head of the pro-SALT group, that would be “because the administration didn’t start early enough to counteract Paul Nitze and others.” Carter did however have a plan. “Henry Kissinger we will have to stroke,” said one Carter official, “Paul Nitze we will have to beat.”
The battle raged through the summer. The administration needed two thirds of the Senate for ratification, meaning that Nitze and other opponents needed thirty-four supporters to block it. Everyone knew the vote would be tense and close, and Nitze was relentless: talking, testifying, writing, arguing. (Kennan, on the other hand, refused an invitation from the Senate to testify.)
By late August 1979, advocates of the treaty thought they had sufficient support and wanted to bring a vote to the Senate floor. But then Nitze pulled his most devious move yet.
One morning, a friend from the CIA came over for breakfast—a former station chief who was quite senior in the agency. The two men began to chat about the Soviets. The United States, Nitze said, was finally ready to recognize the Russian threat. All that was needed now was some incident that would energize people.
The agency man then mentioned that a Soviet brigade was still based in Cuba. After the 1962 missile crisis, about seventeen thousand Soviet troops had stayed to help train Castro’s army. Over the years, most had left; that a few thousand remained would not have surprised anyone in Washington. But, the gentleman from Langley told Nitze, he had new information: the agency had photographs and other evidence to suggest that the brigade was training for combat, not just instructing Cubans. Nitze listened carefully, then waved the story off. Everyone knows that, he said. But then he paused and thought for a minute. Maybe not everyone knows that, he said. Maybe a few people have forgotten. Maybe it was time to remind them. Yes, this was definitely news that could be recycled.
The CIA official returned to his office and, aware that he acted with the blessing of one of the most influential men in Washington, quietly made sure the news got around. Soon an intelligence report that identified the brigade as a combat force began to circulate. Word also quickly reached newspapers and key members of the Senate.
Chaos soon followed. Frank Church, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared that the SALT II treaty could not pass unless the Soviets removed the brigade. Moscow protested that the troops had been there for a decade and a half, and that their mission had not changed. In fact, they considered the charge to be so bogus that the Soviet leadership concluded someone in the White House must have decided to pursue a new, harder policy.
Eventually the Carter administration withdrew the SALT II treaty. The final factor was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. But the battle had been lost before that, and the Cuban brigade leak was a key factor. Ralph Earle, the administration’s lead negotiator on the treaty, remembered the incident with horror. “It was so distorted and overplayed,” he said, yet it ruined the treaty’s prospects. It was the “banana peel,” Earle said, upon which SALT II came crashing down.
The scuttling of the treaty was a defeat for arms control, and for détente too. One of Nitze’s longtime Soviet counterparts, General Nikolai Detinov, the top aide to Ustinov, reflected thirty years later that the rejection of the treaty changed the tenor of the debate within the Soviet Union and made everyone in the leadership more tense. Had the Senate ratified the treaty in the summer of 1979, “we would not have gone into Afghanistan,” Detinov asserted. In fact, he added, the derailing of the SALT II ratification meant the derailing of the best chance that the two sides had to find a peaceful way out of the arms race.
The failure of SALT II was also a bitter political loss for Carter. Nitze could not have been happier about that. As always, he was eager to get back in; if Carter lost the election of 1980, another high post might open up.
At seventy-three years old, Nitze knew he was running out of chances, so, as the new campaign got under way, he spread his bets. He talked extensively with people close to Ted Kennedy, who was then mounting a primary challenge to Carter. He gave money to the Republican candidate John Connally, a former governor of Texas. He offered to consult for the campaign of former congressman John Anderson. He corresponded with former CIA director George Bush.
Eventually he threw his support to a member of the Committee on the Present Danger who came once during the campaign to dine at his house: Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California and charming B movie star, seen by many ordinary Americans as not just a contender for the presidency but also a challenger to the whole Soviet system.
With Carter, Nitze had joined the campaign early and then blown it. With Reagan, he joined late, but then played his hand well. He awed the candidate with his technical grasp of weapons science, and he held a press conference in order to establish himself as a longtime Democrat who now thought the country should vote Republican.
In November, Reagan swept to victory. Nitze could smile at last: Carter and Warnke were gone; SALT II had been defeated; the United States would surely begin a massive rearmament. And, once again, Paul Nitze was likely to be a member of the nation’s highest councils.