In July 1981, Nitze was relaxing, cigar in hand, in his Arlington office, gazing out the windows that looked over the Potomac and back toward Washington. Eugene Rostow, now running the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, had just called with a question. Might Nitze be willing to lead the forthcoming intermediate-range nuclear weapons talks?
His secretary, Nancy Jenkins, was in the room and the two started to laugh. Nitze had played tough on the call: How much authority would he have? To whom would he be reporting? But he and Jenkins both knew this negotiating was an act. Nitze had been hoping for exactly this call since Ronald Reagan’s inauguration six months earlier.
He had not gotten a job when Reagan arrived, languishing as friends and former protégés glided into power. He had hung his coat briefly at the CIA, his frequent employer of last resort. First, he had written a paper for Langley on political unrest in Poland; then he had led a task force examining how the Soviets perceived their own nuclear capabilities. It was marginally important work: appropriate, perhaps, for the average forty-year veteran of Washington who had been collecting Social Security for a decade.
But Paul Nitze was no average seventy-four-year-old. “His manner sparkled with a youthfulness that made colleagues forty years his junior seem tired and spent,” wrote a colleague. He still got up at four in the morning to read, devouring books like Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. He had kept himself astonishingly fit for a man his age, and he was still a force on the slopes of Aspen Mountain and the clay courts of the Northeast Harbor Tennis Club, where he played with a group of men known as the “silver foxes” and teamed up with his grandchildren in “parent-child” tournaments. “I had a particular philosophy as to how to keep oneself healthy,” he once said, “and that was not to do regular exercise of any kind, but to beat your body up at least once every two months. Go off and shoot quail, ski hard, play five sets of tennis a day, or do some outrageous thing that got your body used to adjusting to violent change. It was my theory that this was a better way of maintaining your health than regular exercise. People who did regular exercise got into a rut, and some strange thing would happen and they would get a heart attack.”
He kept up that regimen through his eighth decade. Because of it—or perhaps in spite of it—he was still fit, and eager to put that fitness to professional work. Yes, the offer on the table was an arms control job under Rostow, who knew vastly less about arms control; yes, his title would rank him below Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who had been his interns at the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy. But Nitze cared only about having another chance to set policy, at whatever level. And he knew that, once inside, he would find his way back to power. “Paul’s position never limited his influence,” reflected Harold Brown. “He was convinced that his power of intellect made up for his bureaucratic rank.”
Nitze said later that at this moment he flashed back to the late spring of 1950. George Kennan had been out of the Policy Planning Staff for a few months; one day he came to lunch with Acheson and Nitze in the garden belonging to the secretary of state. The three sat down and Kennan said forlornly, “You know, when I left the Department, it never occurred to me that you two would make foreign policy without consulting me.”
Now Nitze was in almost the same spot, with one big difference: he was going back in.
He laughed again, his eyes twinkled, and he stuck his tongue out ever so slightly, as he often did when acting sly or ironic. “I feel like George Kennan,” he said to Jenkins.
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS OLD when Reagan took the oath of office, Kennan had a firm routine when at home in Princeton. He would get up around six-thirty or seven and pick up the papers at the front door (the New York Times, Die Zeit, and the International Herald Tribune). He would check the thermometer and walk back upstairs to shave. He would dress in a jacket and tie and head to breakfast: hot cereal on cold days, cold cereal on warm days. He would read the papers carefully, often growing frustrated at inaccurate reporting—or accurate reporting of what he considered government folly. Some days he would bicycle down to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study. Other days, he would stay at home and work in his study in the tower that rose above the servants’ quarters, completely cut off from the rest of the house. In the evening, he would have a small glass of scotch, but never two. He would dine with Annelise, turn the thermostat down two degrees, and go to sleep.
At first, Kennan considered Reagan an improvement over the previous occupant of the White House. Carter had been loud when calm was required. “Never since World War II has there been so far-reaching a militarization of thought and discourse in the capital,” Kennan had written in 1980. “An unsuspecting stranger, plunged into its midst, could only conclude that the last hope of peaceful, nonmilitary solutions had been exhausted.” Carter had also been weak when strength was required. Kennan believed that a declaration of war would have been the proper response to the students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took sixty-six Americans hostage. He would also have interned all Iranian officials in the United States.
The new men, however, were experienced and competent. Moreover, Reagan’s hard-line reputation might present an unusual opportunity. A six-foot-one, strapping, horseback-riding former movie star might be able to propose a major arms deal without being attacked by Congress and the press as a weakling. A few weeks before the inauguration, Kennan wrote to the economist Walt Rostow, Eugene’s brother, to suggest that the new administration pledge to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal by 25 percent.
Kennan’s enthusiasm for Reagan vanished fast. Compared with other movie cowboys, Reagan was outwardly more the brash Sundance than the measured Butch. His strategy for the Soviets? “We win. They lose.” At his first press conference, Reagan demonized the Soviet leadership. “The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime: to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.” Behind the scenes, Reagan was much less harsh. In April 1981, for example, he sent Brezhnev a long personal letter urging that the two sides make peace. But publicly, he seemed the kind of man who might have pleased Kennan in 1946 but who grated now.
Kennan quickly shifted from eager counselor to somber condemner, unafraid to say that he was afraid and that Reagan’s first few months had provoked in him a pounding fear. As always, Kennan’s passion inspired eloquence, a full measure of which he displayed in May 1981 when he gave a speech accepting the Albert Einstein Peace Prize.
“Adequate words are lacking to express the full seriousness of our present situation.” Communication between the United States and the Soviet Union had broken down; arms stockpiles had become grotesque. “We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily: like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamelin marching blindly along behind their Pied Piper.”
He proposed “an immediate across-the-boards reduction by 50 percent” of nuclear stockpiles, followed by a further two-thirds cut in arsenal size. Yes, he admitted, the proposal would be difficult to carry out. But it was worth a try, because we had to believe in our duty: “not just to ourselves (for we are all going to die sooner or later) but . . . to our own kind, our duty to the continuity of the generations, our duty to the great experiment of civilized life on this rare and rich and marvelous planet.”
The Washington Post ran a front-page story about the speech, followed two days later with a piece entitled “George Kennan’s 30-Year Nightmare.” Two days after that, the entire text of the speech appeared in the paper. James Reston of the New York Times praised the wise words coming from “probably our most distinguished and certainly our most articulate living diplomat.” Activists passed around pamphlets with Kennan’s words at peace rallies. The Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation started a campaign to get ten million signatures in support of Kennan’s plan. Kennan later equated the response to that he received from the X article, the Reith Lectures, and his Vietnam testimony.
Support, and possibly even a signature, might have come from an unlikely quarter. The day after Kennan gave his speech, a senator asked Nitze what he thought of the idea. A 50 percent reduction could make sense, he responded. The key condition would be the inclusion of every factor, including throw weight. To eliminate half of the heaviest missiles on each side would indeed make the situation more stable.
THE FIRST THREE years of the Reagan administration were probably the most dangerous of the Cold War. The new occupants of the White House wanted to show Moscow that these were no longer the namby-pamby days of Vietnam retreat and Jimmy Carter malaise. In Reagan’s view, Moscow was an evil empire and the contradiction-riddled, pseudo-Leninist monstrosity could be pushed into retreat by American energy, decency, and confidence.
T. K. Jones, Nitze’s technical assistant and collaborator in many of his 1970s essays, declared that the United States could survive a nuclear conflict if people dug holes and hid in them. “If there are enough shovels around, everyone’s going to make it.” Asked in his confirmation hearings whether the United States could survive a nuclear war, Eugene Rostow noted that Japan “not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack.” He added that: “The human race is very resilient.”
“Oh, the race is; but I asked if either country would survive,” responded Senator Claiborne Pell.
“Well, there are ghoulish statistical calculations that are made about how many people would die in a nuclear exchange,” Rostow answered. “Depending upon certain assumptions, some estimates predict that there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another. But that is not the whole of the population.” Rostow might well have been General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say, no more than 10 to 20 million killed, top, depending on the breaks.”
Deeds followed the words. In small and large ways, American behavior toward the Soviets took on an edge. The Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, lost his private parking pass at the State Department. The navy secretary, John Lehman, began running exercises far closer to the Soviet coast than any of his predecessors had dared before. American troops swooped into tiny Grenada to free that nation from communism as part of Operation Urgent Fury.
Kennan was not amused. The rhetoric from Rostow and Jones was part of a “mad welter of calculations about who could take out whom, and how many millions might survive, and how we might hope to save our own poor skins by digging holes in the ground, and thus perhaps surviving into a world not worth surviving into.” In June 1982, Carroll O’Connor, one of America’s best-known actors—he played Archie Bunker in All in the Family—visited the Institute for Advanced Study. He saw Kennan, staring out the window and looking gloomily at the falling rain. “Are you worried about things?” asked O’Connor. “I am worried about everything,” Kennan replied. After they had been chatting for a few minutes, Kennan asked, “Are you one of the new professors here?”
Moscow was even less amused. Hitler had taken the Soviet Union by surprise forty years ago, and the Kremlin feared the new American president might do the same. “The policy of the Reagan administration has to be seen as adventurous and serving the goal of world domination,” Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told a Warsaw Pact chiefs of staff meeting in September 1982. “In 1941, too, there were many among us who warned against war and many who did not believe a war was coming. Therefore, since the danger of war was not assessed correctly, we had to make many sacrifices. Thus the situation is not only very serious, but also very dangerous.”
Driven partly by this fear, Moscow also took Dr. Strangelove a step further than Rostow had. During the early 1980s, the Soviet Union had extensive discussions about deploying a doomsday machine that would automatically direct full-scale retaliation for an American strike, even if everyone in the Kremlin were dead and all normal lines of communication severed.
These plans were abandoned in 1985 when the Soviets deployed a system known as Perimeter that would allow for semi-automatic response. The system centered upon hidden “command missiles” protected in heavily hardened silos designed to withstand extraordinary blasts as well as massive electromagnetic pulses. Each missile had the launch codes that could fire off a fleet of ground ICBMs targeted at American cities. The command missiles would soar above the radioactive ruins and send down low-frequency radio signals that would start the apocalyptic vengeance.
Who would issue the order to launch the command missiles? Someone high up in the Kremlin or military command could do so. But if everyone with authority was dead, the missiles could be launched on the order of some junior official in the command center—as long as three criteria had been met. Some top official, in a moment of crisis, would have had to have sent a signal to unlock the missiles; all communication with the military authorities would have to have ceased; and a network of sensors measuring data such as radiation and pressure would have had to determine that the Americans had really hit. In other words, if the Soviets expected the United States to attack soon, they would have had a nearly foolproof way to guarantee that they could strike back.
There was another danger that America did not know about at the time. In the early 1980s, Fidel Castro urged Moscow to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. According to Danilevich: “The [Soviet leadership] had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S. This changed Castro’s positions considerably.”
IN THE SPRING of 1982, four of Nitze’s former superiors gathered together to repudiate his current boss.
George Kennan, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Gerard Smith made up the quartet. Nitze had served under Bundy in the Kennedy White House and as deputy to the other three men—Kennan at PPS; McNamara at Defense; Smith on the SALT delegation.
The men published an essay in Foreign Affairs arguing that the United States should declare that it would use nuclear weapons only in retaliation and would never fire them first. The United States had not made this pledge before because of its fear that nothing else could stop the massive Red Army if its tanks started rolling toward Paris.
The four men had followed very different roads to the same point. Kennan had denounced “first use” in 1950 and could have written the paper at any time in the following three decades. He had not done so, as he told Gaddis in 1984, because “I realized that if I were to write about ‘first use’ people would say: what the hell does Kennan know about military matters.” Smith was an establishment Republican—a Yale law school graduate and the first chairman of the Trilateral Commission. But the Republican Party was trading away people like him during the Reagan years (and receiving electoral dominance in the Sun Belt and South in return). Bundy and McNamara, the antiheroes of The Best and the Brightest, had retreated steadily from hawkish positions ever since their years as the confident faces of the Kennedy administration.
Kennan played a minor role in drafting the Foreign Affairs essay, and his absence showed. The prose was dense and hyperlogical—hallmarks of the writing of Bundy and McNamara. They argued that renunciation of first use would strengthen the American alliance with Western Europe, where peace movements and antinuclear parties were gaining power. It would reassure the Soviets and it would simplify American planning. If the United States had no first-use intention, it would not need so complex an arsenal.
One of Kennan’s few specific contributions was to knock out a personal shot Bundy took at Nitze in one of the essay’s drafts. “We could say simply,” Kennan wrote, that we “ ‘are deeply unimpressed by the argument, recently so eloquently advanced in Washington . . .’ or something similar. Paul deserves the reproach, but this is not the place to administer it.”
To maximize potential press coverage, the quartet kept the article secret until close to the publication date. To Kennan, this could “be the most important article that has appeared in Foreign Affairs since the last war.” They had four big names and utter confidence in their argument. As Bundy told a New York Times reporter, “On this issue, if you haven’t changed your mind, you haven’t been using your mind.”
Nitze, of course, had not changed his mind on this issue in thirty-five years. And he eagerly accepted when the White House asked him to write a response for the New York Times op-ed page.
But, like Kennan, he did not seem to want to criticize his former colleagues personally. His final draft critiqued the most technical aspects of the article but never mentioned any of the authors by name. Nitze could be blisteringly funny and cutting in private about his adversaries. He once said of Bundy, “Mac was a great success as the dean of the faculty of Harvard, a position in which no man of integrity could possibly succeed.” But he had no interest in a personal and public row.
In the end, neither the article nor Nitze’s rebuttal had much effect. A minor public outcry and a flurry of press attention for the four wise men was followed by silence. The Reagan administration was not going to change its positions.
Watching from Moscow, the Kremlin thought Reagan’s silence ominous; they took it as yet another indicator that he might be planning a first strike. Tensions were high, said Viktor Koltunov, a Soviet arms negotiator and defense official, and announcing a policy of no first use could have substantially calmed them: “it would really have had a lot of impact.”
WHEN NITZE STEPPED into his new job under Eugene Rostow, many considered him an unthinking nuke-lover. Mother Jones magazine anointed him a charter member of the “Holocaust Lobby.” The historian Barbara Tuchman declared: “Let us acknowledge it: the American and Soviet Governments have no real desire to limit nuclear arms. . . . It is indicated on our side by the appointment as chief delegate to the Geneva talks of [one of] the high priests of the hardline, Paul Nitze. A rough equivalent would be putting Pope John Paul II in charge of abortion rights.”
But people who knew Nitze well thought otherwise. Outside of government, he created stress; inside, he reduced it. The appointment was “a stroke of genius,” Paul Warnke said. “[Nitze] will get this administration a deal whether it wants one or not.” Richard Perle called his mentor “an inveterate problem solver.”
The problem that urgently needed solution was the presence of Soviet SS-20s looming over Western Europe. Moscow had put the highly accurate, mobile, triple-warhead missiles in place in the 1970s, believing that they would provide an invaluable advantage if World War III should break out in the same region as World Wars I and II. The Soviets also had plans for “deep operations,” in which Red Army tanks would race across Europe, split NATO, and reach the beaches of France within a week. The SS-20s were essential to accomplishing this objective. According to Danilevich, “the SS-20 was a breakthrough, unlike anything the Americans had. We were immediately able to hold all of Europe hostage.”
The monopoly, however, did not last long. In 1979, the Carter administration announced plans to deploy 108 equivalently advanced missiles known as Pershing IIs to Western Europe, along with a larger number of ground-launch cruise missiles (GLCMs). They were scheduled to arrive in 1983. Nitze’s job was to negotiate a treaty to limit (or eliminate) both the Soviet missiles already in place and the soon-to-arrive American missiles, which terrified the Soviets because of the speed with which they could reach Moscow.
The logic behind the negotiations was extremely complicated. How could we work a deal in which the United States would trade missiles that had not yet arrived in Europe for missiles that were already there? And when assessing arsenal size, how would we account for weapons held by the British and the French?
One Saturday, Richard Perle came into his Pentagon office to wrestle with the papers stacked on his desk. What possible deal would make sense? Perle thought, read, called in men to brief him, and then spent hours thinking. That evening he suddenly hatched the idea that would drive Nitze crazy for the next three years.
“It came so quickly it literally took his breath away,” Perle wrote in an autobiographical novel that, he said in an interview, was entirely accurate in its description of this scene.
Zero. That was it. Zero. Zero for both sides.
Get rid of all of them—SS-20s, Pershing IIs, ground-launched cruise missiles, the whole lot.
We will abandon our deployment if the Soviets give up theirs. Oh, it was perfect. It was fair. Balanced. Simple. Elegant. Obvious. Clean. Tidy. Neatly wrapped.
How could they say no? How could anyone fail to say yes?
Of course, people would criticize Perle’s deal: it was demonstrably to the United States’ advantage, so the Soviets would never accept it. Perle’s “zero option” asked the Soviets to give up missiles already in position for missiles on the assembly line. It was like asking a man to trade his house for a blueprint.
Reagan, however, loved the idea. When Nitze went off to Geneva to begin the talks, he had firm instructions: convince the Soviets to accept the zero option. Nothing else was acceptable.
THE INTERMEDIATE-RANGE NUCLEAR FORCES (INF) talks began on a gray, snowy day in late November 1981. Nitze’s black limousine pulled up to the Soviet mission in Geneva; he stepped out and walked up toward the porch of the building. Another man in a gray suit stepped off the porch to say hello. This was Nitze’s first encounter with Yuli Kvitsinsky, a man he would come to know quite well.
Kvitsinsky was an up-and-coming Soviet diplomat. Forty-five years old, he had served in the Soviet embassies in both East Berlin and Bonn. He spoke perfect English and German. He did not have Nitze’s technical knowledge—no one did—but he matched him in stubbornness. Nitze described the talks in a letter to his sister. “In each session it will go through episodes of competition in wit and humor, calm dead seriousness, oratory or at least attempts at eloquence, and at least on his part outrageous polemics which I choose to believe offer me fine opportunities for brilliant thrusts, rebuttals and repartee. But underlying it is a sense of deadly seriousness.” Frustrated when the Soviets demanded additional concessions on a point he considered settled, Nitze exclaimed, “This horse has already been sold twice.” Kvitsinsky, similarly sharp-tongued, once declared that the zero option was “like the hole in a donut.”
The two sides grappled for months. During the days, they would argue; in the evenings, they would relax. Gradually, Nitze began to understand his Soviet counterparts better and better. Kvitsinsky’s deputy, Nikolai Detinov, remembers long evening conversations with Nitze about the future of computer technology.
Still, Nitze would not budge from zero, and Kvitsinsky would not budge toward it. Meanwhile, protesters massed throughout Western Europe and in the United States, and scientists fretted about the possibility that a nuclear strike would shoot so much soot and smoke into the atmosphere that the world could enter into a period of prolonged winter and mass starvation. In June 1982, half a million people walked from the United Nations to Central Park to demand nuclear disarmament. A few days later, the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, gave a speech discussing the Soviet Union’s declared policy of never using nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
Nitze had begun to worry intensely that deploying the Pershing II missiles could divide the United States and Europe. Most damaging, a coalition of working-class, environmental, and antinuclear politicians could bring down the pro-American government in West Germany. That summer, he clipped a newspaper column in which Joseph Kraft described a recent meeting with Helmut Schmidt, the West German chancellor. The Atlantic Alliance was safe, at least temporarily, Kraft wrote. But Schmidt did not believe in stubbornly sticking to zero-zero. He wanted a deal in which the United States would halt its deployments before the fall of 1983. Now was the perfect time, Kraft argued. Russia was bleeding itself in Afghanistan and had recently appeared timid. Gromyko’s speech was a positive signal. “So the moment now seems opportune for a major American effort to engage the Russians, at the highest level, in a joint approach to the limitation of nuclear arms that everyone in the world now wants.”
“Was Kraft correct,” Nitze wrote in one of his notebooks. “If so . . . what is time deadline—Oct 83 or now[?]”
He decided the answer was now. So he carefully hinted to Kvitsinsky that the two of them might solve the problem if they could negotiate alone. Kvitsinsky was intrigued, and on the afternoon of July 16, 1982, the two men got into the Russian’s Mercedes and drove to the crest of the Jura Mountains, which divide Switzerland from France. Kvitsinsky’s chauffeur let them off and they began to walk along a country road, through mountain pastures, and onto a logging road, until they were walking into the woods. Nitze was wearing boots given to him in 1942—a year when the United States and the Soviet Union were still allies; perhaps, he told Kvitsinsky, the two of them could resolve the irresolvable, now that they were alone, far from the microphones, the politics, the KGB and the CIA, the protesters, the military, the journalists.
So there they were: two men walking down a path, trying to resolve the most vexing division between two giant nations with world-destroying missiles aimed at each other. And Paul Nitze was about to commit one of the most astonishing acts of insubordination in U.S.-Soviet history.
AT THE BEGINNING of the talks, Nitze had told his opposite number that he wanted to strike a deal. He was an old man; he could take risks. The only unacceptable outcome was no progress at all. Playing bridge in his later years, when he could no longer keep track of all that was going on, Nitze would often open with outrageously high bids—three hearts, or six clubs. He might not make the bid, but at least he would get to play the hand. This move in the Jura Mountains was more or less the same kind of gambit.
Nitze had worked out a plan in his own mind for resolving the INF impasse—a plan much more likely to be accepted than Perle’s—and he explained it to Kvitsinsky as they walked. The Soviets did not want the Pershing IIs in Europe. Fair enough. But, in return, the United States needed a substantial reduction in SS-20s, and the United States also needed to deploy the less menacing GLCMs. If the Soviets agreed to the terms of Nitze’s proposal, each side would end up with 225 warheads, though the Soviets’ would be more powerful.
Kvitsinsky listened, pushed back on a few points, and questioned a few technicalities. The two men then sat on a log, making notes, as a drizzle started to fall. They agreed to take the deal back to their respective leaders. Kvitsinsky was initially quite excited; he told Nitze he would send a signal within a few days if he had gotten a positive reception in Moscow. Soon after the two men parted, Nitze returned to Washington, where he cautiously informed his colleagues that he had worked out a grand compromise on his own.
Nitze met first with National Security Adviser William Clark, who seemed receptive. Eugene Rostow supported the proposal, too. Then Nitze visited George Shultz, who had recently replaced Alexander Haig as secretary of state. They went to lunch in the secretary’s private dining room on the eighth floor of the State Department; Shultz brought along the director of politico-military affairs, Richard Burt.
The meal started pleasantly enough. Burt remembers thinking that nothing important would come up. But then Nitze started to recount his walk with Kvitsinsky, and he described the proposed deal. As Nitze explained the complicated arguments in favor, Burt’s jaw dropped. It was, he recalls, “the most flagrant disobedience toward negotiating instructions that I had ever heard.”
After the lunch, Burt gave Shultz his very angry opinion. The deal was a disaster on the technicalities: the United States needed the Pershings, and our allies would go crazy if we did not deploy them. And it was a disaster in form: you cannot simply ignore what the rest of the government has carefully choreographed. Shultz nodded, sphinxlike.
Richard Perle was off at a conference in Aspen, having told his staff not to disturb him unless there was an absolute emergency. On the fourth day, he got a note from one of the employees at the resort where he was staying. “Call your office, ASAP.”
Perle rang back and was greeted by an aide who conveyed the impression that something had gone terribly wrong, though not something he felt he could discuss over a phone line. “What’s wrong? Tell me what you can,” Perle said.
“I’m going to speak cryptically. There’s been an event in the negotiations that you need to be aware of.”
“Okay.”
“It is a potentially new and strikingly different thing.”
“Give me some details,” Perle said.
“It has to do with our white-haired gentleman.”
Soon the two were talking pay phone to pay phone, discussing Nitze’s walk in the woods. “Damn,” thought Perle at the end of the conversation. He would have to fly back to Washington to confront his old mentor.
For the next few weeks, Perle rallied his troops against Nitze, and against a proposal he called “an act of intellectual and political cowardice.” He did not win the battle immediately, but gradually he helped convince President Reagan that the proposal was fundamentally flawed. The Pershings we would be giving up were “fast flyers,” Perle pointed out. The GLCMs we would get to keep were “slow flyers.” The syllogism appealed to Reagan, who liked his arguments packed in clear and simple metaphors.
Nitze had a chance to save the proposal at a meeting in the White House Situation Room on September 12, 1982. He argued that the deal he had worked out with Kvitsinsky was the one way out of a dangerous predicament. The president did not buy it. Why, he asked, did we have to give up our fast flyers? Because, Nitze said, we had not deployed anything yet: we could not honestly expect the Soviets to trade their houses for our blueprints. Reagan smiled with his customary aplomb and coolness. “Well, Paul,” the president said, “you just tell the Soviets that you’re working for one tough son-of-a-bitch.”
Reagan allowed Nitze to keep open a secret negotiating channel (code-named “King”) temporarily. But the channel would prove useless. Kvitsinsky’s government had squashed the proposal even harder than Nitze’s had.
When he returned to Moscow after his private talk with Nitze, Kvitsinsky presented the plan to Deputy Foreign Ministers Georgi Kornienko and Viktor Komplektov. They reacted harshly. The deal was a hoax. Nitze, the man the Soviets called Grandfather, merely wanted to swindle his counterpart. He did not truly want a deal; he just wanted to figure out what the Soviets would concede by pretending to make a real proposal and observing where the Soviets yielded. Kvitsinsky was instructed not even to respond to Nitze.
Nitze could not escape his past as a hard-liner. The Soviets did not know him well enough to understand that he genuinely sought an agreement. They knew only the Nitze of NSC-68 and of the Committee on the Present Danger. Twenty-five years later, Kvitsinsky said: “[My colleagues] depicted Nitze as a shrewd and dangerous American hawk who hated communists and the Soviet Union. Out of previous experience, the general attitude towards him in Moscow was persistently negative. That is why my confidential contacts with him were met with suspicion and the results of them considered rather a proof of Kvitsinsky’s gullibility.”
And so the two men trudged back to Geneva. When they met up again, both were bitter, tired, and convinced that there was now little chance of striking a deal. Why try again? The woods of the Jura Mountains had turned out to be a dangerous place.
THE PUBLIC DID NOT KNOW about Nitze and Kvitsinsky’s démarche until January 1983, when the White House fired Eugene Rostow and someone on his staff leaked the details. Suddenly, on his seventy-sixth birthday, Nitze was on the front page of the New York Times, under the headline “U.S. Aide Reached Arms Agreement Later Ruled Out.”
It looked, at first, like bad news for Nitze: his freelancing, and his failure, had been exposed. But then it became good news, very good news.
The story turned Nitze into a hero: he was the man who had tried to make peace. Reporters rushed to his office. Glasses clinked in his honor in Georgetown. The deep thinker from the Policy Planning Staff had returned, replacing the high priest of the hard line. The episode even turned into a play, a story about two peacemakers, titled A Walk in the Woods. The Europeans seemed pleased, too. Nitze’s sister reported that Helmut Schmidt had told her: “Your brother is the only man in Washington who has the intelligence and experience to understand the present situation facing us all. If, and as long as, he remains head of the arms-negotiating talks without interference, I would put my life in his hands.” Even discounted for political flattery and possible sisterly inflation, it was a high compliment.
But adulation did not equal influence. Nitze still could not get the rest of the Reagan administration to back away from its adamant support for zero-zero. As fall came around, and the missile deployment approached, Nitze made one more effort to strike a back-channel deal with Kvitsinsky. But the Soviet negotiator had little interest in returning to the woods.
As the deadline drew near, tensions rose everywhere. In early September 1983, a Korean airliner full of civilians, including an American congressman, drifted over Soviet airspace and was shot down by two air-to-air missiles. Before even determining that the USSR was responsible, the Reagan administration denounced the incident as an act of brutality. The Soviets, for their part, believed that flight 007 was part of a deliberate provocation. In early November, a Soviet spy picked up on a NATO training exercise known as Able Archer and reported that it was the beginning of an all-out launch.
In late November, the Pershings arrived in Germany and the Soviets walked out of the INF talks. The writer Günter Grass compared the arrival of the missiles to the Wannsee Conference, at which Hitler and his lieutenants planned the Final Solution. Others took a more sanguine view. “Mieux un Pershing dans votre jardin qu’un soldat russe sur votre femme,” read graffiti scribbled in Paris: “Better a Pershing in your garden than a Russian soldier on your wife.”
Nitze was crushed. Not only had he failed, he had earned the enmity of much of the Reagan administration. To this day, Richard Burt seethes when asked about the walk in the woods, declaring that it was all done for “vanity.” It had taken years of careful negotiation to prepare the Pershing deployment. But Nitze “almost ran that baby off the tracks.”
Still, Nitze was forever rational. Arms deals were not good or bad in and of themselves. The right deal—a deal whereby weapon stockpiles went down but the United States’ relative power remained the same or increased—would make the world safer. The wrong deal would make it more dangerous. The only agreement he could have reached in Geneva, once the bargain with Kvitsinsky fell through, would have been a bad one; therefore, he should not regret its absence. “The most important method of preventing a nuclear war is by deterrence,” he told Der Spiegel after the talks broke down. “That’s what really counts. Arms control alone is not going to do it. Arms control can mitigate some of the dangers. It can mitigate the expenses. It can move toward all kinds of things, but it can’t be counted on to prevent war.”
AS THE GENEVA TALKS lumbered along, Kennan’s mood moved from somber to stygian. Just before negotiations broke off, he published an essay in the New Yorker, “Breaking the Spell.” He believed that relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had become “dreadful and dangerous.” Everything he observed suggested that the two superpowers were embarked on “a march toward war—that and nothing else.”
The blame lay partly with the long arm of the past: Russia had mistrusted the West for two hundred years. But more blame belonged with the Reagan administration. The Soviet leaders did “not want a major war,” Kennan argued. It would not serve their interests in any way. But an American government “madly riveted to dreams of world conquest” might yet drive them into battle.
Only a truly massive arms deal could defer the march toward the precipice. He wanted grand compromises and big sacrifices. Perhaps the United States should just start reducing its arsenal. And he did not want intermediate missiles discussed one day and ICBMs the next. He wanted all the issues treated as a whole, not cut “up into a series of fragmentized technical talks . . . [run] by politically helpless experts.” In essence, he wanted to start everything anew. “What is needed here is only the will—the courage, the boldness, the affirmation of life—to break the evil spell that the severed atom has cast upon us all; to declare our independence of the nightmare of nuclear danger; to turn our hearts and minds to better things.”
This was exactly the viewpoint that Nitze denounced to Der Spiegel. And not surprisingly, Nitze thought the New Yorker piece was mush. Writing to Louis Halle, an old friend and colleague from the Policy Planning Staff, he declared that Kennan was correct in his description of the problem. Civility had indeed broken down and the situation was indeed dangerous. But America was not to blame: Moscow was. He also could agree that Moscow did not want a major war. But that was only true in the sense that an aggressor, as Clausewitz said, would always prefer to enter your country unopposed. Moscow was wholly prepared to instigate a series of small wars, and it was confident that the militarily inferior United States would not interfere with those plans.
Nitze had even less patience for Kennan’s technical recommendations. “George . . . mentions the field of arms control, which I will skip on the grounds that, at least from my point of view, he knows nothing about it.” And he did not like Kennan’s solemn tone. “Finally, all this is to be accepted despite its complete separation from fact and logic because George has had fifty-five years of experience dealing with the Russians.”
But if Kennan’s fifty-five years of experience had not given him perfect insight, Nitze’s ten days in the Soviet Union during the Eisenhower administration seemed to have forever confused him. Tripping on an air vent for a bomb shelter in 1955 had helped convince him that the Soviet Union had massive civil defense efforts, which it did not. More important, Nitze endlessly recycled his recollection of Chip Bohlen telling him that the Russian word mir meant both peace and a world in which the Soviets ruled. He would often cite this tidbit in op-eds and speeches. To Nitze, this was the key to understanding the Soviet worldview—and he never paused to ask whether an ancient, linguistic idiosyncrasy could really define a country.
Kvitsinsky himself cited Nitze’s obsession with the meaning of mir as a cause of his misunderstanding of the USSR. “Being a man of integrity and high education, Nitze had nevertheless some strange ideas about Russian history, civilization and intentions of Soviet leadership,” Kvitsinsky said. “For example he suspected Russians of everlasting intentions to dominate the world because Russian for ‘peace’ and ‘world’ is the same word ‘mir.’ So (argued he) Russians when demanding peace in their statements actually were meaning subjugation of the world.”
AFTER SEVERAL YEARS during which they did not write, Svetlana sent Kennan an angry letter in the fall of 1982, blaming him for her struggles, financial and otherwise. She had gone bankrupt and she was enraged at the school system in which her twelve-year-old daughter, Olga, was enrolled. She and Olga moved to London to start fresh. But the English schools were no better. Unhappy and anxious, she vented at her former protector. He, after all, had convinced her to settle in America.
He replied in measured tones and graceful words:
Dear Svetlana:
I am not going to argue with you about the past. I am sorry, of course, that you look back on it with such bitterness and are unable to understand that a number of people, including myself, did the best we could for you. . . . You know that you have only my most fervent good wishes for your own well-being, and Olga’s. I wish some day you could find the peace and happiness life has thus far so largely denied you.
Unappeased, she wrote back:
There is a PATTERN in your dealings with people, George: 1/ you get interested and involved. 2/ people begin to listen to you, because you can provide leadership and advise. 3/ people begin to depend on you and need you. 4/ at this point you abandon them, because you are tired, bored, in a bad mood, etc etc. You have done that with Gene McCarthy Campaign; with George McGovern Campaign; you are doing it now with the Peace & Disarmament Movement (while they just need you MOST, to lead!); and you have done that to me.
Kennan did not write back, and she eventually calmed down. As before, a short period without communication would convince her that she needed Kennan’s friendship. In the summer of 1983, she sent him a letter about her fears of nuclear calamity. “OH, HOW I WOULD LOVE to live under a government which does not possess atom bombs and does not threaten anyone.”
By the time the missiles arrived in Germany, she was nearly without hope and she was eager for the help of her old friend.
I do not know any OTHER time when a real threat to the world existence had been so strong and so dangerous. . . . George, you are a great peacemaker, and known for that. . . . PLEASE DO SOMETHING. RIGHT NOW. SOMETHING. REALLY BIG. . . . The world is hangingover an abyss. Time is running out.
Kennan wrote back, despondent.
It is true that [my recent] statements have received a great deal of publicity and that there are now many thousands of people in this country who listen with respect to what I have to say and who look to me to take some sort of leadership in the effort to ward off the great dangers that seem to be advancing upon us. My difficulty, as you correctly recognized in your letter, is that while I could, perhaps, talk usefully with the Party leadership in the Soviet Union (if not with the military one), I cannot talk that way, and I know of no one who could, with my own government.
George Kennan was also anxious and unhappy—and as the world seemed to edge closer to cataclysm he saw no way to help prevent it. On the verge of his eightieth birthday, George Kennan was a profoundly wearied man.