Paul Nitze has died

WASHINGTON (AP) - Paul H. Nitze, a senior arms control adviser in the Reagan administration who served in various national security roles under eight presidents, is dead at 97.

Reports of his death late Tuesday were confirmed by the Navy Department, which Nitze once headed.

His long career, which began with success on Wall Street as a young investment banker, was capped last April in Bath, Maine, where Nitze witnessed from a wheelchair the christening of a warship bearing his name.

He smiled broadly as his wife, Leezee Porter, swung a champagne bottle against the destroyer's bow to the cheers of hundreds of onlookers. A band then broke into ``Anchors Aweigh'' and red, white and blue streamers and confetti shot into the air.

The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington was founded in 1943 by Nitze and the late former Secretary of State Christian Herter. Nitze was unable to attend the school's annual banquet last week, at which Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke in tribute to his long government service.

In 1957, Nitze conceived the idea of attaching a ``think tank'' to the school, which is e SAIS building near DuPont Circle here, which was named for Nitze and his first wife, Phyllis Pratt Nitze, in 1986.

Then, two years later, he offered to match any amount raised by SAIS to expand the school. The goal was reached in 1989, doubling the school's space with another building.

Nitze, a conservative Democrat, was a natural fit for Ronald Reagan's administration because they both opposed President Jimmy Carter's 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union.

Along with a handful of other prominent conservative Democrats, organized as the Committee on the Present Danger, they swung to Reagan as the Republican president made major inroads among Democrats who were convinced their party had drifted leftward.

Nitze had headed the policy planning office of the State Department in the Truman administration and took charge of negotiating reductions in intermediate range missiles with the Soviet Union in 1981 for Reagan, who had changed directions to support arms control accords.

The negotiations were marked by a ``walk in the woods'' near Vienna with the Soviet negotiator, Yuli Kvitsinsky, that produced a breakthrough but the treaty was not concluded at the time.

Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and author of a biography of Nitze in 1988, said he was ``an extraordinary and influential figure over a long period of time.''

``It was all the more remarkable because he operated at a level below the Cabinet and had a cumulative impact way beyond those who were secretary of state and secretary of defense,'' Talbott said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Nitze ``could be ferocious as an opponent on the outside when he was not in the government,'' said Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

The left cringed some, while eggheads from the think tank "turned toward Reagan," and so the left sought ever since to force this organization to the left and then further to the left.

This think tank runs the international affairs of the U.S.

As the A.F.L.-C.I.O. can pick up the phone and make things happen, so does the S.A.I.S.

A.F.L.-C.I.O. does it by force; S.A.I.S. does it by arrogance.

Between the C.S.I.S. (Center for Strategic and Internation Studies) and the S.A.I.S., you will find almost every "bow tie" and strained Radcliffe - Smith - Welsley smile that acidly burns a hole into an achievement by any conservative on international matters.

If President Bush seems forever intimidated by the liberal media's accusations of being "meanspirited," it is matched by his own cringing at the paperwork from the S.A.I.S. that accuses him of, effectively, butchery.

The inside the Beltway theory of Republicans whose administrations blow with the wind, is that they cannot live without "the center" of the S.A.I.S. and now the C.S.I.S., which they believe, represents the core of influential money.

You will find that both Democrat and Republican administrations, since Nixon, "trust" in the S.A.I.S. and the C.S.I.S. to establish the everyday bread and butter fare of international policy-making and implementation planning, and that both administrations' are populated by the "thinkers" chosen from these two organizations, with all lip service due The Rand and Ford and what's their names who fund P.B.S. foundations.

Even the Stalinist P.F.A.W. listens to the S.A.I.S. and C.S.I.S., because the money that flows into these think tanks, is from the same people who support the P.F.A.W., the A.C.L.U., the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Americans for Separation of Church and State, and the many other leftwing organizations funded by REPUBLICANS in the Congress along with the Democrats in the Congress, because the REPUBLICANS are sensitive to being labeled "meanspirited" and/or "non-partisan" and so the REPUBLICANS OK the funding ... for many leftwing and now extremist organizations founded by the incubation organs of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s center for legal resources (name of it, I can't recall right now.).

Etc.

A mess; the theory of Rove and others who were a constant thorn in the side of the Reagan Administration (I), with claims that "nobody can survive without inside Washington."

Well ... to that, I'd like to say again, that we don't need "inside Washington" especially in matters of State.

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