Worldmaking (54 page)

In August 1953, Mossadegh resigned under duress and the pro-American shah Reza Pahlavi took his place. The shah would remain in power until he was violently deposed by Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini in the Iranian Revolution of 1979—which had a much broader base of support than that of 1953. President Eisenhower's intervention was a success in that it showed that the CIA was entirely capable of toppling distasteful leaders in the right circumstances. But deposing Mossadegh and installing the shah was a strategic error—it led, among other things, to a vast increase in anti-American resentment in a volatile region. It was also remarkably callous and undemocratic. The CIA's actions in 1953 set a disturbing if seductive precedent, which encouraged illusions of consequence-free omniscience. A year later, the CIA intervened to depose Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, who had the temerity to pursue land reform policies that damaged the American multinational company United Fruit. Again a statist-inclined leader with broad popular support was deposed in the spurious name of anticommunism. The sanctity of democracy had been grievously damaged—not by the Soviet Union but by the United States. Kennan later described his role establishing the CIA's covert action capability as “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
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Nitze was nonplussed by the ouster of Mossadegh, whom he had met and liked in 1952. Following a series of meetings in the latter stages of the Truman administration, Nitze had concluded that the Iranian leader “was neither a Marxist nor a Communist. He was … a shrewd and tricky politician, but, in my view, far preferable to the Shah and his regime.”
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But NSC-68's overheated rhetoric—which vested large stakes in ignoring any leader or crisis incommodious to U.S. interests—appeared to justify covert actions such as those that deposed Mossadegh and Arbenz. Like “massive retaliation,” Nitze was a more fearsome prospect in theory than he was in reality. But other policymakers were not so queasy about following NSC-68's interventionist formula through to its logical conclusions. In deploying the CIA in Iran and Guatemala, Eisenhower and Dulles believed they were pursuing an unremarkable course of action—justified by framework precedents established by their predecessors. A State Department official named Joseph Jones captured this imperative when posing and answering the question “What indeed are the limits of United States foreign policy?” “The answer is that the limits of our foreign policy are on a distant and receding horizon; for many practical purposes they are what we think we can accomplish and what we think are necessary to accomplish at any given time.”
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In opposing President Eisenhower's policies, Nitze seemed not to realize that he was partly reneging on the logic of NSC-68, which rationalized open-ended responses to communist threats. Nitze would go on to voice opposition to a series of foreign-policy misadventures to which his writings actually lent sanction. George Kennan was shocked by the damage that his loosened boulder, containment, had wreaked on the mountain and valley below. NSC-68, meanwhile, was an avalanche. But Nitze refused to accept that his blueprint harmed America's ability to ascertain which threats were mortal and which were ignorable.

*   *   *

The presidential election of 1956 reprised the 1952 candidates with Eisenhower again trouncing Stevenson. George Kennan again lent his support to Stevenson, although he was generally unimpressed by the Democratic Party. “I found myself disgusted by everything about the Democratic convention,” Kennan wrote Nitze in September, “except Stevenson himself. The impression I get is that the only aspects of the Administration's performance that the Democratic professionals approve and do not intend to criticize are the conduct of foreign affairs and the security program. In these circumstances it seems obvious that the party has no need for anyone like myself at this juncture.”
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Kennan had expressed his ambivalence toward the Democratic Party in a speech for the Princeton Stevenson for President Committee earlier in the year. In the remarkable address, which must have met with a bemused response, Kennan observed that “I've never been able to believe that the Democrat Party has a monopoly or wisdom … I regard myself, actually, as a conservative.” What kept him in the Democratic fold was disgust “over the naked and undiluted materialism that is so rampant in our country today” and despair at the GOP's anti-intellectualism, exemplified by John Foster Dulles's simplistic Cold War shibboleths. In such bleak circumstances, Adlai Stevenson was the only national political leader possessed of sufficient “intellectual and moral conscience” to enable him to communicate hard truths: “to say to our people what ought to be said to them by their own government, which is not necessarily always what they would most like to hear.”
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It is safe to assume that Kennan's speech did not produce a flood of checks.

That Kennan disliked the Democratic Party's foreign-policy plank was unsurprising given that Nitze was one of its authors. Kennan had earlier conveyed his own foreign-policy preferences in a letter to Stevenson:

I am actually inclined to question the utility of the whole concept of “bipartisan foreign policy.” I wouldn't want to sponsor, or share responsibility … for, anything that Foster did, even if I were able to write the ticket. This particular administration may be justly criticized for smugness; for talking big and doing little; for acting in such a way as to frighten our friends and reassure our adversaries. One could talk about the grievous over-militarization of thought and statement.
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Stevenson wrote an appreciative note in return, but it was Nitze who commanded his attention. And Nitze disagreed with everything in Kennan's letter, except for the part that shunned bipartisanship. Nitze developed a close working relationship with Stevenson and advised him to attack the Eisenhower administration for complacency in the face of a
global
communist offensive that could not be deterred by brute nuclear force. In particular, Nitze wrote that the United States had to devote much more attention to the Third World, which he described as “a fertile field for communist exploitation.” Scores of nations had been freed from European colonial rule or were close to doing so. If this new generation of leaders were to embrace Marxism-Leninism, spurning the West, then “peace can be lost without a shot being fired.”
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Nitze advised the reticent and bookish Stevenson to attack the four-star general and architect of the D-day landings for being an irresolute Cold Warrior. While Stevenson could not carry it off against General Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy found electoral success with this approach four years later.

The problem with the activism of Nitze—the archetypal liberal Cold Warrior—was that ducking challenges was not an option, for the right wing was ever poised to attack and exploit any foreign-policy irresolution. In the aftermath of Stevenson's defeat, Nitze joined the Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), similar in broad purpose to a British shadow cabinet, alongside Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Galbraith recalled that the discussions on foreign policy, dominated by Nitze and Acheson, “were the true portents” of disasters to come. At each meeting, Nitze and Acheson would distribute a paper “attacking whatever John Foster Dulles had done in the preceding weeks. The attack was always for being too lenient toward Communism and the Soviet Union.” Galbraith found it disturbing that Nitze's and Acheson's perspectives were treated almost as holy writ:

Here, early and in miniature were the fatal politics of Vietnam. It was not that the decision was debated and the wrong decision taken; it was rather that there was no debate. The old liberal fear of being thought soft on Communism, the fear of being attacked by professional patriots and the knowledge of the political punishment that awaits any departure from the Establishment view … all united to eliminate discussion. Democracy has, as ever, its own forms of authoritarianism.”
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Nitze's NSC-68 had played a major role in shaping America's basic Cold War posture. Out of office, he was exerting comparable influence shaping the foreign-policy priorities of the Democratic Party. Having suffered scabrous McCarthyite attacks on the sincerity of his own anticommunism, Nitze was pleased to return fire on a Republican administration shirking the full spectrum of its Cold War responsibilities. Nitze was coming to believe that the Cold War would be won or lost in the underdeveloped world, in nations and regions dismissed by Kennan as inconsequential hinterlands. “Flexible response” to communist encroachments would become his mantra—a stick with which to beat Republicans. It is little wonder that Kennan declined Nitze's invitation to join him on the DAC, writing that “it is a tempting prospect—to merge one's efforts once again with so many other people after so many years of working alone—but sober reflection forces me to doubt that any very useful purpose would be served by my association with this Committee.”
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Nitze was given a further opportunity to assault the Eisenhower administration in 1957 when he was invited to join a committee, led by H. Rowan Gaither of the Ford Foundation, established to provide an independent assessment of national security policy. The NSC had convened the committee to report on whether the United States should embark on a large-scale civil defense program to mitigate the human costs of nuclear war, a course that Nitze viewed as imperative. The committee was composed largely of RAND analysts, including the Columbia University–trained nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, who firmly believed in the utility of nuclear deterrence and was deeply concerned by the consequences of the Soviet Union securing parity with the United States. Wohlstetter convinced Gaither to expand the committee's remit to examine American vulnerability to a Soviet preemptive nuclear attack. Gaither in turn hired Nitze as a consultant, who found that the committee's alarmist perspective chimed with his own. Wohlstetter reported to the steering committee that his analysis, drawn largely from Air Force intelligence, showed that the Soviet Union could have in its possession some five hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1960. This would allow Moscow to obliterate America's retaliatory nuclear capability—organized under the auspices of the Strategic Air Command (SAC)—with a devastating first strike, leaving American cities vulnerable to subsequent annihilation. Wohlstetter had identified a hypothetical missile gap—though he did not use those exact words—which the United States had to remedy as the highest, existential priority.
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Nitze, Wohlstetter, and the other members of the committee critiqued Eisenhower and Dulles for failing even to get the “massive” part of their strategic linchpin right. Nitze's vast experience in this field, allied to his skills as a coordinator and a draftsman, ensured that he became the primary framer of the Gaither Report: NSC-68 Redux.

Nitze recalled that the report's primary recommendation was that “maintaining an effective second strike force should be our first priority.” This meant the United States had to “improve its early warning network, train its SAC bomber crews so that the portion of bombers on alert could take-off within the available warning time, accelerate our missile production program, and phase in hardened bases for our ICBMs as rapidly as possible.”
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In the event that America's nuclear deterrent failed to deter, the report urged contingency planning in the form of a large-scale civil defense program. Like NSC-68, the Gaither Report recommended a course of action that was astronomically expensive and that invited the military to assume an ever-larger role in the life and economic health of the nation.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial orbital space satellite. Having a Russian-made object whiz unseen across the continental United States every ninety-eight minutes was a worrying development—to put it mildly. If the Soviets were able to launch a satellite, did they also have the capability to launch ICBMs that could reach New York or Washington? Nitze hoped that this was a watershed moment and that Eisenhower would approve the Gaither Report in all its aspects. But this was not to be. During a meeting on November 7, Eisenhower described the report's recommendations as “far-fetched”—as well as ridiculously, unsustainably expensive.
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“You know, you recommend spending a billion dollars for something in here,” Eisenhower informed the report's authors. “But do you know how much a billion dollars is? Why, it's a stack of ten-dollar bills as high as the Washington Monument.”
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Nitze was appalled by the president's grade-school reasoning—preventing nuclear war was surely worth any cost, and a billion dollars was not what it used to be—but he reserved special scorn for John Foster Dulles, whom he was beginning to view as a chickenhawk. To vent his frustration, Nitze wrote Dulles a remarkably hostile letter. He pointed out that without a “much more vigorous defense program,” a Soviet nuclear attack could “destroy the fabric of our society and ruin our nation.” For presiding over such complacency, Nitze advised Dulles to take the honorable course and fall on his sword: “Finally, assuming that the immediate crisis is surmounted, I should ask you to consider, in the light of events of recent years, whether there is not some other prominent Republican disposed to exercise the responsibility of the office of Secretary of State.”
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Unsurprisingly, Dulles did not resign and Eisenhower did not relent. As a weapon of final resort, Nitze leaked the Gaither Report to Chalmers Roberts of
The Washington Post
. The front-page article observed: “The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays the United States in the gravest danger in its history.”
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