James Graham Wilson, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Cornell University Press, 2024)
On May 11, 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz celebrated the 40th anniversary of his department’s iconic Policy Planning Staff by convening 11 of its former directors for an Open Forum at the State Department. George Kennan, who in 1947 had become the inaugural director of “S/P,” as the office is known in Foggy Bottom’s acronymic vernacular, delivered a typically morose assessment of the world situation. Though four decades earlier Kennan had devised the “containment” doctrine to guide America’s Cold War strategy towards the Soviet Union, he now repudiated containment as “almost entirely irrelevant to the problems we and the rest of the civilized world face today.” Continuing, Kennan lamented the current tensions in U.S.-Soviet relations under the Reagan administration. He predicted:
There are going to be increased demands for political negotiation and if we Americans don’t take the lead in finding a way out of this present Cold War impasse and exploring the possibilities for an East/West political accommodation, others may take that lead and events may begin to drift out of our hands to the extent that they are in our hands today.
At that point Kennan’s most recent government service as ambassador to Yugoslavia had been over a quarter-century earlier, and further he was four decades removed from his last position of senior influence in Washington. What Kennan now failed to see is that President Ronald Reagan and Shultz had devised a strategy to combine pressure and diplomatic outreach towards the Kremlin, which at that moment was succeeding in both weakening the Soviet system and bringing fruitful negotiations between the two sides. And Paul Nitze, Reagan’s senior advisor on arms control, was both an architect and implementer of that strategy.
Nitze, Kennan’s sometime friend and sometime nemesis, was also present at the reunion. Almost 40 years earlier, in 1950, Nitze had succeeded Kennan as the Policy Planning Staff’s second director. Like Kennan, Nitze had also penned a foundational Cold War strategy document in NSC-68, which President Harry Truman adopted in 1950 to operationalize containment with both a military expansion and an ideological counteroffensive. Unlike Kennan, Nitze had continued in senior policy roles for almost every presidency throughout the Cold War’s ensuing decades. In 1987 he was serving the State Department as Shultz and Reagan’s top arms control official. At the same time that Kennan was bemoaning a dearth of American diplomacy with the Soviet Union, Nitze was helping lead negotiations with the Kremlin that would soon lead to the landmark Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty eliminating the most destabilizing class of nuclear weapons.
If there is another American in the 20th century whose career had the span and sustained influence of Nitze, I am not sure who it could be. Quite literally no other American policymaker can lay claim to have played a key role in shaping American strategy at the outset of the Cold War, continuing to hold influential positions over the succeeding course of its four decades, and then helping bring about its peaceful denouement.
For this reason in his new biography of Nitze, America’s Cold Warrior, James Graham Wilson chose the subtitle “Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan.” This splendid book is also long overdue. A vast gap exists between Nitze’s substantial policy influence and the sparse scholarly attention he has received. Compare Nitze, for example, with Kennan, who has inspired dozens of books and hundreds of articles even though his window of high policy influence consisted of a comparatively brief four years at the Cold War’s nativity. Whereas as Wilson writes of Nitze, “No other American in the twentieth century contributed to high policy as much as he did for as long as he did in both Democratic and Republican administrations.”
Indeed, Nitze’s very life spans multitudes. Wilson deftly frames the book with an opening vignette of a young Nitze hiking in the Tyrolean Alps in 1914 when he learns of the mobilization of the Austro-Hungarian army for the outbreak of World War I, and then concludes the book with a scheduled meeting on Sept. 11, 2001 between an aged Nitze and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that was canceled due to the terrorist attacks that day on New York and Washington. Figures such as Nitze who hold senior positions of statecraft for such a long time are altogether rare in American history. The prime example that comes to mind in the 19th century is John Hay’s four decades of service from the Lincoln presidency during the Civil War to the McKinley and Roosevelt presidencies in America’s fin de siècle debut as a global power.
Wilson weaves several interpretive themes through the book, many of them centered around balances and tensions. There is the tension between the academic and policy realms. Nitze viewed himself as a “man of action” who disdained scholarly theories as divorced from real world statecraft, yet also founded one of the world’s premier graduate institutions, the School of Advanced International Studies (later named after him) at Johns Hopkins University. There is the tension between force and diplomacy. Nitze consistently advocated for large defense budgets and a robust nuclear arsenal, yet also sought fervently to avert war through regular diplomatic outreach to the Soviet Union. There is the tension between partisanship and non-partisan service. Nitze served on political campaigns and could be a vocal partisan critic of presidents he disagreed with, yet he also switched parties multiple times and served Democratic presidents while registered as a Republican and then served Republican presidents while registered as a Democrat. Wilson deftly probes these balances and contradictions, situating them within Nitze’s doctrine of “tension between opposites” as a unified field theory for how to understand geopolitics.
While the book focuses on Nitze’s statecraft, Wilson presents his subject in his full humanity. The patrician Nitze enjoyed a life of privilege, yet he also suffered many professional setbacks over the course of his career. The book describes Nitze’s resilience in persisting through an almost unrelenting wave of disappointments, as he was regularly passed over or turned down for jobs he sought, and never attained the elusive cabinet-level position he coveted. Nonetheless, repeated rejections did not cripple him. A combination of stoicism and grit kept him grinding away until another opportunity came along, as they inevitably did.
Through this blend of persistence, skill, and expertise, Nitze came to incarnate what Wilson describes as a new type: the national security professional. In Wilson’s words, waging the Cold War “required a cadre of people who could stay involved and guide U.S. policy throughout it. National security became a practice, just like law or medicine. All this was new to the United States after World War II ended.” The national security professional emerged in tandem with the national security state. To contain Soviet communism and exercise its new global leadership role, the United States needed experts who could staff and steer the new institutions of the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Department, National Security Council, alliance system, and other instruments of American power crafted in the immediate post-war years.
These instruments included the atomic bomb, and early in his career Nitze developed what became a lifelong interest in nuclear weapons. In early 1950, he bested Kennan in a fierce debate over whether the United States should develop a hydrogen bomb — a new warhead that would soon become known as a “nuclear” bomb, vastly more powerful than the atomic bomb — by persuading Truman that America needed it for the simple reason that otherwise the Soviet Union would develop it first and attain strategic superiority.
In time, Nitze would become the American government’s premier expert on its nuclear arsenal and arms control negotiations. He combined arcane technical knowledge of the weapons with acute attention to the psychological and strategic dimensions of the arms race. By the 1970s, Nitze fretted that a bipartisan succession of presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter had frittered away America’s erstwhile nuclear advantage over the Kremlin. This led to Nitze conceiving what Wilson describes as the “Nitze scenario” in which the Soviets would feel emboldened by their edge in intercontinental ballistic missiles (especially the fearsome SS-18 with its 10 independent warheads) to launch a surprise first strike that destroyed America’s land-based missiles. The U.S. president would be left with the fateful choice of either retaliating against Soviet cities with the air and sea legs of the American nuclear triad (and thus committing genocide against millions of Soviet citizens while leaving the United States vulnerable to a Soviet second strike), or of surrendering to the Kremlin to save countless American lives and avert further destruction.
As Wilson writes, though the second scenario was unlikely, “its plausibility … emboldened Soviet risk-taking in all contested areas of the Cold War.” Moreover, “For Nitze, few perceptions were as dangerous as the presupposition that Soviet leaders thought about nuclear war in the same way as American leaders.” Rather, Nitze worried that the Kremlin believed that a nuclear war could potentially be won, and that Moscow’s unrelenting expansion of its strategic forces also empowered Soviet adventurism on the Cold War’s many other fronts. These concerns caused Nitze to become a nettlesome critic of the Carter administration for what he saw as its fecklessness. It followed that he joined many other hawkish Democrats in supporting the Reagan campaign in 1980.
This excellent book is not immune from oversights. Wilson’s portrayal of Nitze as rational, calculating, and relentlessly empirical tracks with the general view of the man, but is not so much inaccurate as incomplete. Less known, but no less important, is that this “man of action” had a literary side. The late Charles Hill, a career Foreign Service officer who served as Shultz’s chief of staff, worked alongside Nitze in the Reagan administration. In his marvelous book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, Hill recalls that “through long nighttime transatlantic flights on the secretary of state’s aircraft … one reading light was always still on. Paul Nitze, the arms control strategist and negotiator, would be reading Shakespeare.” Hill describes how Nitze believed that the Bard’s plays “interwove principles of statecraft with the foibles of the human condition” and that reading literature helped equip him for the interpersonal drama and ambiguities of superpower negotiations. While Nitze may have always had the mind of a technician, he also cultivated the soul of a humanist.
He was hardly infallible. As penetrating as Nitze’s analysis could be of a given situation, his strategic foresight sometimes failed him. Wilson describes how Nitze was too slow to share Reagan and Shultz’s embrace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a genuine reformer. Similarly, at the aforementioned 1987 gathering of the former Policy Planning directors, Nitze bemoaned that “the strategic nuclear balance is already adverse and that there is little prospect of reversing it, at least within this century.” Of course less than five years later the Soviet Union would collapse altogether, leading not merely to a much more favorable nuclear balance but a dramatic reduction in the very prospect of nuclear war.
In the end, this book leaves the reader pleased with a compelling account of a fascinating life, coupled with a sense of loss for our contemporary era. Nitze represents a breed that, in his decades of bipartisan service and policy expertise, is now exceedingly rare if not altogether extinct. (Dennis Ross is one of the only recent examples who comes to mind of a non-career official holding senior national security roles across multiple presidencies of both parties, and may be the exception that proves the rule.) As the United States mobilizes for what seems a new nuclear arms race with Russia and China, it bears asking whether, in addition to modernizing our arsenal, we should tend to our political culture.
William Inboden is director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He has served at the State Department and on the National Security Council staff, and is the author of The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink.
Image: Rob Bogaerts via Wikimedia Commons
