Worldmaking (49 page)

The thesis of the X article, you will recall, was that our main problem was a political one and that we had a good chance of coping with it by political means—(at least means short of a full-scale shooting war)—if we would stop moping, face up to the situation cheerfully and realistically, and conduct ourselves rationally, in terms of our own epoch. I still feel that way. When I took my present job in the Department, I thought there was a good chance that this could be accomplished. Today, I am skeptical. I am afraid that we are not really getting anywhere.

Kennan identified problems at multiple levels. The Truman administration had to “accept propaganda as a major weapon of policy,” and the State Department “must not hesitate to get out and participate in the intellectual debate on U.S. foreign policy.” Communicating the proper purpose of U.S. diplomacy required eschewing “both the arrogance of trying to ‘go it alone' and the neurotic satisfaction of striking of idealistic attitudes … In this concept, there is no room for self-delusion and for lofty announcements about peace and democracy.” The existence of the United Nations, “and the general current vogue for multilateral international negotiation,” was making America's task in containing the Soviet Union all the more difficult. Stalin did not take the organization seriously—except as a useful device for easy wins, where applicable—but a guileless swell of world opinion viewed it as a bastion of collaborative altruism, beyond reproach and cynical carping. This delighted Moscow, for “it is fatuous to expect them to deal seriously in the UN … They would be fools, from their standpoint, to do so; and we would be greater fools to expect them to.” Kennan had begun to give up hope of America communicating with a firm but modulated voice in world affairs: “And if this is the set-up, I'd rather be at Yale, or where-you-will,—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people,—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”
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Kennan had crafted a declaration of independence conditioned by frustration with his government and envy at Walter Lippmann's independence and influence. There was no point remaining in a government that had veered away so drastically from Kennan's worldview. Yet he still retained a little hope that the secretary of state would come around to his way of thinking.

It was not to be. Kennan's letter simply confirmed Acheson's doubts about the absence of “practicality” in his diplomatic thought, informed by antidemocratic sentiments and a yearning for a halcyon age that never was. Through the course of 1949, Kennan continued to languish on the periphery—as Truman's rhetoric grew fiercer, as a virulent anticommunism gathered strength under Senator Joe McCarthy's crudely effective direction—pining for the happier days of 1946 and imagining the pleasures that might accompany scholarly retreat. A spring visit to Hamburg, Kennan's favorite German city, had brought home to him the importance of preserving peace. The indiscriminate Allied bombing campaign had created a scene of devastation that even Kennan, with his imaginative gifts, could scarcely have visualized. The realist snapped and the artist took over:

Here, for the first time, I felt an unshakable conviction that no momentary military advantage … could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values … And it suddenly appeared to me that in these ruins there was an unanswerable symbolism which we in the West could not afford to ignore. If the Western world was really going to make valid the pretense of a higher moral departure point … then it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all.
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Here was a sentiment remarkable in its moral force, about as detached from Acheson's perspective as one could imagine. In two mournful diary entries, Kennan confronted the obvious fact that his perspective on world affairs had become a lonely one. On November 19, 1949, he wrote that “it is time I recognized that my planning staff, started nearly three years ago, has simply been a failure, like all previous attempts to bring order and foresight into the designing of foreign policy by special institutional arrangements within the Department.” Three days later, he lamented that “my concept of the manner in which our diplomatic effort should be conducted is not shared by any of the other senior officials of the Department … If I am ever to do any good in this work, having the courage of my convictions, it must be outside the walls of this institution and not inside them.”
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In Kennan's mind, America's Soviet policy had fluctuated wildly from 1943 to 1949: from accommodation, to surety of purpose, to overreaction, to something else entirely. It was he who had remained constant and in command of his faculties—a baseline on a volatile graph.

 

6

THE SCIENTIST

PAUL NITZE

We must not write into the constitution of the world society a license to universal intervention. For if we license it, we shall invite it. If we invite it, we shall get it.

—WALTER LIPPMANN

Paul Nitze was one of the first Americans to visit the spectral ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But the experience affected him in a very different way from George Kennan's visit to Hamburg four years later. Nitze had a specific job to do: “measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two bombs—in other words, to put calipers on the problem so that people back home would have a factual frame of reference within which to draw conclusions about the bomb's true capabilities as well as its limitations.”
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He had arrived in Hiroshima from Tokyo, where the U.S. Air Force had deployed incendiary devices to create a firestorm that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city and killed upwards of eighty thousand people. For Nitze, the devastation visited upon Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was indistinguishable—the differences between atomic and conventional weapons were not as surprising as the similarities in outcome. It was as if Nitze had traveled from Sodom to Gomorrah to Admah in the aftermath of Yahweh's final judgment. Each biblical city had been utterly destroyed. Did it really matter whether this was achieved by fire or brimstone? In those abnormal times, during a pitiless war, the atomic bomb struck Nitze as a weapon like any other in the modern era.
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There were other aspects of the atomic bombings that Nitze found particularly noteworthy. While the firebombing destroyed a large radius of Tokyo, the atomic bombing had a more intense but localized effect. “The significance of the atomic bomb,” Nitze wrote, “was that it compressed the explosive power of many conventional bombs into one and thus enormously enhanced the effectiveness of a single bomber.”
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Beyond the immediate blast radius, Nitze noted that Nagasaki's railroads were operating after only forty-eight hours. People sitting by closed windows were hurt by broken glass but protected from the radiation. Residents who had retreated to subterranean air raid tunnels, even within ground zero, had survived the blast. The atomic bomb was not just a usable weapon—its impact could even be mitigated by civil defense. He took this lesson home with him, proselytizing on the issue of nuclear preparedness. When Nitze returned to New York City, he asked the powerful urban planner Robert Moses to encourage property developers to include nuclear bunkers in all new structures. Moses cut him off mid-sentence: “Paul, you're mad, absolutely mad. Nobody will pay attention to that.”
4

Nitze would encounter more occasions where his conception of the national interest would run aground on the rocks of what was domestically practicable. Throughout his career, Nitze ascribed consistently malevolent intentions to Moscow and insisted doggedly that its military capabilities were more fearsome than the intelligence community believed. Combining a keen interest in psychology, systems analysis, and the academic discipline of international relations, Nitze believed that America's political leaders had a marked tendency to systematically underestimate the magnitude of the threat posed by Moscow. Nitze was particularly hostile toward presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, believing that each had endangered the nation in a different way. To dissuade Soviet aggression, Nitze recommended that the United States devote a far higher proportion of its GDP to military spending. He recognized that this course would prove a hard political sell, but he believed that the American people were willing to pay higher taxes, and sacrifice a little material comfort, to better safeguard their nation. Nitze's seminal contribution to U.S. grand strategy, NSC-68, dangled worst-case scenarios, then rationalized a vast expansion of the national security state to meet and repulse them; his scientism and certainty were a potent combination.
5

*   *   *

Paul Henry Nitze was born in 1907 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where his father, William Albert, was a professor of philology. His family was of German extraction and had made a fortune in the nineteenth century during the boom in railway construction. The security of inherited family wealth and the elite university settings in which the family resided made for a rarefied childhood. A year after Paul's birth, William Nitze accepted a position as head of the department of Romance languages at the University of Chicago, where he remained for four decades.
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Paul's best friend at school was Glenn Millikan, the son of a Nobel prize–winning physicist who lived across the street.
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The Nitzes spent long summers in Europe, taking advantage of Chicago's generous sabbatical arrangements.

His father was a quiet man, though he came down volubly on any intellectual shoddiness displayed by his son. His mother, Anina Hilken, was different: flamboyant, socially confident, consumed by myriad interests—and utterly devoted to Paul. At dinner parties she drank, smoked, and engaged in passionate scholarly debate with her many academic guests. She read Kafka, admired the music of Richard Strauss, became friends with the dancer Isadora Duncan and the actress and burlesque dancer Sally Rand, and once remortgaged the family home to assist Clarence Darrow, as her son recalled, “in order to provide bail for a left-wing agitator he was defending.” Anina was an irresistible presence in her son's life, filling the parental vacuum left by his father's taciturnity. “By far the greatest influence in my life was my mother,” Nitze wrote. “At times the intensity of her love was overwhelming.”
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Paul was a capable student at school. Indeed, he had little choice but to perform or face William's wrath, remembering later that none of his friends had such a demanding father.
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But when he left John Dewey's University of Chicago Laboratory School for one of the nation's elite prep schools, Hotchkiss, he rebelled and took full advantage of the attendant freedoms, observing that his years in Connecticut “were full of camaraderie, athletics, girls, and studies—pretty much in that order.”
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Nitze remained true to these priorities when he joined Harvard's class of 1928, reflecting later on America's preeminent university with a strong dose of self-exculpation: “In those days grades didn't count. Harvard was more like a European university. You just tried to absorb wisdom. We all drank too much, had girls, and a rich, glorious life.”
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He joined the highly exclusive Porcellian Club, contravened the strictures of Prohibition at every available opportunity, and generally had a riotous time. The Porcellian's motto is
Dum vivimus vivamus—
“While we live, let us live”—which in Nitze's case appeared not to refer to the life of the mind. His performance his first two years was abysmal, though the jolt to the system provided by these results spurred him on to perform well through the rest of his studies. After his slow start, it was in fact miraculous that Nitze only narrowly missed graduating magna cum laude. His talent was clearly present even if the application was harder to discern. Nitze and Kennan's experiences of college could scarcely have been more different.

Nitze was struck down by a serious bout of hepatitis upon graduation—his immune system compromised, perhaps, by his champagne-fueled decision the previous week to canoe from Boston to New York with only two cans of beans and a pocket knife for company. It took Nitze some months to recover from his illness, which derailed his initial plans to enter Harvard's doctoral program. Then, to his father's chagrin, Nitze changed tack and decided against pursuing an academic career. He had always found academia's detachment from public affairs troubling. One episode that struck home with young Paul was an erudite discussion that his father and his colleagues had about the Treaty of Versailles. Each agreed, with good reason, that the treaty was fundamentally flawed, but each, Nitze later observed, was “powerless to influence events … I wanted to be in a position where I could participate in world events, and be close to the levers of influence. Distinguished scholarship did not appear to offer that opportunity.”
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Instead Nitze made some serious money. A Harvard urban legend holds that if a member of the Porcellian has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, the club would cover the shortfall. Paul Nitze required no such largesse. In October 1929, the New York investment bank Dillon Read hired him. He decided to specialize in economics because it “was a field where one could be close to the levers of power—to put it frankly the levers of influence.”
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Nitze was conscious of his luck in landing a plum job with a storied firm at that vertiginous moment in world economic affairs: “I was very likely the last man hired on Wall Street for many years thereafter.”
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He took full advantage of this good fortune. While Nitze's father disapproved of his career as a shallow “money lender,” Nitze made a million dollars by 1935 through an astute investment in a laboratory based in the United States, run by two French scientists, which developed a vitamin-mineral supplement called Visyneral and a “pill for certain types of diabetes,” both of which turned out to be “smashing success[es].”
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From Nitze's perspective, the marvelous thing about making so much money was that it allowed him to ignore quotidian matters like earning a salary. Instead he could now devote all his time to pondering issues that really mattered—like the precarious balance of power in Europe. This life of the mind had a distinct advantage over the university-based version. Nitze's financial success meant he could pursue his intellectual interests without attending to teaching or university service.