Arms and the Man

By Strobe Talbott

He was a canny and successful Wall Street investment banker while still in his 20s, a yuppie before his time. But in 1937, at the age of 30, Paul Nitze experienced a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion. He took a leave from the firm of Dillon, Read & Co. to tour his family's ancestral homeland, Germany. Deeply disturbed by what he saw of Adolf Hitler's rule, he returned home -- but not to the world of high finance and private wealth. Instead, he went back to his alma mater, Harvard, to study history, sociology and philosophy: "There were big issues, big questions, big problems in the world. $ I wanted to come to terms with them. I couldn't do that making money."

So Nitze threw himself into the great debates of the past half-century over how America should use its power and cope with its enemies. He is one of the last of a breed of patrician policymakers who, immediately after World War II, helped rebuild Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and defend it by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And last week Nitze, who turns 81 in January, hovered in the background like the spirit of summits past.

With his full head of silver hair, his impeccably tailored pinstripe suits and his still trim figure, he certainly looked the part of the quintessential elder statesman. But he is no mere ornament in this, the seventh of the Administrations he has served. "I've advised every President since Roosevelt," said Nitze last week. "And all, to some extent, have sought and taken that advice." That pointedly includes Ronald Reagan. As special adviser to the President and Secretary of State for Arms Control, Nitze played a key, sometimes controversial part in crafting last week's treaty on intermediate- range nuclear forces (INF). He was chairman of the high-level American "working group" on arms control during the summit. And he is embroiled in a fierce struggle to bring about a much more ambitious strategic-arms agreement next year.

Nitze has devoted much of his life to public service in part because he could afford to. He came from a well-to-do family, and his wife of 54 1/2 years, Phyllis, who died in June, was an heiress of the Standard Oil fortune. In addition to having a few silver spoons come his way, he had something of a Midas touch. He was a wunderkind of the investment-banking world in the 1930s -- "the last man hired on Wall Street before the Crash," he says with a wry smile -- and later helped develop the Aspen, Colo., resort where he plans to take some of his eleven grandchildren skiing in two weeks. (Nitze has two sons and two daughters; there is also one great-grandchild so far, but at age three he is not yet up to the intermediate slopes that Nitze favors.) On his 1,900-acre farm in Maryland, which produces corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle, pigs and sheep, he keeps 16 horses and rides on weekends. He owns a summer house on an island in Maine, where he played tennis almost every day last August. Serious tennis. Once, a much younger man whom Nitze had just trounced in singles asked him how he kept so fit at his age. "My body," he replied, "does what I tell it to."

When his mind told him to go back to Harvard nearly 50 years ago, he threw himself into the study of the piano and developed an enduring passion for Bach. For years afterward he would relax by playing the partitas. He found himself fascinated by such scholars as the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian emigre who saw ominous parallels between Nazism and Soviet Communism. Nitze shared that lesson with his mentor, Dillon, Read's president James Forrestal, who later became the nation's first -- and most obsessively anti- Communist -- Secretary of Defense. Forrestal brought Nitze to Washington to work for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Ronald Reagan played George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American that year, and Mikhail Gorbachev was nine years old.

In 1946, as part of a group of American observers who stood in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nitze contemplated the implications of the atom bomb for the postwar world. His conclusion: once the Soviets got their own bomb, they might use it as an instrument of political intimidation and perhaps of war; to deter Soviet aggression, the U.S. would have to build up its own conventional and nuclear military strength. That has been the nub of his message to his countrymen ever since.

In March 1983 Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world." Harsh words, but no harsher than what Nitze said in 1950 in a report to Harry Truman called National Security Council Directive No. 68, one of the seminal documents of the cold war ("The Kremlin is inescapably militant"). Nitze supervised the preparation of NSC-68 as director of the State Department's policy planning staff. His desk was only a conference room away from that of his friend and boss, Secretary of State Dean Acheson. His office in Foggy Bottom today, its walls decorated with memorabilia and impressionist art, is almost as close to George Shultz's.

Another Reagan theme -- that the U.S. is losing the arms race with the Soviet Union and that the Kremlin could wage a pre-emptive attack against the U.S. -- is one that Nitze has been sounding for more than 30 years. Much of his life has been a Paul Revere's ride to alert America that the Russians are coming. NSC-68 predicted that by 1954 the Soviets would have enough nuclear- armed bombers to "seriously damage this country" by striking "swiftly and with stealth." These were more than just words to Nitze. At his Maryland farm there is a bomb shelter, which for years he kept stocked with emergency provisions.

In 1957 Nitze was an author of the so-called Gaither report to Dwight Eisenhower, which warned that within two years the Soviets would be able to carry out a "disarming attack" against "our deterrent power." That alarm helped John F. Kennedy proclaim the "missile gap" in his campaign against Richard Nixon. Nitze, an adviser to Kennedy, was rewarded with a Pentagon appointment, first as an Assistant Secretary of Defense, then as Secretary of the Navy. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, he was at the heart of the action as a member of J.F.K.'s ad hoc Executive committee.

Despite his emphasis on the growing military threat from Moscow, Nitze has long believed that "working the problem" of the Soviet challenge also requires dogged and imaginative diplomacy. As a result, he has occasionally aroused the suspicion and enmity of the right. The McCarthyite press attacked him in the early '50s because of his association with the "Red Dean," Acheson, and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond tried, in vain, to prevent his confirmation to the Navy job a decade later.

Centrist Republicans, however, regarded Nitze -- a Democrat since 1952 -- as an asset to bipartisan foreign policy. In 1969 Nixon personally asked Nitze to help launch the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. He played a key part in negotiating the SALT I treaty of 1972 and worked on SALT II until he resigned in 1974, accusing Nixon of making too many concessions for the sake of an agreement that might save his embattled presidency from the effects of the Watergate scandal.

Nitze was an early supporter of Jimmy Carter for President. But their relationship turned sour when Nitze gave Carter a hair-raising briefing on the Soviet threat in Plains, Ga., in July 1976. Recalling that meeting, the former President told TIME, "Nitze was typically know-it-all. He was arrogant and inflexible. His own ideas were sacred to him. He didn't seem to listen to others, and he had a doomsday approach." Carter barred him from consideration for a senior post.

Nitze seemed to take his revenge against his former friends and colleagues who fared better in the new Administration. One was Paul Warnke, who had worked closely with Nitze in the Pentagon during Lyndon Johnson's presidency. When Warnke was nominated to be Carter's chief arms-control negotiator, Nitze savaged him in congressional testimony, impugning his integrity and patriotism. In 1979, as a founder and leading spokesman for the Committee on the Present Danger, Nitze did more than any other single individual to block ratification of the SALT II treaty, although today Nitze says he was merely trying to promote a "dialogue on the pros and cons of the treaty."

Some of Nitze's longtime acquaintances see a pattern to what might seem like vindictive behavior. Says Ralph Earle, a lawyer who worked with Nitze in the Pentagon -- and against him during the battle over SALT II: "When he is an insider, he is part of the solution to the challenge of arms control; when he is an outsider, he is part of the problem -- an implacable obstructionist." Warnke argues that Nitze illustrates a corollary to Lord Acton's famous adage: "Power corrupts, but the loss of power corrupts absolutely." Nitze rejects and resents the charge: "On a number of occasions in my career I have quit jobs when I disagreed with policy. I'm not just interested in being part of the Government; I'm interested in the Government being right."

Nitze's opposition to SALT II earned him favor with the Reagan camp in 1980, and in the next year he was made chief negotiator for the INF talks, giving him an opportunity to become part of the solution again. A number of proponents of arms control hailed the appointment, including some who had felt the sting of Nitze's denunciatory passion. Predicted Warnke six years ago: "Paul Nitze will force this Administration to make progress in spite of itself."

Some of the more doctrinaire opponents of arms control in the Administration feared that Warnke might be right. Richard Perle, whom Nitze brought to Washington in the late '60s and who served as an Assistant Secretary of Defense until earlier this year, remarked, "Paul is an inveterate problem solver." He did not mean it as a compliment. Nitze, however, took it as one, and he has lived up to Perle's apprehensions.

In 1982 he embarked on one of the most extraordinary episodes of creative insubordination in the annals of diplomacy. He entered a covert and unauthorized negotiation-within-the-negotiation with his Soviet counterpart in the INF talks, Yuli Kvitsinsky. During a stroll in a forest outside Geneva, the famous "walk in the woods," they reached a tentative compromise. Back in Washington, Perle and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger led a successful campaign to repudiate the deal and reprimand Nitze.

When Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986, Nitze headed the U.S. delegation in an all-night negotiating session. It produced important breakthroughs in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), the Reagan Administration's attempt to improve on the much maligned SALT process. The encounter was, says Nitze, "one of the most exciting experiences of my life -- and potentially one of the most productive." Nitze believes a START agreement may be possible, perhaps in time to be signed at a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow next year -- but only if the U.S. is willing to accept some limits on the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.

Nitze's advocacy of compromise on SDI has exposed him once again to fire from right-wing Senators and to blasts from the conservative press. The attacks are eerily reminiscent of the ones against him in the early '50s and '60s, and they have been painful to the proud old hawk. "It's no fun and damned unfair being depicted as a giveaway artist," he confided to a colleague recently.

Reagan has grown wary of Nitze's desire to cut a deal on SDI, so much so that the President passed him over for the directorship of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency despite a recommendation from George Shultz. Even so, Nitze's principal opponents within the Administration, Weinberger and Perle, have resigned. That leaves Paul Nitze on the inside, and who knows? Perhaps next year there will be one more opportunity to "work the problem" of arms control, one more chance to be part of the spirit of a superpower summit.