America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan
“. . . an admiring, but not uncritical, portrait of one of the great national security ‘experts’ of the second-half of the 20th century.”
Paul Nitze surely ranks as one of the most important American strategists during what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1950, Nitze oversaw the writing of NSC-68—the principal U.S. blueprint for waging the Cold War against the Soviet empire. As chief arms control negotiator near the end of the Reagan presidency, Nitze played a leading role in shaping the arms control agreements that signaled an end to the Cold War. James Graham Wilson’s new biography, America’s Cold Warrior, focuses on the central and ubiquitous role that Nitze played in that global conflict.
Wilson is an historian at the U.S. Department of State who has mined the relevant government archives, primary and secondary sources, and Nitze’s own autobiographies (he wrote two) to write a balanced assessment of Nitze’s career, which included work in some capacity for every U.S. president from FDR to Reagan. The result is an admiring, but not uncritical, portrait of one of the great national security “experts” of the second half of the 20th century.
“No other American in the twentieth century,” Wilson writes, “contributed to high policy as much as [Nitze] did for as long as he did in both Democrat and Republican administrations.” After a successful career on Wall Street in the 1930s, Nitze came to Washington in 1940 to help the Roosevelt administration prepare for and wage the Second World War. He always admired “men of action” as opposed to scholars and theorists, and he became one by repeatedly serving in national security posts for the next 50 years.
Nitze worked on the Selective Service Act prior to the outbreak of World War II, and came to admire the leadership and character of General George Marshall. Nitze later reflected on how unprepared the United States was for war due to FDR’s unwillingness to take politically courageous action in the face of domestic anti-war sentiment. When Pearl Harbor and the Philippines were attacked by Japanese forces, the lack of preparedness meant defeat—this was a lesson, Wilson writes, that Nitze never forgot.
During the war, Nitze worked in the Bureau of Economic Warfare, where he oversaw the procurement of strategic metals and minerals crucial to the war effort. Toward the end of the war, he worked on the strategic bombing survey that assessed the effects of strategic bombing on the German and Japanese war economies. After the war, he traveled to Japan where he witnessed the destructive aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and wrote a Summary Report of the Pacific War.
Wilson writes that Nitze’s major takeaway from our experience in World War II was the folly of unpreparedness. Nitze believed that we should have been preparing for war from the time Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria in the early 1930s. (Then Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur had reached the same conclusion at the time, and urged FDR to increase the defense budget, but to no avail). Weakness and unpreparedness, Nitze believed, invited aggression. That belief shaped his strategic outlook for the rest of his career.
Nitze played a major role in developing the Marshall Plan, which provided economic assistance to the devastated nations of Western Europe. Will Clayton, who oversaw this effort, said that Nitze knew “more about the Marshall Plan than perhaps any other individual” in the U.S. government. In August 1949, Nitze was named by his lifelong friend and colleague George F. Kennan as deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, where he championed U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb in the face of opposition by Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer, and others.
Wilson notes that the hydrogen bomb debate “thrust Nitze into the field that would define much of the rest of his career: atomic and nuclear strategy.” But his most important work during the Truman administration was the drafting of NSC-68. Nitze had succeeded Kennan as director of the Policy Planning Staff, and Wilson rightly devotes an entire chapter of the book to the drafting, content, and impact of NSC-68, which remained classified until 1975.
NSC-68 was America’s geopolitical blueprint for waging the Cold War. It included some of Kennan’s concepts of “containment,” but was more offensive-oriented in calling for U.S. policy to promote a change in the Soviet system. Though Wilson doesn’t mention it, Nitze once told his friend and state department colleague Charles Burton Marshall that the “main intellectual stimulus” for NSC-68 was James Burnham’s book The Coming Defeat of Communism. Burnham had criticized containment as too passive and recommended a psycho-political offensive strategy designed to alter or destroy the Soviet-communist system.
Truman initially rejected the policy recommendations of NSC-68—which included a conventional and nuclear buildup—but the outbreak of the Korean War changed Truman’s mind. “Preparedness lay at the heart of deterring Soviet aggression,” Wilson writes, and Nitze believed that deterrence in peacetime meant “acquiring the means to prevail in wartime.” And, Nitze believed, nuclear weapons would play a key role in shaping the geopolitics of the Cold War.
The incoming Eisenhower administration did not have a permanent position for Nitze, but he did consult and participate in special projects for the administration. That did not prevent him from criticizing Eisenhower’s doctrine of “massive retaliation,” which Nitze believed relied too much on nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression. The United States, Nitze said, also need a more robust conventional deterrence, which anticipated the Kennedy administrations’ doctrine of “flexible response.”
Nitze joined the Kennedy administration as assistant secretary of defense for international affairs, but he never became a Kennedy insider. Nitze served on the so-called ExComm committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he differed with his boss Robert McNamara on the lessons of that crisis. McNamara promoted the strategic idea of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which held that nuclear parity among the superpowers was the best means to assure stability and prevent nuclear war. Nitze believed that the Soviets backed down in Cuba because of America’s overwhelming strategic superiority. McNamara’s idea of letting the Soviets catch up to the U.S. in strategic nuclear weapons was anathema to Nitze, and always would be.
America’s inability to prevail in Vietnam reinforced Nitze’s belief that, in Wilson’s words, “U.S. strength brought stability; U.S. weakness brought instability.” When he joined the Nixon administration as an arms control negotiator, Nitze’s approach was shaped by that belief. This brought him into conflict at times with Nixon and Kissinger, whom he believed wanted an arms control agreement—even a flawed one—to help Nixon’s reelection effort. That, however, is unfair to Nixon and Kissinger who were playing a longer game of triangular diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China.
Wilson notes that Nitze approached nuclear arms control negotiations with a fixation on missile “throw weight,” which is a measure of the effective weight of ballistic missile payloads. That, Nitze believed, was more important than simple numbers of missiles and warheads. And verification was also important so that we could determine if the Soviets were abiding by signed agreements. Nitze helped negotiate SALT I and the ABM Treaty which dealt with missile defense. He realized that such agreements were imperfect—they didn’t slow down the arms race and in some instances provided openings for Soviet strategic growth.
When Jimmy Carter became president and launched an all-out effort to conclude a SALT II agreement with the Soviets, Nitze became one of his fiercest critics. SALT II, Nitze said, would enable the Soviets to maintain their advantage in heavy strategic missiles, such as the SS-18, which carried as many as 10 independently targetable warheads (or MIRVS) that theoretically could destroy much of our land-based nuclear deterrent in a “first strike.” Nitze joined the Committee on the Present Danger and voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Thereafter, he served in the Reagan administration as an arms control negotiator who had direct access to Secretary of State George Shultz and Reagan.
He helped negotiate the INF Treaty that dealt with missiles in Europe and laid the groundwork for the START Treaty that was concluded by President George H. W. Bush. So Nitze’s career effectively book-ended the Cold War—NSC-68 set up the framework for victory in the Cold War and the arms control agreements of the late 1980s and early 1990s signaled its end. Wilson is right to call him “America’s cold warrior.”