Worldmaking (55 page)

Nitze was clearly not angling to secure a special place in Eisenhower's heart. George Kennan and Walter Lippmann, meanwhile, were as hostile toward the Gaither Report's rationale as was the president. The British Broadcasting Corporation had invited Kennan to deliver its prestigious annual series of Reith Lectures, in which prominent intellectuals are gifted six hours of radio time to reflect on a significant contemporary issue. Kennan's topic was “Russia, the Atom, and the West,” and his arguments were antithetical to Nitze's. Kennan heaped scorn on those nuclear strategists who “evidently believe that if the Russians gain the slightest edge on us in the capacity to wreak massive destruction at long range, they will immediately use it, regardless of our capacity for retaliation.” He also identified serious problems with the notion of civil defense: “Are we to flee like haunted creatures from one defensive device to another, each more costly and humiliating than the one before, cowering underground one day, breaking up our cities the next, attempting to surround ourselves with elaborate electronic shields on the third, concerned only to prolong the length of our lives while sacrificing all the values for which it might be worthwhile to live at all?”
91

In a letter to Walter Lippmann in the summer of 1951, Kennan had earlier complained that foreign policy had become excessively quantified and mechanized and that wise diplomatic strategy required the touch and insight of a “gardener,” not a “mechanic.” Strategists like Nitze “do not understand the difference between working in a mechanical medium, where you can translate direct impulses in a mechanical way, and working in an organic medium, where the living impulse is beyond your own doing and you achieve your effects by altering the environmental stimuli to which a given growth is subjected or, if you cannot do this, then adjusting yourself as best you can to whatever unpleasant quality it may have.”
92

Kennan's implied critique of Nitze was deep but opaque. Lippmann's scorn was presented with hallmark clarity in a 1959 column titled “The Tired Old Men.” The article blamed three individuals—Nitze, Dean Acheson, and ex-President Truman—for devising a confrontational blueprint from which U.S foreign policy still recklessly operated. Nitze was appalled by the article and attributed its genesis to a heated dispute he had with Lippmann five days earlier. Over the course of a wine-fueled lunch, Nitze had grown increasingly tired of Lippmann's sanctimonious call for a more “reasoned” approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. “You know, Walter,” said Nitze, “it's possible to be too G-D impartial.” “Paul, when you say that,” replied Lippmann, “to whom are you referring?” Nitze replied, “Walter, if you press me, I have to admit that I have you in mind.” According to Nitze, Lippmann “turned purple and then pink and then white and then black … [He was] absolutely outraged by that remark.”
93
Lippmann and Kennan had come to view Nitze's foreign-policy recommendations with genuine concern.

Nitze cared not a jot for their poor opinion because he was developing warm relations with a more significant personage: Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was all but certain to run for the presidency in 1960. Nitze first met Kennedy in 1959, when he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs on a fact-gathering trip he had taken to the continent for the Council on Foreign Relations. Nitze was impressed by the young senator's focus: “He listened carefully, absorbing information and ideas for use when the occasion arose.”
94
Nitze's testimony on the vital importance of the unaligned, developing world to America's Cold War prospects found a receptive audience in Kennedy. He firmly believed in the necessity of a vastly increased foreign aid program, and for deploying a more varied set of diplomatic tools. The one tool currently in the box—the mallet of “massive retaliation”—was not designed for close work like undermining communism's appeal in the Third World. As early as 1954, Kennedy had delivered a speech in the Senate in which he observed that “our reduction of strength for resistance in so-called brush-fire wars, while threatening atomic retaliation, has in effect invited expansion by the Communists in such areas as Indochina.”
95
Kennedy's and Nitze's views were closely aligned on a variety of issues, as the latter recalled with satisfaction:

I thought he was very quick. In fact, he had independently come to some of the ideas that seemed to me to be very important. He was concerned about the massive retaliation doctrine. He was concerned that we were not putting enough emphasis upon defense options rather than the strategic nuclear attack option. He was concerned about the military support which we were able to give in crisis spots in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.
96

A few months after their first meeting, Nitze was furnishing Kennedy with foreign-policy advice and contributing to the drafting of his speeches. They were an excellent match. Kennedy liked tough-minded advisers who got to the point; Nitze admired leaders who emphasized the possibilities, rather than the limitations, of American power.

Similarly attuned to the senator's potential, George Kennan had attempted to win Kennedy's favor when he wrote him a long letter detailing his own foreign-policy views. Kennan began by emulating Nitze's Paul Revere approach, observing that “the Russian and Chinese Communists are obviously determined to bring about, before a new administration can take over and get into the swing, an extensive and decisive undermining of our world position, with a view to isolating us politically and militarily and to eliminating us as a major factor of resistance to their ambitions and undertakings.” The purpose and vitality of the prose might have surprised seasoned Kennan watchers. But after this tub-thumping buildup, Kennan reverted to type:

One of the most dangerous elements in our present world position is that we are greatly over-extended in our commitments, political and military. I have felt this for years; so, I believe, has Lippmann. This provides our adversaries with one opportunity after another for badgering us and thrusting us onto the defensive. To get ourselves back into a sound position, there should be a careful appraisal of our existing commitments and a ruthless elimination of those which are unsound, super-annuated, or beyond our strength to support.
97

At this moment of supposedly “maximum danger,” to borrow Nitze's phrase from NSC-68, Kennan recommended “ruthlessly” hacking away at America's overgrown defense commitments. JFK was not won over. Kennan and Nitze did not so much disagree about foreign policy as inhabit different planets.

After securing the Democratic nomination ahead of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy was keen to solicit the best—which for him meant the most robust—foreign-policy advice. He did not turn to Kennan, needless to say, and instead sought out the engineer of NSC-68. On August 30, 1960, Nitze and Kennedy held a joint news conference. The Democratic presidential candidate announced that he had appointed Nitze to convene and chair a Committee on National Security Policy. Its purpose was not to furnish Kennedy with partisan debating points but to provide concrete foreign-policy recommendations that would permit the new administration to hit the ground running. Kennedy informed the assembled press that he wanted Nitze to “consult … on national security problems with the ablest and most experienced authorities in the nation, without regard to party.”
98
Nitze was given an office in the Russell Senate Office Building, right next to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, where he sat down with his team—David K. Bruce, Roswell Gilpatric, and James Perkins—to prepare his report. With his usual diligence, Nitze took soundings from RAND and some of the nation's elite universities, including the Center for International Studies at MIT, which had developed a distinctive research program emphasizing the centrality of the struggle with communism in the Third World.

While Nitze worked on his report, Kennedy had an election to win—against Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Milhous Nixon. One of Kennedy's most effective campaigning strategies was to portray the Eisenhower-Nixon years as a period in which the big stick of massive retaliation actually encouraged drift and irresolution, which had allowed the Soviet Union to narrow the gap in nuclear capabilities and project power and influence beyond the European theater. Even Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida, had been “lost” to communism in 1959. For hawkish Democrats with painful memories of McCarthyism, attacking Nixon and the GOP for foreign-policy weakness was cathartic. Drawing on Nitze's and Wohlstetter's dark Gaither scenarios, Kennedy blasted the Nixon-Eisenhower team for allowing a “missile gap” to develop, which imperiled American security: “Whether the missile gap—that everyone agrees now exists—will become critical in 1961, 1962, or 1963 … the point is that we are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival … Unless immediate steps are taken, failure to maintain our relative power of retaliation may in the near future expose the United States to a nuclear missile attack.”
99

This inflammatory allegation was taken right from Nitze's playbook. Never mind that the missile gap did not actually exist; the mere allegation was damaging enough. And Nixon could not decisively rebut the charge without revealing the full extent of America's surveillance operation over the Soviet Union. On this and other issues, Kennedy had Nixon on the hook.

Partly assisted by these foreign-policy advantages—as well as Walter Lippmann's priceless endorsement—Kennedy defeated Nixon on Election Day by the slimmest of margins. Across the nation he secured just 100,000 more popular votes, which translated as 303 votes to Nixon's 219 in the electoral college. Nitze submitted his report to President-elect Kennedy on November 9, the day after his victory. It called for an “early decision” on whether the United States should “attempt to achieve a politically meaningful ‘win' capability in general nuclear war, or settle for the more modest goal of being able to deny the Soviets such a capability through assuring ourselves secure retaliatory capability.” It also focused on the sheer weight of crises that would confront Kennedy upon entering the White House, in “Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and the ‘smoldering guerrilla war in South Vietnam.'” “Because of limitations of time and space,” Nitze recalled, “our report made only brief stabs at sorting out the multitude of problems inherent in these global time bombs.”
100
An appreciative Kennedy directed that a copy of the report be sent to all cabinet appointees as the starting point for their subsequent recommendations. The main question that remained was where would Nitze—an architect of Kennedy's main diplomatic campaigning advantage—land?

President-elect Kennedy offered Nitze three jobs during the transition, in a brief phone conversation. He informed Nitze that the incoming secretary of state, Dean Rusk—a man Nitze had recommended for the job—wanted him to serve as his undersecretary for economic affairs. “Before you respond to this, however,” said Kennedy, “you should know that I would like you to become either my national security adviser or deputy secretary of defense.” Nitze asked, “How long do I have to make up my mind?” to which Kennedy answered, “Thirty seconds.” His mind set to gallop, Nitze immediately dismissed the job at State because he had already worked in economic affairs during the Truman administration. He liked the proximity to power that the office of national security adviser provided, but worried that he would be continuously “stalemated by a Pentagon unsympathetic to the type of policy I thought was required.” To truly grapple with the issues that mattered most—primarily pertaining to strategic vulnerabilities and the conventional and unconventional means to address them—Nitze believed it was vital to work in the Pentagon. “I choose the post of deputy secretary of defense,” replied Nitze within the thirty seconds. “Fine,” said Kennedy, who hung up without saying goodbye and crossed another job off his long to-do list.

Nitze made a major error in declining the job of national security adviser. The position had lacked clout during the Eisenhower years, certainly, but the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter appointments—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski—used the office to construct independent power bases in the White House, exerting an influence on presidential decision making that often exceeded the supposedly more powerful cabinet appointments. Nitze's mistake was compounded when Kennedy appointed Robert S. McNamara as his secretary of defense and his position immediately became insecure.

McNamara and Nitze shared many traits. A graduate of Berkeley and the Harvard Business School, McNamara had enjoyed a spectacularly successful business career, rising to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company. He also held a strong belief in deploying quantitative methods to assess a whole range of issues—from automobile production in Detroit to military progress in Indochina. Once described memorably as an “IBM machine with legs,” McNamara was a formidable presence whose crisp analyses, impatience with prolixity, and unforgiving work ethic kept his subordinates in a state of perpetual tension and exhaustion. He accepted Kennedy's job offer on one condition: that he would have total control over subsequent Pentagon appointments. McNamara decided that he did not want another McNamara (with actual foreign-policy experience) serving as his number two. He wanted a loyal lieutenant to carry out his orders without demur. This person turned out to be the hardworking and selfless Roswell Gilpatric. “I had never met Bob McNamara,” Nitze later recalled, “but he knew of me and my reputation for hard-nosed determination. He told Mr. Kennedy that he would prefer a deputy who would be his alter ego and carry out his programs without argument or confrontation.”
101