Nitze, Paul Henry

(b. Amherst, Massachusetts, 16 January 1907; d. Washington, D.C., 19 October 2004), investment banker, foreign policy official, arms control adviser, and a major architect of U.S. cold war strategy from the Truman to the Reagan administrations.

Nitze and his elder sister, Elizabeth, were the children of parents of German extraction. Nitze’s father, William A. Nitze, was a wealthy professor of literature at Amherst College. His mother, Anina (Hilken) Nitze, a homemaker, had strong artistic and musical interests and left-wing political opinions, which brought her a wide circle of like-minded friends. In 1908 Nitze’s father moved to the University of Chicago’s Department of Romance Languages and Literature. Nitze attended a private school in Hyde Park, a prosperous Chicago suburb, and the Hotchkiss School, an elite boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut. From childhood he traveled extensively in Europe. He attended Harvard University, receiving a BA cum laude (with honors) in 1928.

Nitze entered the prominent Wall Street investment banking house of Dillon, Read and Co. in September 1929. In 1932 he married Phyllis Pratt, a wealthy heiress; the couple had four children. His astute investments and his wife’s fortune soon made Nitze independently wealthy. He rose to the position of vice president at Dillon, Read, but he nonetheless found his career unfulfilling. Greatly affected by reading Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline of the West (1926–1928), which argued that Western democracies could not compete with authoritarian regimes, and by a 1937 vacation in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which impressed but alarmed him, Nitze took a leave of absence from Dillon, Read and returned to Harvard to study for a year. His studies, which permanently affected his worldview, concentrated on totalitarian political systems, especially Marxism-Leninism. Nitze discerned many parallels between the Soviet Union under Communism and Germany under National Socialism. Handsome, polished, lean, elegant, athletic, and vigorous, Nitze was recognized as intellectually brilliant—but his inability to suffer fools gladly, his caustic wit, and his raw ambition ultimately kept him out of the highest positions to which he aspired. From 1938 to 1939 Nitze briefly established his own firm, Paul H. Nitze & Co., but in late 1939 he returned to Dillon Read as a vice president.

Until the German blitzkrieg overran the Low Countries and France within a few weeks in the spring of 1940, Nitze opposed U.S. intervention on the side of the Allies in World War II, considering Britain and France too effete to oppose Hitler. In June 1940, however, he became an aide to James V. Forrestal, his former superior at Dillon, Read. Forrestal, a future secretary of defense, was then an administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, helping him prepare the United States for war. Later that year, Nitze became a consultant to the War Department on the military draft. In 1941 he became the financial director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, in 1942 he headed the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare, and in 1943 he took over as the director of overseas procurement in the Foreign Economic Administration. From 1944 to 1946 Nitze served first as director and then as vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, a study that sought to assess the impact of using conventional as well as atomic bombs against Germany and Japan. Nitze concluded that atomic weapons had probably not been decisive in forcing Japan’s surrender and were unlikely to deter future wars. This assessment would require the United States to anticipate the necessity of waging conventional wars after 1945.

In late 1946 Nitze began seven years at the Department of State as deputy director of its Office of International Trade Policy, becoming deputy assistant secretary of state for economic affairs in 1947, deputy director of the department’s policy planning staff in 1948, and director of policy planning in 1949—positions in which he helped to draft legislation for the European Recovery Program (also known as the Marshall Plan). His greatest contribution, however, was his role in formulating a central U.S. policy statement for the cold war. In January 1950, responding to the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb and a Communist victory in China, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked Nitze to chair an interdepartmental study group to review American foreign and defense policy, the first such comprehensive survey. The result of the group’s work was National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68), a classified report considered one of the most important historical documents of the cold war period. Nitze largely wrote NSC-68, which maintained that the Soviets sought world domination. Nitze recommended a strategy of active containment to meet this challenge, which committed the United States to rebuild the West economically while assuming primary responsibility for the entire non-Communist world’s security against outside attack. NSC-68 envisaged doubling or even quadrupling American defense spending, estimating that the United States could prudently devote up to 20 percent of its gross national product (GNP) to funding its armed forces.

President Harry S Truman received NSC-68 in April 1950. The budget-conscious Truman initially rejected the report’s recommendations but implemented them when the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 appeared to confirm Nitze’s assessment of the Communist threat. Annual American defense outlays rose from $13 billion in 1949 to $50 billion in 1953. For forty years the broad framework of U.S. defense capabilities, commitments, and objectives laid out in NSC-68 guided the country’s strategy in many respects.

Nitze left public office in June 1953, as McCarthyite congressmen hostile to his patron, Dean Acheson, blocked any possibility of an appointment in the Eisenhower administration for him. He served instead as president of the Foreign Service Educational Foundation from 1953 to 1961. In addition to writing and speaking prolifically on international affairs, Nitze gave major financial and intellectual patronage to the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, a graduate school he had cofounded in 1943. The school eventually took his name to become the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Nitze subsequently held numerous second-rank national security offices but never attained the top positions that he coveted. His strategic outlook was normally hard-line, although he was prepared to jettison areas he considered insignificant to the security of the United States.

In 1957 Nitze became vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s advisory committee on foreign policy, working closely with Acheson to warn that the Eisenhower administration was insufficiently vigilant in waging the cold war. Nitze also served on the Eisenhower-appointed Gaither Committee on national security in 1957. The committee’s report warned that United States was trailing Soviet Russia in missiles, defense capabilities, and technology—themes taken up in the 1960 presidential campaign of the Democratic candidate, John F. Kennedy. Somewhat paradoxically, in the spring of 1960 Nitze floated proposals to confine U.S. nuclear forces to retaliatory systems under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations, uncharacteristic suggestions that he never subsequently developed and later claimed had advanced only as a devil’s advocate in the hope of stimulating discussion.

In January 1961 Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. In this capacity Nitze participated in deliberations during the Berlin and Cuba crises; in 1961 he even contemplated a preemptive strategic nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. From 1963 to 1967 he served as secretary of the navy, where he became a proponent of a negotiated peace settlement and de-escalation of the ground war in Vietnam, positions he maintained from June 1967 to January 1969 as deputy secretary of defense under Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford. Nitze was one of the “Wise Men,” members of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Ad Hoc Task Force on Vietnam, who recommended gradual American withdrawal from Vietnam in March 1968. As deputy defense secretary, Nitze also established an ad hoc committee to explore a potential agreement on arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union—proposals that laid the groundwork for the subsequent Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).

From January 1969, when the incoming Republican president, Richard Nixon, appointed Nitze as the representative of the secretary of defense on the United States delegation to the SALT meetings held in Helsinki, Finland, from 1969 to 1974, arms control became Nitze’s primary focus. A tough negotiator, he reached agreement with Soviet representatives on the 1972 SALT I treaty. In June 1974, however, Nitze resigned from the delegation, fearing that the Watergate scandal would impel the embattled Nixon to make unacceptable concessions in the ongoing SALT II talks at Moscow. Nitze later attacked the 1979 SALT II treaty that President Jimmy Carter subsequently negotiated as unacceptable on the ground that it placed the United States at a disadvantage in terms of nuclear throw-weight. Throw-weight refers to the total weight of the warheads, guidance systems, and other payload of a guided missile. Increased throw-weight increases the number of warheads that a missile can deliver and the number of enemy missiles it can destroy. Nitze emphasized the danger in the Soviet Union’s numerical heavy-missile superiority over the United States, rendering the latter vulnerable to a first strike. The hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, a nonpartisan group that Nitze helped to found in 1976, propounded similar views. These views were publicized in the committee’s policy studies, which Nitze chaired, and were eventually taken up by the 1980 Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan.

Under Reagan, Nitze—now often dubbed the “Silver Fox”—headed his country’s delegation to the Geneva Arms Control Talks held between 1981 and 1984. In the course of a famous “walk in the woods” that Nitze and the Soviet negotiator, Yuli Kvitsinsky, shared in July 1982, the two diplomats tentatively agreed on a formula permitting each superpower to deploy seventy-five intermediate-range nuclear force missiles in Europe, the Americans the four-warhead Tomahawk cruise missile and the Soviets the three-warhead SS-20 missile. Many analysts considered this arrangement beneficial to the United States, but to Nitze’s acute disappointment, the agreement fell victim to a hard-line contingent in the Pentagon that included Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Richard Perle, the assistant secretary for international security policy. The intermediate-range nuclear force talks collapsed when the Russians walked out of the negotiations in November 1983.

In the autumn of 1984 Nitze joined Secretary of State George P. Shultz as a special arms control adviser, drafting the 1985 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) proposals, which envisaged reductions of 50 percent in Soviet and American nuclear forces. The START proposals also sought, over Weinberger’s and Perle’s sustained opposition, to trade the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative space-based shield against incoming missiles for deep cuts in Soviet nuclear weaponry. The START negotiations ultimately proved unavailing during Reagan’s presidency, although they bore fruit under his successor, President George H. W. Bush. On 1 May 1989, Nitze finally left public office at the age of eighty-two.

In retirement Nitze served as the diplomat in residence at School of Advanced International Studies, publishing his autobiography as well as several volumes of collected writings and addresses on current issues. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, he argued: “The United States, with first-class military potential, inherent political, economic and cultural strengths and no territorial ambitions,” must “play a unique role” in international affairs. Nitze’s first wife died of emphysema in 1987, and in 1993 he married Elisabeth Scott Porter. Despite a serious fall in 1989, a bout with colon cancer, and a heart attack, until his final months Nitze remained physically and mentally robust, dancing, swimming, employing a personal trainer, and maintaining a crowded social life. He died of pneumonia at his Georgetown home and is buried on his farm at Port Tobacco, Maryland, next to his first wife.

Nitze was one of the last surviving members of the East Coast elite, drawn from leading banking and law firms, which set the course of American foreign policy after World War II. Usually a hard-line hawk whose worldview was pessimistic, by the 1980s he nonetheless appeared to be a moderate among conservative Republicans. After Nitze’s impressive funeral service in Washington National Cathedral, several commentators observed that his passing also marked the effective disappearance of the cold war “wise men.”

Nitze’s personal papers are in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Official records generated during his service in the Departments of State, Navy, and Defense are deposited in the U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, Independence, Missouri; the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Austin, Texas; and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, Simi Valley, California. Nitze published an autobiography, with Ann M. Smith and Steven L. Rearden, From Hiroshima to Glasnost at the Center of Decision: A Memoir (1989). His later book, Tension Between Opposites: Reflections on the Practice and Theory of Politics (1993), also contains autobiographical material. NSC-68 and Nitze’s reflections thereon are in S. Nelson Drew, ed., NSC-68: Forging the Strategy of Containment (1994). Three published collections of Nitze’s speeches and writings are Kenneth W. Thompson and Stephen L. Rearden, eds., Paul H. Nitze on Foreign Policy (1989); Paul H. Nitze on National Security and Arms Control (1990); and Paul H. Nitze on the Future (1991). Full-length studies of Nitze’s career include Steven L. Rearden, The Evolution of American Strategic Doctrine: Paul H. Nitze and the Soviet Challenge (1984); Strobe Talbott, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (1988); and David Callahan, Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitze and the Cold War (1990). A study of Nitze’s tenure as secretary of the navy is Paul R. Schratz, “Paul Henry Nitze, 29 November 1963–30 June 1967,” in American Secretaries of the Navy, Vol. 2: 1913–1972, edited by Paolo E. Coletta (1980), 941–959. He figures extensively in Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (1986). Obituaries are in the New York Times (20 Oct. 2004); the Washington Post (21 Oct. 2004); and the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Times (London) (all 22 Oct. 2004). Nitze also recorded oral histories for the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson presidential libraries and for the U.S. Air Force Oral History Collection, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama.

Priscilla Roberts