Worldmaking (59 page)

Rostow got the job, the Vietnam War escalated apace, and Nitze's isolation continued until June 1967, when he was appointed deputy secretary of defense. This was the job he had accepted from Kennedy until the caustic, superconfident Bob McNamara had blocked it. In the summer of 1967, however, McNamara was a different man: emotionally broken over his part in escalating a war that he now viewed as unwinnable.

That times had changed from the optimistic Kennedy era might be seen in the fact that Nitze's first job as deputy secretary was to prepare the Pentagon for a massive antiwar protest. Among the hundred thousand protesters who marched on the Pentagon on October 21 were three of Nitze's children, “more out of curiosity than for protest,” he observed hopefully. Nitze made absolutely sure that the troops that defended the Pentagon carried no live ammunition in their rifles. Nonetheless, scuffles broke out, tear gas was deployed, red paint was poured on the Pentagon steps to simulate blood, and Yippies (members of the Youth International Party) led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin failed in their attempt to surround and “levitate” the Pentagon in a bid to cast out evil spirits. The marchers included the writer Norman Mailer, the godfather of intuitive parenting Benjamin Spock, and the poet Robert Lowell. Mailer wrote the fine “nonfiction novel”
Armies of the Night
based on his experience of the march and his subsequent arrest. Reviewing the book in
The New York Times
, Alfred Kazin wrote that “only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive, so vivid with crowds, the great stage that is American democracy, the Washington streets and bridges, the Lincoln Memorial, the women, students, hippies, Negroes and assorted intellectuals for peace.”
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Nitze did not record his views of Mailer's stylized depiction. He did mock the protesters for getting het up by “vaguely Marxist authors whom they then considered inspirational, such as Dr. Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky, [who] are no longer read.”
155
George Kennan was ostensibly on the same side as the protesters, but he wrote a mean-spirited book,
Democracy and the Student Left
, mocking their methods and pretensions: “If the students think
they
are gloomy about the American scene, and fearful of America's future, I must tell them that they haven't seen anything yet. Not only do my apprehensions outclass theirs but my ideas of what would have to be done to put things right are far more radical than theirs.”
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Kennan's assault on the student protesters was wide-ranging: they were naïve, work shy, drug addled, nihilistic, and spewed cant informed by an alarmingly shallow pool of knowledge. Writing in
Commentary
, the conservative Norman Podhoretz hailed Kennan as a resolute truth teller. Elsewhere he was denounced by the playwright Lillian Hellman, Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the poet W. H. Auden. “There is no one in public life for whose integrity and wisdom I have greater respect than Mr. George Kennan,” Auden wrote, but denigrating the protesters' potential and purpose “is to deny that human history owes anything to martyrs.”
157

Antiwar dissent grew fiercer throughout 1968 as it became obvious that the United States was killing and maiming its enemy to no political effect. A watershed moment arrived on January 30, 1968, when a combined force of eighty-four thousand NLF troops launched a coordinated assault on every significant town, city, and U.S. military facility in South Vietnam. In its greatest propaganda coup, NLF troops infiltrated the U.S. embassy in Saigon and killed two U.S. military policemen. It was a suicide mission—they were all eventually killed—but they stayed alive long enough for their efforts to make it onto American television screens, presenting a distressing image of the war that jarred with President Johnson's hitherto upbeat assurances of steady progress. For the first time, the major newsweeklies—
Time
,
Life
,
Newsweek
—criticized the war. America's most trusted news anchor, Walter Cronkite, observed with genuine surprise, “I thought we were winning the war.”
158

Nitze was not as surprised as Cronkite by the Tet Offensive—so-called because the assault was launched on the eve of Tet, the lunar New Year. He had been consistently unpersuaded by the insistence of Walt Rostow and other optimistic hawks that the vast U.S. military effort had the southern insurgency on the back foot—that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” Clark Clifford had officially replaced a broken Robert McNamara as defense secretary on March 1, and Nitze began to lobby Clifford for a fundamental reappraisal of the war. Clifford had served as a naval aide to President Truman in the latter stages of the Second World War and played a key role in drafting the seminal 1947 National Security Act. He had served President Kennedy on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and advised President Johnson on the Vietnam War in 1965—when he sided with George Ball in opposing escalation. But after LBJ made the decision to Americanize the war, Clifford became one of the president's staunchest supporters—a fierce advocate of winning wars once established. At the point of his replacing McNamara, Nitze described him as a “fire-breathing hawk.” But then Tet compelled him to change tack completely, as Nitze later described:

Clark's [views] changed first and Clark switched 180 degrees, so Clark came to the conclusion the thing to do was to cut and run right away. Having been a “bomb 'em to pieces” fellow, he suddenly became “get out at all costs, any costs, just get out.” And that I thought was also wrong, so from that point on suddenly I found myself being not on the dove side, but on the firmer side. I thought it was just dreadful to just pull out.
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On March 4, Clifford briefed the president on his post-Tet recommendations and cast what he described as “grave doubts” on the sharp escalatory route—the dispatch of a further 206,000 American troops—urged by Walt Rostow and General William Westmoreland. Clifford observed that the president's war policies had already done “enormous damage” to the country “we are trying to save.”
160
He doubted whether “we can ever find a way out if we continue to shovel men into Vietnam.”
161

Clifford's assessment shocked President Johnson. Nitze was glad for his change of heart—he had threatened to resign from the administration rather than defend the Vietnam War before Senator Fulbright's committee—but he now came to view the new defense secretary as mercurial and untrustworthy. So followed a remarkable month in American politics. On March 12, the liberal antiwar senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won 42 percent of the presidential primary vote in New Hampshire. Sensing LBJ's political weakness, Robert Kennedy joined the race—on a similarly antiwar platform—to secure the nomination ahead of the sitting president four days later. Previously steadfast supporters of Johnson's efforts in Vietnam shifted their position to outright opposition in the aftermath of Tet. During a tense meeting with Walt Rostow, Dean Acheson told the national security adviser “to tell the president—and you tell him in precisely these words—that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass.”
162
During a meeting of the so-called Wise Men—establishment types like Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and Charles Bohlen—on March 25, each member counseled the president to disengage from Vietnam. After the meeting, Rostow wrote mournfully, “The American Establishment is dead.”
163
The logic of NSC-68 had been given its last rites. On March 31, President Johnson announced a unilateral restriction on the U.S. bombing, called for substantive peace negotiations, and added, finally, that he would not seek a second elected term in office.

The remainder of Nitze's service to the Johnson administration consisted largely of opposing Clifford's efforts to concede too much to North Vietnam in the search for peace. President Johnson had appointed Averell Harriman to lead peace negotiations with North Vietnam in Paris beginning May 1. Both Clifford and Harriman wanted the president to order further restrictions on the bombing to facilitate discussions. Nitze joined Rostow in arguing strongly to the contrary. “I was convinced,” Nitze wrote, “that we would achieve nothing in Paris that was not won on the battlefield.”
164
And so Nitze's peculiar relationship with the Vietnam War continued right to the end of the Johnson administration. Advocates of escalation had always spoken the language of NSC-68, the hallowed text of Cold War interventionism. Yet Nitze was as indecisive in person as he was unambiguous on the page. Some conflicts cannot be refracted through a crystalline doctrine, offering a clear path to success. His scattershot take on Vietnam reflected this dilemma. Nitze refused to connect the amped-up language of NSC-68—a theory designed to guide the United States through the Cold War—to any foreign-policy misadventure that followed.

Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey—Johnson's vice president, who fended off Eugene McCarthy's challenge following Robert Kennedy's assassination in June—in the general election of November 1968. Nitze yearned for a job in the new administration, but he had gathered too many enemies on the left and the right during the 1960s to make him a viable choice. Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, sounded out senators from both sides of the political aisle on their willingness to confirm Nitze to an appropriate second-tier position. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 GOP presidential candidate, said no way. He blamed Nitze, unfairly, for the Democratic Party's success during the election in portraying him as unhinged and quick on the trigger. Laird asked Senator Fulbright his thoughts on the same question, particularly in regard to Nitze becoming U.S. ambassador to West Germany. “My comment is that Nitze is an imperialist at heart,” replied Fulbright, “and would not be a good person to support U.S. troop withdrawals and, therefore, might be a good ambassador to Mali or some other equivalent position—but not Bonn.”
165

Congenitally incapable of sitting around in a funk, in the spring of 1969 Nitze established a pressure group with Dean Acheson. The Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy lobbied for the continued development of Safeguard, a missile defense program that would allow the United States to shoot down incoming Soviet ballistic missiles. In the mood to reassert itself after being made peripheral through the Americanization of the Vietnam War, Congress had threatened to cut off funding for the program. Nitze was aghast that sore feelings about Vietnam might be allowed to imperil America's defensive capabilities. He hired three of Albert Wohlstetter's most talented graduate students at the University of Chicago to assist his lobbying efforts: Richard Perle, Peter Wilson, and Paul Wolfowitz.
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They combined well and Safeguard was spared by one vote in the Senate in August 1969. Thereafter Nitze's team remained united in their opposition to defense cuts and any needless kowtowing to the Soviet Union. They began sketching a new strategic agenda for the next generation. When a year later Kennan met with Nitze in Washington, D.C., he found him “as serious as ever about the mathematics of destruction.”
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7

METTERNICH REDUX

HENRY KISSINGER

Henry was too tricky to get along with—nobody in the U.S. government liked him at all because he tricked and deceived everybody.

—PAUL NITZE

Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has.

—GEORGE KENNAN

By the fall of 1967, Robert McNamara was absolutely certain that the Americanization of the Vietnam War had been a mistake. Determined to halt a debacle that was largely of his own making, the secretary of defense urged Lyndon Johnson to appoint Henry Kissinger to lead third-party negotiations to end the conflict. Kissinger was a noted scholar and public intellectual, the author of acclaimed books on nuclear strategy and the Congress of Vienna, a Harvard professor with a fierce ambition for government service. McNamara reasoned that Kissinger's deliberative style, moderation, and varied international connections made him the ideal person to move negotiations forward. On September 12, President Johnson's advisers gathered to consider McNamara's suggestion. Secretary of State Dean Rusk endorsed Kissinger's “trustworthiness and character,” noting that his centrist politics and seemingly orthodox Cold War views means that he is “basically for us.” The hawkish Walt Rostow conceded that Kissinger was a “good analyst” but worried that “he may go a little soft when you get down to the crunch.”
1

McNamara won the argument—for the last time in the Johnson administration—and Kissinger began meeting in Paris with two French intermediaries with Hanoi connections, Herbert Marcovich and Raymond Aubrac, through September and October. The negotiations—code-named “Pennsylvania”—foundered on Hanoi's reluctance to talk until the United States stopped bombing North Vietnam. While McNamara lauded Kissinger as “a very shrewd negotiator … the best I have seen in my seven years,” Johnson grew increasingly impatient as the weeks passed.
2
During a tense telephone conversation in which the president addressed Kissinger as “Professor Schlesinger,” LBJ issued a blunt final warning in the style of Al Capone: “I'm going to give it one more try,” said Johnson, “and if that doesn't work I'm going to come up to Cambridge and cut off your balls.”
3

The channel quietly expired late in 1967 (though the president declined to carry out his threat). Kissinger drew at least two conclusions from this dismal affair. First, he needed to serve a president who trusted his judgment and was willing to give his diplomacy some time to work. Second, he would boost his prospects of securing a powerful position in the next administration if both major parties viewed him as a potential appointment. Having previously worked for the centrist Republican Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger turned swiftly to advise the victorious Nixon campaign after Rockefeller was defeated in the summer of 1968. His contact was Richard Allen, a thirty-two-year-old member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University whom Nixon had appointed his principal foreign-policy aide. Allen and Kissinger worked together on the Vietnam platform plank. Allen was sufficiently impressed to invite Kissinger to join Nixon's foreign-policy advisory board.