The Enduring Influence of “America’s Cold Warrior”
BOOK REVIEW: America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan
By James Graham Wilson /Cornell University Press
Reviewed by John A. Lauder
The Reviewer – John A. Lauder is a Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and is a founder of the James A. Garfield Center for Public Leadership at Hiram College. He retired from the US government with over 33 years of managerial, analytical, and policy experience in the Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and as an arms control negotiator. He has continued to lead efforts to improve intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and to facilitate verification of international agreements.
The Review: National Security is a profession where longevity is both possible and an asset. Few professionals though have had as sustained and consequential career at the apex of policy formulation and implementation as did Paul Nitze.
Nitze served in eight Presidential administrations in such positions as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Navy, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, and as an arms control strategist and negotiator. As principal drafter of NSC-68 (the 1950 paper titled “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”) and other seminal strategy documents, he established the intellectual and policy underpinnings for US global leadership and competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He co-founded the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) whose graduate school bears his name.
Nitze was born into privilege, was educated at elite schools, and made his fortune in business. In 1914 on a family vacation in Europe, he witnessed the start of World War I and, as Vice Chairman of the influential Strategic Bombing Survey, visited Hiroshima at the end of World War II. He was an adviser to Presidents both while inside and outside of government and could be a fierce critic of an Administration when he disagreed with policy, the level of defense spending, or felt personally slighted.
Nitze was the initiator of an iconic moment in arms control history when he “walked in the woods” outside Geneva with his Soviet counterpart as they informally sought ways to move ahead on negotiating an agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF.) The event even inspired a theatrical play about the encounter, but both negotiators were out beyond the scope of their instructions and their governments walked back from their efforts. Five years later, though, the INF Treaty was completed and set the stage for further sweeping agreements.
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America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan by James Graham Wilson, an historian at the US Department of State, expertly recounts and analyzes Nitze’s career and influence. Because of Nitze’s reach, the book is more than just a biography but a summary of US national security deliberations from the lead-up to World War II through the end of the Cold War and into the challenges of this century. Readers will marvel at how Nitze could have been instrumental for so long in a broad range of critical moments in US history.
There have been other biographies of Nitze and articles assessing his contributions, but Wilson’s book is extraordinarily well researched. The author’s grasp of the subject matter is demonstrated when he even cites the work of experts such as the State Department’s Jim Timbie and the Defense Department’s Frank Miller. They were the stars below normal public view whom Nitze valued and who provided expertise to flesh out Nitze’s ideas and approaches.
Despite such attention to detail, Wilson delivers a highly readable book that one can peruse at the beach or on an airplane. The author keeps the story moving but reminds the reader of the key points of the narrative at the beginning and end of each chapter.
Wilson also introduces insightful and at times humorous anecdotes to enliven the book. Wilson tells us, for example, that Nitze missed the signing ceremony for the SALT I arms control agreement at the US Embassy in Moscow in 1972. “Detained at the airport, initially blocked from getting into the US Embassy, he announced himself to a Marine as the former secretary of the navy and was placed in a headlock.”
Wilson manages to capture the essence of key national security debates without drifting into arcane details. This discipline though will have a downside for some readers who will want to know more about the context of the decision making.
For example, Wilson includes a fascinating paragraph on Nitze’s views on the arms control theology of the difference between “monitoring,” which the Intelligence Community conducts, and “verification,” which are judgments reserved to the policy community. In June 1979, Nitze had written a memo to himself during debate over SALT II in which he observed that “the Executive Branch has now done an Alice in Wonderland on us. . . the word ‘verify’ no longer means what it used to mean. The CIA can no longer be asked any question about ‘verification.’ What they do is not now verification; it is now covered by a different word – the word ‘monitor.”
Wilson does not elaborate in his text about what led to Nitze’s musing and what consequence the vocabulary had for the vigorous debates on the Soviet strategic buildup and potential compliance with arms control agreements under consideration.
Still, the book in other sections outlines the complicated and fraught relationship that Nitze had with intelligence. In policy debates even when outside the government, he relied on his access to sensitive intelligence to give his arguments credibility. Yet, his belief that US strategic superiority and enhanced spending on defense were necessary for deterrence and crisis stability led him to be a frequent and public critic of what he saw as the CIA’s underestimation of Soviet capability. Wilson suggests that Nitze’s concern – and his participation in alternative estimates such as the controversial Team B study in 1976 –were as much driven by Nitze’s mindset as they were by any specific intelligence to which he might have had access.
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Nitze, like many others, was slow to recognize the signs of the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. He had predicted that Gorbachev would intervene militarily in Eastern Europe to put down the liberalization emerging there. Nitze’s skepticism of Gorbachev’s reforms and Soviet willingness to compromise was one of the factors – along with his criticism of George H. W. Bush’s national security policies and Secretary of State James Baker’s interest to bring in new faces — that may have led to Nitze being largely on the sidelines during the end game negotiations that led to the high-water mark of arms control in the early 1990s.
Wilson praises Nitze’s achievements and dedication to public service but does not hold back in identifying those areas where Nitze was wrong or was difficult. The author cites James Chace quoting former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford: “[Nitze’s] ambition and impatient intellect often manifested themselves in irritable peevishness and flashes of unveiled contempt for people whom he felt did not deserve the high government positions they held.”
One of Nitze’s rivalries was with Henry Kissinger, although the two frequently consulted. Wilson notes that Nitze was chagrined that Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy became a best seller in 1957. In a book review that year, “Nitze took Kissinger to task, focusing his criticism on sloppy mathematical calculations related to nuclear yields and other such esoteric matters. He did not write what he believed at the time and afterward: that Kissinger had taken the work of others [including Nitze] and published it under his name.” Kissinger for his part – in a move that chills book reviewers – threatened a lawsuit upon reading the draft review.
In assessing Nitze’s career and legacy, Wilson concludes that US national security needs more leading figures like Nitze, particularly in this time of renewed nuclear challenges and a complex international environment. Wilson assesses that Nitze “helped create the architecture of the US national security state and a system for training future professionals . . .He contributed directly to the most pressing national security dilemma of the Cold War: nuclear confrontation. While Nitze saw himself as failing in most of his pursuits, his overall legacy has profoundly influenced the crafting of policy during and after the Cold War. He only sometimes lived up to his standards of excellence: even when he did, he was only sometimes correct. Yet he never gave up and lost sight of the United States’ fundamental aspirations.”
America’s Cold Warrior earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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