Worldmaking (53 page)

Nitze's view of Eisenhower was less favorable. He had actually supported Eisenhower through the primary campaign—having remained a registered Republican through his service to the Truman administration—but Nitze switched allegiances following the Republican National Convention in Chicago in July 1952. Nitze watched in disgust as one speaker after another lambasted the Truman administration for a litany of supposed misdeeds: losing China; firing General MacArthur, one of the nation's greatest patriots; harboring communists; engaging in corruption; and so on and so forth. Eisenhower, who should have known better, was guilty of some of the worst slurs. Nitze recalled that “he said the most outrageous things that I was fully persuaded that he knew to be untrue or else he was the stupidest man in the world. I couldn't imagine he was that stupid, therefore I came to the conclusion that he was basically a fraud.” Eisenhower's acceptance speech accused the Truman administration of corruption and malfeasance. “To have Eisenhower call [Democrats] a bunch of crooks, carpetbaggers, and so forth,” Nitze fumed, “was absolutely the worst kind of demagoguery.”
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Eisenhower, who had served an unhappy tenure as president of Columbia University, was generally skeptical of the utility of hiring intellectuals to advise politicians. Responding to an aide's proposal that a group of academics might be convened to review U.S. nuclear policy, Eisenhower replied that he did not want a “lot of long-haired professors” to examine matters of such national significance, exclaiming, “What the hell do they know about it?”
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In 1954, Eisenhower described the “intellectual” acidly as “a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”
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Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party's Princeton-educated, pointy-headed candidate—and a Unitarian, to boot—may well have been Eisenhower's intended target. The columnist Stewart Alsop coined the word “egghead” to categorize the type—of bulging cerebra—who swooned at Stevenson's erudition. Academic luminaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., drafted Stevenson's speeches, which were peppered with classical allusions and quotations from Shakespeare.
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George Kennan, delighted to have the chance to vote for a politician who did not resemble an irredeemable philistine, was charmed and offered Stevenson his support. But Stevenson himself recognized that his intellectual disposition, and devoted following among the nation's intelligentsia, was unlikely to provide a real advantage. Responding favorably to one of Stevenson's elegantly crafted speeches, a campaign supporter reportedly gushed, “Good for you, Governor, you're the thinking man's candidate!” “Thanks,” replied Stevenson, “but I need a majority to win.”
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And so it turned out. Eisenhower won with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson's 89. As a consolation prize, which distilled both his virtues and his predicament, Stevenson was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Paul Nitze was disappointed at the outcome of the election, but he remained hopeful that his advisory services might be retained. To this end Nitze, in collaboration with others, including Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Nash, drafted a long paper titled “Reexamination of United States Programs for National Security,” which was presented to the National Security Council as NSC-141 on President Truman's last day in the White House. The paper called for a vast buildup of nonnuclear forces to allow the United States to properly meet the range of challenges delineated in NSC-68. The report placed no price tag on its recommendations, which amounted to a significant expansion of a military budget that had already quadrupled over three years. But the report made clear the severity of the challenges that lay ahead:

A capability for varied and flexible application of our striking power is essential both because of the wide variety of situations which may confront us and because such a capability offers the best chance to convince the Soviets that they cannot hope to destroy our striking power by surprise attack.
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Nitze's valedictory advice to the Eisenhower administration was uncompromising: continue implementing the expansionary logic of NSC-68, funding nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities at ever-increasing levels, or invite Soviet aggression. “Flexibility” in response was the key word, a capability that would come at a substantial price.

*   *   *

It all started so promisingly. President Eisenhower's inaugural address could have been filched from NSC-68, declining as it did to impose any hierarchy of interest upon a concept as pure as freedom. “Conceiving the defense of freedom, like freedom itself, to be one and indivisible,” Eisenhower said, “we hold all continents and peoples in equal regard and honor. We reject any insinuation that one race or another, one people or another, is in any sense inferior or expendable.” Uttering a sentiment that chimed melodically with Nitze's worldview, and jarred discordantly with Kennan's, Eisenhower reinforced the universalism of his inaugural address six months later: “As there is no weapon too small, no arena too remote, to be ignored, there is no free nation too humble to be forgotten.”
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These sentiments cheered Nitze, but they were not matched by the necessary corollary: increased defense spending. In fact, Eisenhower had told Senator Robert Taft, his main challenger throughout the Republican primaries, that he planned to cut $5 billion from the Truman defense budget in 1954—the reverse of what Nitze had recommended in NSC-68 and NSC-141. Indeed, Eisenhower was as good as his word, cutting the defense budget from $41.3 billion to $36 billion in his first year in office, taking the largest share from the Air Force—as any good soldier should. Eisenhower's public stance was that America's foreign-policy interests were theoretically limitless. Privately, he opposed increasing the defense budget “excessively under the impulse of fear,” which “could, in the long-run, defeat our purposes by damaging the growth of our economy and eventually forcing it into regimented controls.”
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As Nitze was sympathetic to such government controls—believing that living standards could stand to fall and taxes could certainly rise, in the pursuit of an unchallengeable military machine—he did not look kindly upon the Eisenhower administration's defense policies.

Prior to assuming office, Eisenhower actually considered appointing Nitze as his secretary of defense. John Foster Dulles talked him out of this idea, observing that it was unwise to appoint “an Acheson man” to such an important post, particularly as Eisenhower's hawkish running mate, Richard Nixon, had described Acheson as the “red dean of the cowardly college of containment.”
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But Eisenhower had been impressed by Nitze's anti-Soviet mettle and remained keen to find a place for him in his administration.

To this end the president drafted Nitze to advise the administration on how to respond to Stalin's death in March 1953. Did the dictator's demise present any opportunities for U.S.-Soviet rapprochement? If so, how might they be pursued without appearing weak? Nitze's advisory role began inauspiciously when he walked into the president's quarters midway through a change of outfit: “I caught him standing in nothing but his undershorts. His wife Mamie, who was sitting in a chair near the window, grinned, but the President flushed with annoyance … Thus ended my only claim to intimacy with Dwight Eisenhower.”
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Their relationship had not started well, but Nitze made a substantial contribution to the president's speech, advising Eisenhower to convey optimism but to temper this with a clear statement of U.S.-Soviet disagreements. Only if these differences were bridged could a truly meaningful dialogue with Moscow commence. Titled “The Chance for Peace,” Eisenhower's speech offered a cautiously hopeful response to Stalin's death that was reported favorably in
Pravda
and
The New York Times
. Nitze had proved his worth to the new president.

As a reward, Nitze was finally offered a job—assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—in June 1953. But the
Washington Times Herald
, a conservative paper sympathetic to Senator Joe McCarthy, made a devastating intervention. It ran a story that read: “Paul H. Nitze, 46 and wealthy, one of the principal shapers of the European recovery plan, is the latest Truman-Acheson lieutenant contemplated for retention in a powerful position under the Eisenhower administration.” The article impugned Nitze “for pouring billions into Europe” through which “enormous profits were reaped by Wall Street.” The
Times Herald
had characterized Nitze as a moneyed, liberal northeasterner out for personal gain—sufficient to torpedo his prospects. Eisenhower's Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson informed Nitze that a change in the political climate made his position no longer tenable. Appalled, though not particularly surprised, that the administration had caved to a piece of defamatory reporting, Nitze replied, “Very well, Mr. Secretary. I didn't ask for this job.”
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It is likely that Nitze would have resigned from the administration regardless, for there was much in Eisenhower's presidency that he disagreed with. The president and his hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, viewed the Soviet threat in similar terms to those presented in NSC-68: Moscow's expansionary instincts were insatiable and wholly nefarious. Indeed, Dulles went further than Nitze (and much further than Kennan), arguing that “liberation” should replace “containment” as America's default goal. But the administration's bark turned out to be worse than its bite. President Eisenhower's frugality made sure of that. At the Council on Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954, Dulles presented the logical conclusion of espousing strong anticommunism on the cheap. Recounting the substance of a meeting called to survey the Eisenhower administration's first year in office, Dulles said, “The President and his advisers, as represented by the National Security Council, had to take some basic policy decisions. This has been done. The basic decision was to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.”

Nitze sat next to the banker and diplomat—and later John F. Kennedy's treasury secretary—Douglas Dillon during Dulles's speech. He recalled, “We looked at each other in amazement as his words sank in.”
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Dulles had unveiled the policy of “massive retaliation,” whereby the United States seemed to promise to confront all gradations of Soviet provocation—from meddling in a civil war in Congo to invading West Germany—with a massive American nuclear response. George Kennan was even more horrified, writing to Adlai Stevenson that “if we were to attempt to use the atomic bomb because—let us say—Italy might go communist in an election, we would be taking upon ourselves a most hideous moral responsibility for the sake of an extremely questionable issue. I cannot believe that our allies would bear with us in such an act of petulance.”
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Eisenhower and Dulles disagreed, viewing massive retaliation as the best way to keep Moscow in check at minimal financial cost.

Nitze was relieved to discover that massive retaliation was merely the scariest hollow threat in history. In fact, Dulles allegedly told Nitze and Kennan, in separate meetings, that “rollback,” “liberation,” and “massive retaliation” were political slogans designed to distinguish Eisenhower from his much-maligned predecessor and they shouldn't be taken too seriously. The truth of the matter was that Eisenhower's foreign policies were not so different from Harry Truman's. In October 1953, for example, Eisenhower approved NSC 162/2, which affirmed many of NSC-68's precepts—though not those that vastly increased the defense budget. As Nitze himself observed, “By 1955 it became clear that Foster's doctrine of massive retaliation was merely a declaratory policy, while our action policy was graduated deterrence.”
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Of course, George Kennan viewed both Nitze's and Dulles's strategic approaches as alarmist and needlessly provocative. He continued to lick his wounds, finding some solace in the fact that “the American people … would certainly not know brilliant and perceptive diplomacy if they saw it.”
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Kennan did not like the substance of Eisenhower's foreign policies, but he had played a significant role in devising one of the president's major innovations: CIA covert action in the Third World. When designing his containment doctrine in the mid-1940s, Kennan had emphasized the merits of political warfare, covert action, and espionage—the dark arts of international relations—as Cold War weapons. Because Kennan's version of containment viewed war against the Soviet Union as inconceivable except as a last resort, deploying the talents of the CIA, as a coercive and supposedly undetectable tool, was greatly appealing. Kennan expended a lot of effort during the Truman years arguing first for the creation of the CIA, and second that it be funded more generously and deployed more frequently. So if a nation was susceptible to communist-inclined revolution—whether through force of arms or at the ballot box—America should neutralize this threat by funding Western-inclined individuals and groupings, while surreptitiously undermining their opponents, using whatever worked.

The Eisenhower administration deployed this rationale in extremis. It used the CIA to orchestrate the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the independent-minded, democratically elected prime minister of Iran who had irritated the United States and United Kingdom by nationalizing British oil interests in Iran and displaying a clear preference for socialistic solutions to endemic poverty in Iran. But the Iranian prime minister was no communist—not that this mattered much to Eisenhower, Dulles, and Winston Churchill. The CIA, led by Allen Dulles, John Foster's brother, began plotting Mossadegh's overthrow in the fall of 1952. The following summer the CIA hired a large group of Iranians to behave thuggishly—smashing windows and monuments, starting fights, and the like—while chanting pro-Mossadegh slogans. Counterdemonstrations were also organized, creating what the CIA viewed as the perfect storm of chaos and instability—optimal conditions for a coup d'état.