Paul H. Nitze, Missile Treaty Negotiator and Cold War Strategist, Dies at 97

New York Times ^ | October 21, 2004 | MARILYN BERGER

[OESY]

Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider spanned the era from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and helped shape America's cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, died Tuesday night at his home in Washington. He was 97.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Elisabeth Scott Porter.

From the beginning of the nuclear age, whether in government or out, Mr. Nitze urged successive American presidents to take measures against what he saw as the Soviet drive to overwhelm the United States through the force of arms. Yet he may be best remembered for his conciliatory role in efforts to achieve two major arms agreements with the Soviet Union.

In one, he was successful in negotiating an agreement that eliminated intermediate-range missiles from Europe. In the other, he hoped to cap his long career with a so-called grand compromise in 1988 that would have severely circumscribed work on President Reagan's cherished strategic missile defense initiative in exchange for deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both superpowers. His efforts foundered when the negotiators ran out of time as the Reagan administration came to an end.

In a now legendary moment of the cold war, Mr. Nitze undertook a bold but unsuccessful personal effort to achieve an earlier arms agreement with the Russians. In 1982, acting on his own and, some say, superseding his instructions, Mr. Nitze took a walk with his Soviet counterpart in the Jura Mountains, where he tried to strike a bargain on a package dealing with intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

In that episode - which later became the subject of the Broadway play "A Walk in the Woods" by Lee Blessing - Mr. Nitze tried to cut through the bureaucratic tangle but was thwarted when both Moscow and Washington repudiated the agreement.

Mr. Nitze (pronounced NITS-uh) refused an appointment in the first Bush administration as ambassador at large emeritus, saying it would leave him with no clear responsibilities. He retired to an office at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University - a school that was named for him in 1989 - where he continued to write articles in a continuing attempt to influence policy.

With that, his long career in government came to an end, a career that began in 1940 with a telegram that said, "Be in Washington Monday, Forrestal."

The summons from James V. Forrestal, then a special assistant at the White House, lured Mr. Nitze from the lucrative confines of Wall Street to the first of many assignments in government that involved him in the supply of the Allies for the war effort, a survey of the impact of the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, the feeding of the hungry of war-ravaged Europe, the creation of the Marshall Plan and crises in Iran and Berlin.

In the aftermath of World War II, Mr. Nitze became part of the remarkable group of public servants - George F. Kennan, Charles E. Bohlen, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy - that coalesced around Dean Acheson to develop foreign political and military policy as the United States took its place as a major world power.

He was a senior State Department official in the Truman administration, an assistant defense secretary in the Kennedy administration, and Navy secretary and later deputy defense secretary in the Johnson administration.

By the time he became one of the chief negotiators on strategic weapons, Mr. Nitze had accumulated more experience in national security affairs than anyone else of his time, to the point that his critics began to think that he believed he had a monopoly on understanding the political uses of nuclear weapons.

Postwar Policy Framework

Ever since 1950, when as head of the policy planning staff of the State Department he was the principal author of a study on the Soviet threat, Mr. Nitze took a dark view of Soviet intentions, seeing in the Kremlin a drive for world hegemony.

The study, known as N.S.C.-68, conceived of deterrence in military rather than diplomatic terms, warned against sole reliance on the nuclear deterrent and urged a buildup of conventional forces.

Its precepts became a cornerstone of American policy. In succeeding years, when the United States nuclear monopoly was broken, Mr. Nitze warned regularly that the Soviet Union was trying to achieve preponderant nuclear strength as a tool of blackmail or, in the worst case, to win an all-out war.

Later, when Mr. Nitze took his walk in the woods near Geneva to work out an arms deal, he confounded his critics, who considered him too hard-line because of his pessimistic views of the Russians.

A man of intimidating intellect, Mr. Nitze could be warm and affectionate or cerebral and brittle. He was a formidable bureaucrat with a brilliant mind and a persuasive pen. Out of government- as he was during the Carter administration- he was an equally effective critic, as he showed in the late 1970's as the mastermind of the opposition to the second strategic arms limitation agreement. He used complicated charts and computer printouts to warn that the treaty would lock the United States into permanent strategic inferiority.

Despite that vigorous opposition, once Mr. Nitze was back in government he urged President Reagan to comply with the terms of the treaty, even though it was never ratified, and to try to reach a better agreement with Moscow.

Among his colleagues there were those who said Mr. Nitze was so embittered at being excluded from the Carter administration that he could not assess the treaty dispassionately. He had too often been passed over for the major jobs, always on tap but never on top, as his old neighbor James Reston once wrote.

He always seemed too conservative for the liberal administrations and too liberal for the conservative ones. In an interview in which he looked back at his long career in government, Mr. Nitze acknowledged that it was one of his life's major disappointments that he had never been appointed to a cabinet-level position - as secretary of state or defense, or as director of central intelligence.

"I sometimes think I would have liked to be secretary of agriculture," he said with a rueful chuckle.

While his considerable expertise was in political-military affairs, his little joke was not far off the mark, and in his later years he tried to get the country to deal with environmental problems. For years, in addition to homes in Washington, Northeast Harbor, Me., and Aspen, Colo., he maintained a 1,920-acre working farm in Maryland on the banks of the Potomac, where he kept pigs and cattle and grew corn.

It was there that he rode horses, sailed along the Potomac and practiced the piano in a lifelong endeavor to understand, as one friend said, why Bach sounds like Bach.

A Confirmed Pessimist

For all that good life, Mr. Nitze - handsome with a full head of white hair and still athletic and trim in his later years, well-educated, intelligent and wealthy - remained a confirmed pessimist, having been deeply affected by seeing at first hand the outbreak of the two world wars.

Paul Henry Nitze was born on Jan. 16, 1907, in Amherst, Mass., where his father, one of the world's leading philologists, was a professor of Romance languages. The Nitze family did not live on a professor's salary, though. Mr. Nitze explained that "both my grandparents did very well." During his childhood there were summers in Europe, mainly in Germany, and the family was in the Tyrol in 1914 when World War I broke out.

Mr. Nitze spent much of his boyhood in Chicago. His father taught at the university, and he attended experimental schools before going on to Hotchkiss and Harvard. Generally a good student, he said: "I distinguished myself by getting the lowest mark ever given at Harvard, a zero, in a course on the history of economic thought. The most beautiful girl suggested that I go down to Newport for the weekend on the day of the final exam."

The zero left no permanent economic scar, for Nitze got rich in Wall Street despite the Depression, first at Dillon Read & Company and then in his own firm. He made one fortune from a company he started with other investors, known as the U.S. Vitamin and Pharmaceutical Company. Another fortune came from real estate investments in Aspen. In 1932 he married Phyllis Pratt, whose grandfather was a founder of the Standard Oil Company of New York and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Mrs. Nitze died in June 1987.

In 1993 he married Elisabeth Porter. She survives him, as do his four children: Heidi Nitze and Peter, both of New York; William, of Washington, and Phyllis Anina Nitze Moriarty of Boston; a stepdaughter, Erin Porter, of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia; 11 grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

There will be a memorial service at 11 a.m. Saturday in the National Cathedral in Washington, followed by a reception at the Metropolitan Club, 1700 H Street NW, Washington. Burial will be private.

Earlier this year, in one of his last public appearances, Mr. Nitze was present in Maine at the christening of a Navy guided-missile destroyer bearing his name, only the eighth time the Navy has named a warship for a living person.

Mr. Nitze was called to Washington by Mr. Forrestal - then an assistant to President Roosevelt - who had been president of Dillon Read, where Mr. Nitze had been a vice president.

It was 1940 and Mr. Nitze, who had seen Hitler during a visit to Germany, opposed United States entry into the war. But he quickly became active in the American war effort. He helped draft the Selective Service Act and, in 1942, became chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare.

Subsequently he became director of foreign procurement and development for the Foreign Economic Administration. He was vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a study that years later caused him to question United States bombing strategy in Vietnam. After the war he headed the billion-dollar global relief program.

In 1950, during the Truman administration, he succeeded George F. Kennan as head of the State Department's policy planning staff. It was then that Mr. Nitze started making his mark as a political-military strategist whose dark view of the Russians surpassed those of Mr. Kennan and Mr. Bohlen, the nation's leading experts on the Soviet Union. Mr. Kennan found the language of N.S.C.-68 to be dangerously melodramatic and unhelpful.

Seven years later, although he was out of favor during the Eisenhower administration, Mr. Nitze was appointed to the presidential committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither that called for nationwide fallout shelters and warned of a "missile gap" that eventually proved to be illusory.

Mr. Nitze was a Democrat who changed parties to protest Roosevelt's effort to pack the Supreme Court. He returned to the fold at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration. Squeezed out of office because of his association with Mr. Acheson and discouraged at being on the outside, Mr. Nitze went back to his farm and, at the suggestion of his wife, who wanted to take his mind off his troubles, entered a horse race at the Charles County fair. When he won, he acknowledged, at least to himself, his longing for recognition.

President Kennedy offered Mr. Nitze several jobs and gave him 30 seconds to decide which one he wanted. He chose deputy defense secretary, but did not get the post until seven years later. In the intervening years he was an assistant secretary in the Pentagon and then secretary of the Navy.

When President Nixon appointed Mr. Nitze to the United States delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union, he played an important role in negotiating the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, but he resigned in 1974, charging that the "depressing reality of the traumatic events" related to Watergate was making the administration too eager to cut a deal with the Russians.

As an early supporter of Jimmy Carter, Mr. Nitze expected that he would finally get a major appointment and was bitterly disappointed when he was passed over once again. His views were too hawkish for the liberal foreign policy that President Carter wanted to pursue.

Mr. Nitze mounted a spirited - some called it venomous - opposition to the confirmation of one of his old colleagues, Paul C. Warnke, as Mr. Carter's strategic arms negotiator, incurring the wrath of old friends who labeled him an ideologue.

Critic of Carter Arms Pact

When Mr. Warnke was confirmed and the Carter administration achieved a second strategic arms limitation treaty, Mr. Nitze became its most vocal and effective critic, the intellectual guru for the Committee on the Present Danger in its campaign against the agreement. It was never ratified.

Mr. Nitze's hard line toward Moscow found greater resonance with the next president, Ronald Reagan, who put him in charge of the United States delegation to the talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons. His mandate was to negotiate the so-called zero-zero option by which the United States would forgo future American deployment of new missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would remove the missiles it had targeted on Western Europe.

The two sides were far apart when Mr. Nitze went on the now famous walk in the woods to draw the Russians into a package deal. When the proposal was rejected by both sides, Mr. Nitze, instead of being reprimanded, was appointed special adviser to the president on arms control matters in 1984.

Though the Soviet Union rejected the zero-zero option, a few years later it accepted a more comprehensive arrangement, the so-called double zero agreement that limited medium-range missiles in Europe and shorter-range missiles as well. That agreement was signed on Dec. 8, 1987.

In November 1985, Mr. Reagan awarded Mr. Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet that same year Mr. Nitze once again seemed to be going out on his own to raise serious questions about Mr. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. While insisting that he favored the program, informally known as Star Wars, he laid down such stringent terms for its acceptability that he seemed to be torpedoing it from the start, in effect handing useful arguments to its opponents.

At the same time, he was seeking to make a deal that would limit the elaborate new antimissile system in exchange for cuts in offensive weapons, a two-pronged ploy that once again provided evidence of his cunning and skill as a negotiator, another example of a talent that contributed to a lifetime of survival in Washington.

"Some people say there are two policies in the executive branch," he said one day as he sat in his office on the seventh floor of the State Department just before his 79th birthday. "One is mine and the other is the president's, which is marginally so. Some of the things I've said are different from what the president has said, but all the things I have said have been approved by the president."

[OESY]

Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose
roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider helped shape
America’s cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, was 97.

[Ken522]

So Paul Nitze was VP of Dillon Read?

[Fedora]

Squeezed out of office because of his association with Mr. Acheson

As well he should have been.