On February 17, 1984, Paul Nitze decided that the arms race could wait. For the past two and a half years, he had led the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. But on this day, he left that grave work in the early afternoon to dress in black tie and hop on a train to Princeton, New Jersey.
He was heading north to attend the eightieth-birthday party of a man who was both a close friend and a bitter rival: George Kennan. Nitze had been Kennan’s deputy on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s, and the two had worked together on some of the most important issues the country ever faced. They tried to reverse the partition of Germany; they helped write the Marshall Plan; they advised Harry Truman on whether to build a hydrogen bomb. And then, for thirty-five years, they had disagreed profoundly on the direction the country should take. Even at this moment, each believed that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.
Nitze arrived just in time to join the sixty other friends, colleagues, children, and grandchildren at the celebration. After dinner ended, he stood up slowly and raised his glass to give a toast. “Among those born after 1904, I know of no one who has been more fortunate in his bosses than have I,” he said. He then listed a series of remarkable mentors and what he had learned from each of them.
Soon he turned to the real center of attention: the taller, thinner, balder man celebrating his birthday. Kennan had just published a long article in the New Yorker and was hard at work on his seventeenth book, this one about the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. An immensely complicated individual, he was revered both as one of the men who had started the Cold War and as the one most determined to end it.
Nitze continued gracefully. “George Kennan taught us to approach the issues of policy, not just from the narrow immediate interest of the United States, but from a longer-range viewpoint that included the cultures and interests of others, including our opponents, and a proper regard for the opinions of mankind.
“George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil. But the warmth of his and Annelise’s friendship for Phyllis and for me has never faltered,” said Nitze, referring to his and Kennan’s wives.
“I extend my appreciation, gratitude and thanks to George, who has been a teacher and an example for close to forty years.”
The guests clinked their glasses and cheered. It was one of the tensest periods of the arms race: just three months ago, Nitze’s arms talks had collapsed in a way that many people thought would invite war; one week ago, the KGB veteran who had been running the Soviet Union had died. But this was a moment for two old friends, not for the quiet but ever-present terror that colored these years.
Kennan rose to respond: the main lesson he had learned from Nitze, he said, was that, when one disagreed with government, “it may be best to soldier on, and to do what one can to make the things you believe in come out right.”
That evening, another guest asked Nitze how he and Kennan had remained friends despite their vast differences on issues of national security. Nitze smiled and responded that he had never had any difference with George “except over matters of substance.”
PAUL NITZE and George Kennan were the only two people to be deeply involved in American foreign policy from the outset of the Cold War until its end. They had come to prominence in the tumultuous days that followed the Second World War when Germany was divided and the Soviet Union turned from ally into enemy. They immersed themselves in the great questions and events to come: the Marshall Plan, Korea, the ever more dangerous arms race, Vietnam, détente, SALT, glasnost. They stepped off stage only when Germany reunited and the Soviet Union dissolved.
The two men were equally influential and equally important, yet vastly different. Nitze was the diligent insider, Kennan the wise outsider; Nitze the doer, Kennan the thinker. Kennan designed America’s policy for the Cold War, and Nitze mastered it. With respect to America’s ability to shape the world, Nitze was an idealist and Kennan a realist. In their old age, Nitze still wanted to win the Cold War, and Kennan wanted to be done with it. Their views overlapped at strange and crucial moments; but for most of their working lives, they disagreed profoundly. In the New Yorker article published just before his eightieth-birthday party, Kennan had indirectly criticized Nitze—who marked the piece up vigorously and also sent a letter to a mutual friend complaining that the argument showed a “complete separation from fact and logic.”
Nitze was the hawk. When the United States and the Soviet Union built up their terrifying weapon stockpiles soon after World War II, he argued that the best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one. If you want peace, prepare for war. More than any other American, Nitze gave shape to the arms race. Kennan came up with the word containment that was used more than any other to describe America’s Cold War policy. But he saw it as a political strategy for combating a political threat. Nitze defined the word the way it was really used: as a military strategy for combating a military threat.
Nitze’s strengths were his organizational skills, his commitment to logic, and his endurance. Few people knew more about weaponry and few people were able to gain as many allies in different parts of Washington. He worked for, or consulted with, every president from FDR to George H. W. Bush. He even impressed his adversaries with his ability to absorb facts and make arguments about nuclear arms. “Nitze was a god,” said Aleksandr Savelyev, one of his Soviet negotiating counterparts. “Just not our god.”
Nitze never, however, learned how to manage his superiors: he ended up personally alienating six of those ten presidents. Fired, demoted, or forced to resign so many times that he lost count, Nitze never became either secretary of state or secretary of defense, although he often seemed to deserve both posts. Still, no failure or rejection ever made him sulk for long or disappear. “Presidents came and went. But every year there was Paul Nitze,” said George Shultz, the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.
Kennan was the dove. For forty years, he argued that America must end its dependence on nuclear weapons. If you want peace, act peacefully. During almost every military conflict from the Korean War through the Iraq War that began in 2003, he argued for forbearance.
Kennan was a brilliant writer: his histories earned the publishing world’s highest prizes, and his memoirs offer one of the finest sketches of America in the first half of the twentieth century. He objected to the arms race—and NATO, the UN, the Korean War, the Eisenhower administration, the Vietnam War, the student movement of the 1960s, the Carter administration, the Reagan administration, and American policy at the very end of the Cold War—with an eloquence that even his steadfast enemies respected.
He also had an uncanny ability to predict many of the great events of his lifetime. When the Cold War was just beginning, he foresaw how it would end. He immediately understood that splitting Germany and creating NATO would harden the division of Europe. In 1949, he astutely predicted how the nuclear arms race would unfold. He foresaw the Sino-Soviet split and grasped, very early, the flaws in America’s strategy in Vietnam.
These keen powers of perception, however, were married with profound vulnerability. Minor slights sent Kennan into deep despair. His last government job ended in failure when he resigned after a trivial setback. If Nitze treated wounds as scratches, Kennan felt scratches as wounds.
Neither of these idiosyncratic and original men conformed exactly to the hawk and dove labels, of course. Yes, Nitze drove the arms race. And he always believed that the Cold War was a series of moments of urgent peril in which the United States must display strength. But if he spent 90 percent of his career raising tensions, he spent the other 10 percent—the moments when actual conflict loomed and he was helping to shape the consequential decisions—lowering them. He tried to halt the Korean War and then helped stop it from spreading. He tried, early on, to extricate the United States from Vietnam. No one worked harder during the Reagan years to broker major arms deals with the Soviets.
Kennan, for his part, was a dove with hidden talons. He helped set up the CIA and later advised it. He worked closely with the FBI. His views on social issues and the value of democracy were those of a pterodactyl. Early on, he advocated standing up firmly to the Soviets. Though terrified of nuclear weapons, he took pride in not being a pacifist and he recommended declaring war against Iran after rioters seized the American embassy in 1979.
DESPITE THESE MANY differences, Kennan and Nitze were warm friends throughout the Cold War. And that lasting friendship has inspired this book.
Nitze was my grandfather, and I remember well his receipt of a letter in 1999 from his old colleague. Nitze was ninety-two years old then, Kennan ninety-five. I was a twenty-four-year-old journalist and had just moved to Washington, D.C. My grandfather was old and frail but, that November, we spent a lovely evening playing bridge and having dinner with friends of his. He, as always, dressed in a jacket and tie and enjoyed a glass or two of red wine. At some point during the evening, he said he wanted to read a letter.
On October 28, he had published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves,” in which he declared that the United States had no more need for the arsenal he had spent his life building and studying. “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons,” Nitze wrote. “To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security.”
The letter in response was equally simple and heartfelt. “Dear Paul: Warmest congratulations on your recent New York Times article, with every word of which I agree,” wrote Kennan. “In the light of our longstanding friendship and mutual respect, it is a source of deep satisfaction to me to find the two of us, at our advanced ages, in complete accord on questions that have meant so much to each of us, even when we did not fully agree, in times gone by.”
Nitze smiled and laughed as he read it. Later, as we said good-bye, I remarked on the elegance of Kennan’s prose. “Yes, George could always write brilliantly,” reflected my grandfather, seeming to pause on the word “write” as if to suggest what it left out. “He really could.”
His memory, already failing, would decline rapidly in the years ahead. I never talked in depth with him about Kennan, but I remembered that letter five years later, when both men died. Their passings came just six months apart, which seemed fitting. Soon thereafter, I began to investigate their lives and to attempt to discover how their contradictory influences shaped a struggle for the world. My research revealed two very different men who nonetheless shared a commitment to the United States and to their very different ways of serving it. As Alexander Bessmertnykh, a Soviet foreign minister who worked across from each of them at different points during the Cold War, said to me, “They both were great in their own gardens.”
What follows is a story about friends, but not about friendship. The pair attended each other’s birthday parties and family weddings. They often inspired or enraged each other with their ideas. But the letter in 1999 was a rare one. There are no piles of correspondence or transcripts of personal conversations. They were good friends but not best friends; perhaps if they had been closer, they would have fallen out.
They did, however, greatly respect each other and admire each other’s seriousness of purpose, demeanor, and dedication. They realized they shared an uncommon endurance. They also shared a similar fate: neither reached his ultimate ambitions, while many lesser men reached the positions of influence to which they both aspired.
Most important, they represented two great strains of American thought during the second half of the twentieth century. And perhaps they realized something I came to believe as I worked on this book: one can understand much of the story of the United States during the Cold War by examining the often parallel, and sometimes perpendicular, lives of Paul Nitze and George Kennan.