Paul
Henry Nitze was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on 16th January, 1907. After
graduating from Harvard University in 1927 he worked as an investment
banker in Wall Street. Over the next few years Nitze became extremely
wealthy from his business activities in New
York. During this period he worked for C.
Douglas Dillon and Jim
Forrestal at
Dillon, Read & Company.
In 1940 Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed Jim
Forrestal
as under secretary of the
navy with special responsibility for procurement and production. Forrestal
invited Nitze to join him in Washington.
In
1944 Nitze became vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing
Survey. In this post
he played an important role in the decision to drop nuclear bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the war Nitze married
Phyllis Pratt, a Standard Oil heiress.
While
in Washington
he
associated
with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials
that became known as the Georgetown Set.
This included Frank
Wisner,
George Kennan, Dean
Acheson,
Richard
Bissell,
Desmond
FitzGerald,
Joseph Alsop, Stewart
Alsop,
Tracy
Barnes,
Thomas
Braden,
Philip
Graham,
David
Bruce,
Clark Clifford, Walt
Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip
Bohlen, Cord
Meyer, James Angleton, William
Averill Harriman, John
McCloy, Felix Frankfurter,
John Sherman Cooper, James
Reston, and Allen
W. Dulles.
Paul
Nitze in 1950
In 1950
Nitze became head of Policy Planning in the State Department. In this
post he
was the principal author of a highly influential secret National Security
Council document, United
States Objectives and Programs for National Security
(NSC-68), which provided the strategic outline
for increased U.S. expenditures to counter the perceived threat of
the Soviet
Union.
After
the resignation of Fred Korth as a result
of the TFX scandal, President John F. Kennedy
appointed Nitze as Secretary of the Navy. He retained this position
under President Lyndon Johnson. In
1967 Nitze became Deputy Secretary of Defense.
In
1969 President Richard Nixon appointed
Nitze as a member of the US delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks (SALT). Nitze also served as Assistant Secretary of Defense
for International Affairs (1973–76).
In August 1975, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) wrote a letter to President Gerald Ford proposing that an outside group of experts be given access to the same intelligence as the CIA analysts and be allowed to prepare a competing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and then make an evaluation. The outside group would be called the B Team. The CIA and the intelligence community estimates would be the A Team.
William Colby, the director of the CIA, rejected the idea. On 30 January 1976, Gerald Ford sacked Colby and replaced him with George H. W. Bush. Soon afterwards Bush agreed to the setting up a B Team. As a result of this move, outsiders would now have access to all of America's classified knowledge about the Soviet Military. Hank Knoche, Bush's deputy, was ordered to organize this new system. Interestingly, Paisley was brought out of retirement to become the CIA 'coordinator' for the B Team. It was Paisley who would control the documents that they saw and the information they received.
Members of the B Team included Paul Nitze, Richard E. Pipes, Clare Boothe Luce, John Connally, General Daniel O. Graham, Edward Teller, Paul Wolfowitz (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency), General John W. Vogt, Brigadier General Jasper A. Welch, William van Cleeve (University of Southern California), Foy D. Kohler (U.S. Ambassador to Moscow), Seymour Weiss (State Department) and Thomas W. Wolfe (Rand Corporation).
Nitze constantly feared
the possibility of Soviet rearmament and in 1979 opposed the ratification
of SALT II. As a result President Jimmy Carter was forced to withdraw the Salt Treaty.
In
1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed
him as chief negotiator of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF)
treaty. In 1984 he was named special adviser to the President and
Secretary of State on Arms Control.
Paul
Nitze
died on 19th October, 2004.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on Watergate
Forum Debate on John Paisley
Namebase: Paul H. Nitze
(1)
Evan
Thomas, The Very Best Men: The
Early Days of the CIA (1995)
When Wisner moved
to Washington, he bought a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland
and rented a house in Georgetown. He immediately fell in with a
crowd that was unusually lively and self-confident. At the center
were two rising Soviet experts from the State Department, Charles
"Chip" Bohlen and George Kennan. Bohlen was especially
charming and gregarious. He loved to argue with his college clubmates
Joseph Alsop, a well-connected newspaper columnist, and Paul Nitze,
another young comer at the State Department. Kennan, while admired
for his intellect, was less socially at ease; he was prone to periods
of brooding.
The young
couples, lawyers down from New York, diplomats returned from abroad,
bought or rented small eighteenth- and nineteenth-century row houses
in Georgetown. The New Deal and wartime had transformed the neighborhood
from a backwater, inhabited largely by lower-middle-class blacks.
The new crowd felt a sense of arrival and belonging. They were not
stuffy, like the old-time "cave dwellers" of Washington
society, yet they were confident of their place in a new order that
placed the United States on top.
(2)
Fred Kaplan, Paul
Nitze: The man who brought us the Cold War (1996)
When Paul Henry Nitze died at the age of 97 on Oct. 19, an era died
with him. If there was one man responsible for America's emergence
as a global military power in the mid-20th century, Nitze could
lay claim to that credit. If one man was most responsible for the
nuclear nightmares that many Americans suffered along the way, Nitze
could wear that tag as well.
In the annals
of Cold War history, three sets of documents stand out as potent
hair-raiser, the kinds of documents that not only gave their readers
cold sweats, but also changed the course of American security policy
- and Nitze wrote all of them.
The first
and most pivotal was a top secret paper, written in April 1950,
called "United States Objectives and Programs for National
Security," more famously known as NSC-68. In the months leading
up to this paper, the Truman administration was split on its policy
toward the Soviet Union. Secretary of State Dean Acheson saw the
Soviets as a serious threat that needed to be countered through
an enormous military buildup. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson
sided with fiscal conservatives - and Truman himself - who believed
that boosting the annual arms budget beyond $15 billion would wreck
the economy. Acheson's powerful policy planning chief, George Kennan,
though worried about the Soviets, favored a "containment"
policy that stressed bolstering the West more through political
and economic means.
At the beginning
of 1950, Acheson fired Kennan and put Nitze in his place. Nitze,
a former Wall Street banker, had been one of Kennan's deputies,
but openly sympathized with Acheson. Nitze's first task: Scare the
daylights out of Truman, so he'd raise the military budget. NSC-68
was the vehicle for doing so.
The document
(which was declassified in the mid-1970s) warned of the "Kremlin's
design for world domination," an urge it posited as intrinsic
to Soviet Russia. "The Kremlin is inescapably militant,"
the paper argued. The Soviet system required "the ultimate
elimination of any effective opposition," and so it would inexorably
seek to destroy its main opponent, the United States. Moreover,
the paper continued, once the Kremlin "calculates that it has
a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us,"
it might very well launch such an attack "swiftly and with
stealth." The Soviets would have this capability as early as
1954 - "the year of maximum danger" - unless the United
States "substantially increased" its army, navy, air force,
nuclear arsenal, and civil defenses immediately.
Years later,
in his memoir, Present at the Creation, Acheson admitted that the
language was "clearer than truth," as he put it, but justified
the hype. "The purpose of NSC-68," he wrote, "was
to so bludgeon the mass mind of 'top government' that not only could
the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried
out."
(3)
William Burr and Robert Wampler, The
Master of the Game (27th October, 2004)
The recent passing
of Paul Nitze at the age of 97 has brought forth the expected array
of obituaries, retrospectives and assessments of his lengthy and
often controversial career, in the process turning people's minds
back to an era when superpower rivalry and the threat of nuclear
annihilation hung over the world as the United States and Russia
engaged in what John F. Kennedy termed the long, twilight struggle.
As the many obituaries that have appeared since his death detail,
Nitze's life in public service, following a successful early career
as a Wall Street financier, placed him at the center of practically
every significant decision or debate about U.S. Cold War strategy
and nuclear weapons policies, though not always at the highest levels.
As his memoir, titled From Hiroshima to Glasnost, underscores,
this career stretched from his work with the World War II Strategic
Bombing Survey, which placed him in Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon
after the atomic bombs were dropped, to his negotiations with the
Soviets on intermediate nuclear forces under Reagan. His commitment
to rigorous analysis and advocacy of what he saw as the logical
consequences of this analysis in strategic planning and arms control
negotiations often put him at odds with colleagues as well as his
adversaries and critics, who saw his assessments as biased towards
worst-case scenarios. Both Nitze's memoir and his biographers have
detailed the history of his often contentious battles, inside and
outside of government, whenever he believed that U.S. was pursuing
ill-advised and even dangerous policies with respect to fielding
the necessary levels and proper mix of military forces both conventional
and nuclear, and pursuing arms control agreements with the USSR.
(4)
Hella Pick, Paul
Nitze, The Guardian (22nd
October, 2004)
There is no single label to fit Nitze. This slim, silver-haired,
courteous man was the ultimate Washington insider, one of the small
handful of Americans who chose public service rather than politics
and achieved positions of great influence. He shaped US foreign
and security policies from 1940 onwards, working for both Democratic
and Republican presidents through to the first Bush administration,
and remained in the limelight almost to the end.
Nitze was
a Democrat, but for much of the cold war his hawkish views were
more in line with mainstream Republican thinking. He plotted US
nuclear policy throughout the era of "mutually assured destruction".
But Nitze was also ahead of many of his contemporaries from the
early 1980s onwards, when he became convinced that the two superpowers
should embark on radical arms cuts. He mastered every nook and cranny
of nuclear strategic thinking, but was sharply critical of President
Reagan's Star Wars initiative: he did not share the widely held
view that the costly race to develop nuclear defence system was
justified
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