by David Milne
The book that transformed Nitze from banker into aspiring diplomat was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which had also weighed on Kennan: Nitze read it during a fishing trip in 1937 “with care, word by word, while waiting for a fish to appear.”16 The book evoked in Nitze deep concern about America’s place in the international system, tilting inexorably away from the years of Western advantage, although he had mixed feelings about Spengler’s analysis:
It had all the faults of the German temperament; it was brilliant, full of profound feeling and thought, but dogmatic, rough, tactless. Along the peaceful banks of the Upsalquitch River, I pondered the flaws in its logic. How could the tendencies toward cultural delay, socialistic Caesarism and war, which he saw as being irreversible, be countered and reversed? I knew of no one who had a lucid and persuasive opinion on those issues.17
In search of remedies to Spengler’s gloomy prognoses, Nitze resigned from Dillon Read and enrolled in Harvard as a graduate student in sociology, taking supplementary seminars in philosophy and international law. Nitze’s second sojourn in Cambridge was significantly more diligent than the first—he drafted a well-received thesis on Spengler supervised by the eminent sociologist Pitirim Sorokin—but he ultimately found the experience frustrating, complaining that he “received almost no answers about Spengler, the trends of the future, and what could be done to affect those trends.”18 The discipline of history still dominated the teaching of international affairs at Harvard—and this was not enough. Nitze believed that foreign policy had to be reconceived and practiced on a more scientific basis.
Having received no assistance in identifying a strategic worldview at Harvard, Nitze joined Charles Beard and other isolationists in favoring a passive one: neutrality from European affairs. Indeed, his frequent trips to Germany, his Teutonic ancestry, and his respectful appraisals of Hitler’s success in rebuilding a strong Germany led some critics to suspect him of harboring Nazi sympathies.19 These whispered allegations were off the mark; Nitze was a consistent if apathetic “America Firster” in the absence of any better alternatives. Hitler was a serious threat to American interests; Nitze was sure of that. He simply held to this view while at the same time holding a grudging respect for Hitler’s success in reenergizing his nation.
The fall of France led Nitze to abandon his isolationism, never deeply felt, and his hope that someone else might answer Spengler; he would have to do this under his own steam. James Forrestal, a former colleague at Dillon Read, hired Nitze to serve as one of six “administrative assistants” with links to the business community; their purpose was to co-opt the private sector in an era of total war. Forrestal asked Nitze to serve his government on June 22, 1940—in those pithier days the entire cable ran: “Be in Washington Monday morning. Forrestal”—but it took awhile for the government to grant him the necessary security clearances, largely due to persistent rumors circulating about Nitze’s admiration for the Third Reich. He had not helped his cause when at a dinner party in 1940 he joked that he would rather live under Hitler’s rule than that of the British Empire—a remark that clearly made its way to the wrong audience.20 Nitze was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, though he accumulated a weighty FBI file in the process. Once added to the government payroll, Nitze was charged with sourcing materials needed for the war effort, including Mexican prairie dog bones, required for making glue, and dried cuttlefish, for making bombsight lenses.21 Nitze performed adeptly in this role, even if the duties were somewhat infra dig for a Wall Street millionaire. What Nitze found harder to accept was the lackluster way the State Department went about its business:
As Forrestal and I began to dig into the matter, we found the State Department under Cordell Hull almost totally lacking an organization for strategic policy-making. Most of the people in the State Department at that time had been brought up in the school of diplomacy that emphasized reporting; few were oriented toward the formulation and execution of strategic policy per se. We concluded that the State Department was inadequately staffed and not intellectually equipped to deal with the radically new situation brought about by the war.22
This disturbing geopolitical vacuum was of course addressed by Walter Lippmann in U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims, and by Kennan in the Long Telegram and the X Article. Nitze first began to ruminate seriously on foreign policy in the summer of 1944, when he was invited to participate in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, established to ascertain the effectiveness of Allied strategic bombing in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during the Second World War. The USSBS boasted a remarkable staff, including a young Canadian economist named John Kenneth Galbraith and a future undersecretary of state and critic of the Americanization of the Vietnam War, George Ball. It was a rich experience, from which aspects of Nitze’s “theory of international relations,” as he later described it, began to emerge.
The survey drew mixed conclusions about the effectiveness of Allied bombing in reducing the ability of German factories to produce munitions. In the summer of 1943, for example, an RAF-led bombing raid code-named “Gomorrah” targeted the center of George Kennan’s beloved Hamburg with conventional ordnance and incendiary devices, unleashing a firestorm that reached a thousand degrees, killing some thirty thousand people in hideous circumstances. The historic and commercial center of the city—home to its restaurants, shops, and museums—was razed to the ground. But the factories and shipyards on the city’s perimeter were untouched by the inferno. This was a dark day in German history: the heart of a great city was destroyed at appalling human cost. But the unintended consequences could hardly have been worse from an Allied strategic perspective. An exodus of waiters, bank clerks, and shopkeepers, “forcibly unemployed by the bombers,” as Galbraith recalled, “flocked to the war plants to find work … The bombers had eased the labor shortage.” The USSBS found that strategic bombing did not critically hinder Germany’s military capabilities.
The bombing did accrue advantages, but they were as unintended as the disadvantages. Allied bombers forced German fighters to scramble, where they were overwhelmed in dogfights through Anglo-American weight of numbers. Dominating European airspace, George Ball recalled, “gave us command of the air for the [D-day] invasion.”23 Nitze took note of the limitations and unintended benefits of strategic bombing. More important, however, he was deeply impressed by the fact that the much larger defense budget of the United States, and that of Stalin’s Soviet Union, had allowed the Allies to simply outproduce and outlast the German war machine. Berlin could not keep pace with its enemies in production terms, despite Albert Speer’s best efforts. Once this fact was established, and it became clear that “Hitler’s Empire” was not an imperial system—like Great Britain’s—that could be co-opted and worked to the homeland’s advantage, its military prospects were greatly diminished.24 Nitze extrapolated that America should seek to build a permanent military advantage through devoting a higher proportion of national wealth to defense spending than any peer competitor. He described this goal as achieving for the United States in perpetuity a favorable “correlation of forces”—the strategic imperative that guided him through the entire Cold War.
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From Harvard to Wall Street to World War II, Nitze was a committed Republican: cool toward Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and seriously concerned about his successor’s leadership potential. Nitze’s wartime appraisal of Truman was “less than favorable … When he became president I had visions of this country being turned over to political cronies of his … My wife Phyllis caused me to change my mind about Mr. Truman. When I came home from Europe in 1945 I found her convinced that the Trumans—Mrs. Truman in particular—were wonderful people of great integrity.”25 Throughout the early stages of the Cold War, Nitze came to warmly support the president’s hard-edged diplomacy and was particularly impressed by the Truman Doctrine, caring little whether or not the commitments enunciated were open-ended. Truman had proved himself to be a leader of “courage and guts,”
in Nitze’s estimation, who intuitively understood that the United States had to assume the preponderant burden “of leadership of the free world, no matter what was required.”26 The Wilsonian elements of Truman’s approach that worried Kennan—linking America’s liberty to the extension of freedom to all nations—roused only the warmest support in Nitze.
Nitze was based in the State Department’s Office of International Trade Policy during the genesis of the Marshall Plan. After Kennan and Lippmann had thrashed out the basics of a reconstruction program, Nitze found himself in disagreement with its sole European focus. He suggested to his close friend Will Clayton, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, that the government disburse $5 billion of aid per annum, over a five-year period, to offset a balance of payments of surplus of a similar amount. But Nitze wanted this funding allocated “on a worldwide basis rather than concentrating it all in Europe.” Kennan was hostile to the idea of spreading aid thinly, and to areas of the world whose prospects he deemed tangential to America’s national interest. Nitze’s view was, “Why Europe? The problem [of the communist threat] was a worldwide problem. Why not do it on a broader scale? But the decision finally was in favor of Kennan’s approach of just an aid program to support Europe, not worldwide.”27 Nitze was forming a strong difference with Kennan on what constituted an appropriate range of America’s overseas interests.
After he lost this debate, Nitze picked himself up with little fuss or self-recrimination and started adding substance to the Marshall Plan’s bare outline. He called in favors to borrow some protocomputers from Prudential Life Insurance and began figuring out exactly what each European nation required. Nitze was in his quantitative element, compiling charts and graphs, identifying each nation’s economic strengths and weaknesses, predicting the likely agricultural productivity of each, matching American surpluses in raw materials to European shortfalls. This paragon of Wall Street was a splendid statist, warming to the powers and certainties of centralized planning. Clayton described Nitze as “young, able and a hard worker. Moreover he knows more about the Marshall Plan than perhaps any other individual around here.” Nitze was called to testify before a hostile Congress on the Marshall Plan’s substance and purpose. It was a rough ride, but he managed to convince many Republicans of its merits, including Arthur Vandenberg, who observed that it was “backed by more hard work and careful research than almost any other bill to come before Congress.”28 Kennan’s ideas and Nitze’s logistical prowess had worked well in tandem.
On balance, however, discord between Nitze and Kennan was a more common response than concord to the salient geostrategic issues. President Truman’s Point Four Program, for example, designed to deploy American science, industry, and aid to modernize the underdeveloped world, garnered Nitze’s strong support. He was concerned that U.S. policy in Asia focused so intently on China and Japan, to the exclusion of a vast area: “The rest of Asia, except for the Philippines, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, was generally unfamiliar territory that festered with problems—anticolonialism, social unrest, overcrowded populations, and economies that despite their resources and potential wealth remained underdeveloped.”29 Kennan evinced little concern for the Third World, for it mattered little to Washington if those nations continued to stagnate or flourished. It was preferable if poorer nations became richer, but it did not fall upon the United States to facilitate this process, the costs of which would eventually outrun its resources. Nitze believed that the range of America’s overseas interests had no geographical boundaries, and that its latent capabilities would simply have to expand to take the strain. If that required a tax hike or the restructuring of the American economy—well, so be it.
Of course, Kennan’s conception of the national interest had not diverged only from Nitze’s but from every senior figure in the Truman administration. He liked Nitze personally, found him highly capable, and was relaxed at the prospect of him succeeding him. When Nitze joined PPS as his deputy in the summer of 1949, Kennan vacated his office for him and moved to work in a conference room down the hall. There could hardly have been a clearer signal that Kennan had anointed his successor. Then the H-bomb debate intervened, Kennan fell farther to the margins, and he began to have second thoughts. He wrote to Chip Bohlen that the “question must soon be faced as to who should succeed me. My own inclination would be to say that unless you yourself would feel like coming home … they should leave it vacant for a while.”30 But the die had already been cast. Nitze had momentum and had forged a close working relationship with Dean Acheson. After relocating to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—where he eventually won over the mathematicians who were skeptical about his lack of academic bona fides—Kennan found it difficult to accept the manner of his eclipse. In the summer of 1950, Kennan half joked to Nitze and Acheson that “when I left the department, it never occurred to me that you two would make foreign policy without having first consulted me.”31
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Upon taking the reins at the PPS, Nitze effected a transformation in its manner of operation. Alluding to his predecessor’s foibles, Nitze observed, “There was no point in producing a marvelous piece of paper if it didn’t get read.”32 The main problem with Kennan’s PPS was that it resembled an artist’s studio in Renaissance Florence. Each of the staffers gained valuable experience and proximity to a genius, and many, in turn, went on to become substantial figures in their own right. But the papers that emerged were unmistakably Kennan’s—as the paintings and sculptures were Donatello’s or Michelangelo’s. True collaboration was not possible in the master-apprentice relationship favored by Kennan, meaning all documents that emerged from the PPS had a single voice. This was hardly surprising, as Kennan’s mode of operation was to discuss an issue with his staff and then sequester himself away to write alone without interruption. All policy papers had literary consistency, but when the audience became uncongenial, as happened with Acheson, the papers ceased to matter in the policymaking crucible. The Policy Planning Staff’s output throughout 1949 came to consist primarily of minority reports and dissenting opinions—valuable for posterity but peripheral to the times.
Reporting on Nitze’s appointment, The Washington Star quoted an unnamed source at the State Department who observed perceptively that “Kennan’s leadership of the Policy Planning Staff was a little like a gallant cavalry charge with George brandishing a saber in the lead, astride the most spirited horse in the regiment. Nitze operates more like a chief of staff—or like the editor of a great research project. He presides, listens, and suggests. He organizes, deputizes, and supervises. He weighs, balances, analyzes, and sums up.”33 This marked difference in style owed a lot to Nitze’s career on Wall Street, as well as to the logistical nature of his wartime service and his work on the Marshall Plan. But due to his disciplinary preferences, it also stood to reason that Nitze would prefer the collaborative model of research common to the natural and social sciences, ahead of the lone scholar version common to the arts and humanities.
Nitze had developed many close links with the RAND Corporation (an acronym for research and development), which was established in 1946 to offer quantitative analysis to the U.S. Air Force, but which struck out as a nonprofit think tank in 1948 with seed money from the Ford Foundation. RAND’s motto is simple: “To help improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis.” According to the historian Alex Abella, its headquarters in Santa Monica, California, were “designed to be like a campus without students, just faculty thinking about the vicissitudes of their specialty.”34 RAND’s approach was interdisciplinary, bringing together natural and social scientists to offer recommendations informed by the fledgling discipline of systems analysis. Nitze had long sought to quantify problems, eradicating the requirement for subjective value judgment in the process. He believed that the practice of international relations could be made more scientific, reducing the margin for error.
Nitze was given an opportunity to deploy these
RAND-favored methods when President Truman issued a directive on January 31 that the State and Defense Departments “undertake a re-examination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear capability of the Soviet Union.”35 Acheson delegated this task to Nitze, who immediately gathered an abundance of numerical data, which included predictions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Soviet Union could have in its armory some 135 atomic bombs by mid-1953. If the figures were correct, the response was clear: the United States had to spend much more on both its nuclear and conventional deterrents. Nitze identified the likeliest opponents of military expansion and hired them as consultants to the project, persuading the likes of Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant—the president of Harvard University and consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission—that the Soviet threat was as ominous as the JCS suggested. Nitze also convinced Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett to abandon the Pentagon’s plans for a separate review and instead collaborate with his team at the PPS. Through a deft bureaucratic sleight of hand, Nitze used new classification rules to shield his deliberations from the Treasury and budget bureau.36 Through force of personality and example, Nitze inspired his team to work unrelenting hours in preparing a comprehensive response to Truman’s request. The report that emerged, NSC-68, was very much a team effort, with PPS staffers such as John Paton Davies crafting some of its most memorable phrases. But its primary author and booster was Paul Nitze.
The manner of NSC-68’s planning and execution was far removed from the style favored by Kennan. Its contents were too. NSC-68’s estimate of threat assessment was influenced by Nathan Leites, a RAND social scientist who would write the important book The Operational Code of the Politburo. Nitze came to know Leites’s work through his connections with RAND, and he was impressed by his insights, drawn mainly from psychology and psychoanalysis, regarding the relentless expansionary instincts of the Politburo. NSC-68 follows Leites in identifying a series of “rules” or “codes” that drove Soviet behavior—referred to in the document as the drivers behind a cohesive Soviet “design.” Indeed, the word “design” is used some fifty times in NSC-68 and is deployed to imply malevolence, rather than “purpose” or “strategy,” which suggest normality in diplomatic intention. So the third section of NSC-68, “The Fundamental Design of the Kremlin,” describes Soviet intentions in the following terms: