Served 9 Presidents : Paul Nitze: Last of the ‘Wise Men’

Earlier this year, Paul Nitze got a new pair of skis--downhill racing skis, according to State Department gossip. The annual family vacation in Aspen was approaching. Besides, it was Nitze’s birthday--his 82nd.

“They were not racers,” Nitze recalled, “and they were a gift.” But they were skis. The venerable Nitze was still schussing.

Perhaps not for much longer, however--at least not on the upper slopes of power in Washington. Soon, for only the second time in five decades, he apparently will cease to practice his chosen profession of government service. Adviser to virtually every President since Franklin D. Roosevelt, chief arms control aide to former President Ronald Reagan, Paul Henry Nitze is retiring.

End of an Era

With his retirement an extraordinary era in the history of American government is ending--the period, spanning the last half century, in which American foreign policy and national security decisions were influenced to an extraordinary degree by a small, tight-knit band of patrician public servants.

Set apart by social position, education and financial independence, by internationalist outlook, shared values and an unquestioning conviction that they had something special to contribute, Nitze and the others--men such as Dean Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John J. McCloy, Robert A. Lovett, George F. Kennan and Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen--left their mark on nearly every major national security decision from World War II through Korea and Vietnam, from the dawning of the Cold War to its current eclipse.

“Not many replicas of Nitze and the others are coming along. In fact I can’t think of any, and we’ll be the worse for it,” said Samuel F. Wells, a former diplomat who is now deputy director of the Wilson Center at the Smithsonian Institution. “They served in nonaggrandizing ways, not demanding great fame, not writing kiss-and-tell books, not turning their offices into vast amounts of income.

“Public service seems a notion in disuse, ignored, maybe discredited, certainly by the youth today,” Wells lamented.

Critics’ View

Not everyone shares this admiring view of Nitze. To populist critics, he and others in the select group epitomized the Eastern Establishment: arrogant and elitist, propelling the nation into dangerous waters--the Cold War, for example--out of a conviction that they knew what was best not only for America but for the world.

If experts disagree about whether their influence ultimately was good or bad, what is beyond question is the unusual extent of that influence.

From their ranks came the architects of the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, senior counselors to President John F. Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis and policy-makers who helped design the foundations of nuclear deterrence. So closely were they involved in shaping the modern political world that Acheson, secretary of state in the Administration of Harry S. Truman, called his autobiography “Present at the Creation.”

What were the roots of such influence?

Their backgrounds were part of it, imbuing them with authority and networks of elite connections. They were also men of broad experience and knowledge in the world, comfortable dealing with nations and regions that most American politicians knew relatively little about.

“Nitze is like a pre-Marxian, pre-Freudian man. Clear thinking--a man who doesn’t get into motive,” one U.S. diplomat said reflectively. “It was this kind of man who made the New Deal.”

Moreover, they reflected an idea widely accepted in this country before World War II--that altruistic dedication to public service was the natural vocation of men of wealth and erudition. Few of them claimed it, but members of the tight-knit group seemed to regard their tours in government as a matter of honor and noblesse oblige.

As a result, since they sought no tangible personal gain except influence, the advice of these so-called “wise men” was ostensibly selfless and carried more weight than the urgings of less visibly disinterested advocates.

Career Bureaucrats

Today, Washington draws its expertise from other, more egalitarian reservoirs. Career bureaucrats and professional government specialists, along with academics and other experts who shuttle between Washington and the nation’s universities and think tanks, provide the informed opinions on which Presidents and Cabinet leaders rely.

These specialists are at least the equals of Nitze and the others in expertise. But their greater diversity makes them less cohesive--and sometimes more competitive--than the old elite. They play critical roles at particular times and on particular issues, but few have stayed near the summits of power so long or made their weight felt on so many subjects.

In the view of political scientist James David Barber of Duke University, the short-term perspective of recent presidential staffs--their preoccupation with the news media and their story-of-the-day approach to managing the White House--contrasts with the longer-term outlooks of men such as Nitze.

“The distinction between the international and domestic dimensions of the challenge facing the United States is no longer meaningful,” Barber said, “and people like Nitze and others could make essential contributions but we don’t see them around.”

Nitze and the others had their antecedents in the informal advisers to President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I, and their roots were deep in New England Puritanism, according to historians.

Held Same Basic Beliefs

They were not ideological and came from different political parties. But they held the same basic tenets, including the view that America’s leadership role--and their own--was “part of a moral destiny,” as Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas wrote in “The Wise Men.”

Before World War II they opposed U.S. isolationism and, after it, Soviet expansionism. It was they--Kennan, Acheson, Harriman, Bohlen, McCloy, Lovett and Nitze--who devised the policy of containing communism, by force and diplomacy, Isaacson and Thomas said. They believed in discretion, moderation, privacy and gentlemanly conduct--forming the velvet glove of a tough, realpolitik approach to the world.

Nitze came from an educated though not a wealthy family. His father was a university professor of romance languages and philology. But Nitze had a successful Wall Street career before marrying Phyllis Pratt, an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune. He made his own fortune in the Aspen Ski Corp., which has helped him to live well despite moderate government salaries.

While not born into wealth, Nitze clearly benefited from his background. His first language was German, thanks to a German nanny, and as a youth he traveled widely. He attended Hotchkiss and Harvard, where he was graduated cum laude in 1928.

His sports, besides skiing, are fishing, sailing, tennis and horseback riding.

Youthful Antics

As a youth, he chalked up some carefree if not hell-raising adventures. During a wild party in his senior year in college to celebrate his release from hospital after a bout with jaundice, he bet he could paddle a canoe from the Ipswich River near Boston to the New York Yacht Club. He and a friend did it in eight days.

A year later came an episode that tells much about the difference between Nitze and his peers and most comparable young men and women today.

After conducting an investment survey in Europe for an American investment banking firm, Nitze and a friend found that they had three weeks of free time. “We had seen all the interesting capitals and decided to go where the population was least,” he recalled recently. “That was northern Finland, Lake Inari, above the Arctic Circle.”

To reach the lake, the two 22-year-olds had to hike the last three days through a forest. At the lake at last, they spoke in German to an astonished fisherman, who said: “You know where you are? The U.S.S.R. You oughtn’t to be here.” He pointed to a trail on the other side of the lake that ran due west--and suggested they take it.

“As we started out, the man said: ‘If I were you, I’d run,’ ” Nitze recalled, slapping his knee. “And we ran like hell down that trail.”

It is hard to imagine today’s hard-driving young Wall Streeters and MBAs finding themselves on a business trip to Europe with three weeks time to burn, much less being so familiar with the major centers of European life that they decided to explore the remote fringes.

Yet it was this deep, almost leisurely schooling in the cultures and politics of other lands that contributed to the special authority of Nitze and his peers.

Went on Sabbatical

After rising rapidly in the New York investment firm of Dillon Read & Co., Nitze took a sabbatical in 1937, at age 30, to return to Harvard to study history, sociology and philosophy. He saw Europe on the brink of catastrophe and wanted to come to terms with the larger issues. He also studied the piano, which he still plays, often turning to it to relieve stress during negotiations.

After a year at Harvard, he started his own investment company in New York, but his health broke down from overwork, and he returned to Dillon Read. In 1940, when Roosevelt asked Dillon Read’s president, James Forrestal, to help repair relations with Wall Street, which Roosevelt had been blasting during the election campaign, Forrestal turned to Nitze.

“Forrestal was forbidden by law from hiring any staff except a secretary, and when I asked who would pay me, he said Dillon Read would,” Nitze said. “My first job for the government in Washington was totally illegal.”

He was introduced to defense issues when he represented the Air Force in a dispute with the British over the optimum bombing targets in Germany--railroad marshaling yards, as the British urged, or refineries and bridges, as the Americans preferred. Nitze’s arguments won the day and they sparked a friendship with the British negotiator, who was impressed with his logic.

After the war, Nitze was a member of the U.S. strategic bombing survey team that assessed the damage from air strikes in Europe and later the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From those studies, incidentally, Nitze developed an abiding personal conviction that bomb shelters offer a great deal of protection. Even at ground zero at Nagasaki, he said, “people who got into bomb shelters survived.” Nitze built a shelter on his 1,800-acre Maryland estate, which was kept provisioned for many years.

Most Admires Truman

Of the Presidents he served, Nitze most admires Truman. “It was not Truman’s consistency or logic,” he said, “but the man, straightforward, putting the presidency above personal considerations, that was most admirable.”

His most rewarding job, he said, was undertaken during this period: converting the public pledge of Secretary of State George C. Marshall to rebuild Europe into a workable plan. “It was an enormous undertaking but most stimulating, translating a good idea into reality,” Nitze said.

During the Truman Administration, Nitze was also the chief author of the key National Security Council document of the postwar era, NSC-68. Completed in 1950, it was a seminal document of the Cold War, the blueprint for containing communism.

NSC-68 aroused strong opposition not for its conclusions about Soviet intentions but because it estimated that the Soviets had a larger military machine than was then credited to them. Implicitly, it called for a much higher rate of U.S. defense spending--four times the existing levels--to create a nuclear force formidable enough to deter Moscow’s expansive goals.

“Many people at that time felt the Russians had zero competence in building weapons,” Nitze said recently. “They could not believe our intelligence estimates of MIG-15 production, for example, because it was higher than for our own F-86s.

“So we calculated how many MIG-15s would be on two Soviet bases on Sakhalin Island (near Japan) if our estimates were correct, and then had the CIA take aerial photos from oblique angles (offshore). We’d estimated 30 on one base, 40 on another. The photos showed 46 and 58.”

Nuclear Military Buildup

Those photos, plus the start of the Korean War, set the United States on its own massive military buildup of nuclear weapons that was to continue through the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration.

Until then, Nitze had been a Republican. But he switched after becoming “cross” with President Eisenhower for failing to support Marshall, who had brought Eisenhower to the top, against the demagoguery of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.).

But Nitze worked in Eisenhower’s Administration, most prominently in writing the Gaither Report of 1957, which found major flaws in U.S. defenses--the “bomber gap” and later, after Sputnik, the “missile gap.” Neither of those gaps in fact existed, as later intelligence proved, but the issues helped Kennedy win the presidency.

In the Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, Nitze held his highest formal jobs: secretary of the Navy and undersecretary of defense.

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon personally asked Nitze to begin the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets, with whom he first had negotiated in 1946 over wartime Lend-Lease. But after helping negotiate the first SALT agreement and the ban on anti-missile systems, Nitze resigned in 1974 when he believed that Nixon intended to make concessions to the Soviets to save his Watergate-besieged presidency.

Since Roosevelt, only former President Jimmy Carter did not use Nitze’s services. Nitze served on Carter’s transition team after his election in 1976, but he antagonized the President-elect by lecturing him on the need for a strong defense to counter the Soviet threat.

‘Doomsday Approach’

Speaking of Nitze, Carter complained: “He was arrogant and inflexible . . . and he had a doomsday approach,” according to Strobe Talbott’s new book, “The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and The Nuclear Peace.”

Nitze smiles at the recollection. “I don’t know whether I was the first (Democrat) to desert him or he was the first (President) to desert me,” he said.

Regardless, the outcome proved costly to Carter. Outside of government, Nitze became a vocal critic of U.S. arms control policy and, through an organization he created, the Committee on the Present Danger, did more than any other individual to block Senate ratification of the 1979 strategic arms agreement that Carter signed with the Soviet Union.

Back in government, Nitze’s best-known bold departure came in 1982 with an unauthorized negotiation-within-a-negotiation with a Soviet diplomat, Yuli Kvitsinsky, in an effort to end an impasse over intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

The Reagan Administration repudiated the “walk-in-the-woods” compromise. Nitze’s hands were slapped for going beyond his instructions; the Administration knew it would have let loose an uproar by firing him.

He is an “inveterate problem solver,” complained a Pentagon official at the time--a time when the Administration did not want the problem solved. He is widely credited as the man who kept the flame of arms control alive in the first Reagan term, when the overwhelming emphasis was on the trillion-dollar military buildup.

Regular Exercise

As the “silver fox” of Reagan’s nuclear negotiations, Nitze looked the part. His face is weathered but firm, his body slightly bent but still trim thanks to daily exercises before his morning bath.

Now, in the twilight of his career, what might have been the final jewel in his crown--a treaty reducing long-range nuclear weapons by half--appears at least several years from completion. But Nitze appears unconcerned about whether he will play a role in its final negotiation.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who has gotten rid of almost every senior official of the Reagan Administration’s State Department, offered Nitze a part-time job as ambassador-at-large emeritus. Nitze, according to associates, decided instead to resign effective May 1 to join the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies here.

President Bush invited Nitze to help his White House staff with its strategic policy review, which is to be completed by the end of April. Nitze agreed, telling colleagues: “I may be persona non grata at the State Department, but not at the White House.”

Fractured Pelvis

Now Nitze’s irrepressible urge to exercise may force him to change those plans. While horseback riding two weekends ago, he fell from his mount, fracturing his pelvis. His recovery may take up to eight weeks.

Not much can shake Nitze’s cheerfulness, but one subject--his wife, Phyllis, who died two years ago after 54 years of marriage--brings mist to his eyes. He recalls her with animation and warm smiles.

“She was an enthusiastic supporter of whatever I wanted to do,” he said, “although not of the social life that went with some of the jobs. When I was secretary of the Navy, she disliked the admirals’ wives, who moved like schools of fish around her. But Phyllis made no pretense at being an intellectual. She never went to college. She was a fine horseback rider and an excellent fisherman, and she danced marvelously.”

The couple had four children, 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Many are excellent skiers. Nitze himself now sticks to the intermediate slopes.

“My grandchildren lead the way down,” he said, “and my children come behind to pick me up.”