Worldmaking (50 page)

The book that transformed Nitze from banker into aspiring diplomat was Oswald Spengler's
The Decline of the West
, which had also weighed on Kennan: Nitze read it during a fishing trip in 1937 “with care, word by word, while waiting for a fish to appear.”
16
The book evoked in Nitze deep concern about America's place in the international system, tilting inexorably away from the years of Western advantage, although he had mixed feelings about Spengler's analysis:

It had all the faults of the German temperament; it was brilliant, full of profound feeling and thought, but dogmatic, rough, tactless. Along the peaceful banks of the Upsalquitch River, I pondered the flaws in its logic. How could the tendencies toward cultural delay, socialistic Caesarism and war, which he saw as being irreversible, be countered and reversed? I knew of no one who had a lucid and persuasive opinion on those issues.
17

In search of remedies to Spengler's gloomy prognoses, Nitze resigned from Dillon Read and enrolled in Harvard as a graduate student in sociology, taking supplementary seminars in philosophy and international law. Nitze's second sojourn in Cambridge was significantly more diligent than the first—he drafted a well-received thesis on Spengler supervised by the eminent sociologist Pitirim Sorokin—but he ultimately found the experience frustrating, complaining that he “received almost no answers about Spengler, the trends of the future, and what could be done to affect those trends.”
18
The discipline of history still dominated the teaching of international affairs at Harvard—and this was not enough. Nitze believed that foreign policy had to be reconceived and practiced on a more scientific basis.

Having received no assistance in identifying a strategic worldview at Harvard, Nitze joined Charles Beard and other isolationists in favoring a passive one: neutrality from European affairs. Indeed, his frequent trips to Germany, his Teutonic ancestry, and his respectful appraisals of Hitler's success in rebuilding a strong Germany led some critics to suspect him of harboring Nazi sympathies.
19
These whispered allegations were off the mark; Nitze was a consistent if apathetic “America Firster” in the absence of any better alternatives. Hitler was a serious threat to American interests; Nitze was sure of that. He simply held to this view while at the same time holding a grudging respect for Hitler's success in reenergizing his nation.

The fall of France led Nitze to abandon his isolationism, never deeply felt, and his hope that someone else might answer Spengler; he would have to do this under his own steam. James Forrestal, a former colleague at Dillon Read, hired Nitze to serve as one of six “administrative assistants” with links to the business community; their purpose was to co-opt the private sector in an era of total war. Forrestal asked Nitze to serve his government on June 22, 1940—in those pithier days the entire cable ran: “Be in Washington Monday morning. Forrestal”—but it took awhile for the government to grant him the necessary security clearances, largely due to persistent rumors circulating about Nitze's admiration for the Third Reich. He had not helped his cause when at a dinner party in 1940 he joked that he would rather live under Hitler's rule than that of the British Empire—a remark that clearly made its way to the wrong audience.
20
Nitze was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, though he accumulated a weighty FBI file in the process. Once added to the government payroll, Nitze was charged with sourcing materials needed for the war effort, including Mexican prairie dog bones, required for making glue, and dried cuttlefish, for making bombsight lenses.
21
Nitze performed adeptly in this role, even if the duties were somewhat infra dig for a Wall Street millionaire. What Nitze found harder to accept was the lackluster way the State Department went about its business:

As Forrestal and I began to dig into the matter, we found the State Department under Cordell Hull almost totally lacking an organization for strategic policy-making. Most of the people in the State Department at that time had been brought up in the school of diplomacy that emphasized reporting; few were oriented toward the formulation and execution of strategic policy per se. We concluded that the State Department was inadequately staffed and not intellectually equipped to deal with the radically new situation brought about by the war.
22

This disturbing geopolitical vacuum was of course addressed by Walter Lippmann in
U.S. Foreign Policy
and
U.S. War Aims
, and by Kennan in the Long Telegram and the X Article. Nitze first began to ruminate seriously on foreign policy in the summer of 1944, when he was invited to participate in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, established to ascertain the effectiveness of Allied strategic bombing in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during the Second World War. The USSBS boasted a remarkable staff, including a young Canadian economist named John Kenneth Galbraith and a future undersecretary of state and critic of the Americanization of the Vietnam War, George Ball. It was a rich experience, from which aspects of Nitze's “theory of international relations,” as he later described it, began to emerge.

The survey drew mixed conclusions about the effectiveness of Allied bombing in reducing the ability of German factories to produce munitions. In the summer of 1943, for example, an RAF-led bombing raid code-named “Gomorrah” targeted the center of George Kennan's beloved Hamburg with conventional ordnance and incendiary devices, unleashing a firestorm that reached a thousand degrees, killing some thirty thousand people in hideous circumstances. The historic and commercial center of the city—home to its restaurants, shops, and museums—was razed to the ground. But the factories and shipyards on the city's perimeter were untouched by the inferno. This was a dark day in German history: the heart of a great city was destroyed at appalling human cost. But the unintended consequences could hardly have been worse from an Allied strategic perspective. An exodus of waiters, bank clerks, and shopkeepers, “forcibly unemployed by the bombers,” as Galbraith recalled, “flocked to the war plants to find work … The bombers had eased the labor shortage.” The USSBS found that strategic bombing did not critically hinder Germany's military capabilities.

The bombing did accrue advantages, but they were as unintended as the disadvantages. Allied bombers forced German fighters to scramble, where they were overwhelmed in dogfights through Anglo-American weight of numbers. Dominating European airspace, George Ball recalled, “gave us command of the air for the [D-day] invasion.”
23
Nitze took note of the limitations and unintended benefits of strategic bombing. More important, however, he was deeply impressed by the fact that the much larger defense budget of the United States, and that of Stalin's Soviet Union, had allowed the Allies to simply outproduce and outlast the German war machine. Berlin could not keep pace with its enemies in production terms, despite Albert Speer's best efforts. Once this fact was established, and it became clear that “Hitler's Empire” was not an imperial system—like Great Britain's—that could be co-opted and worked to the homeland's advantage, its military prospects were greatly diminished.
24
Nitze extrapolated that America should seek to build a permanent military advantage through devoting a higher proportion of national wealth to defense spending than any peer competitor. He described this goal as achieving for the United States in perpetuity a favorable “correlation of forces”—the strategic imperative that guided him through the entire Cold War.

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From Harvard to Wall Street to World War II, Nitze was a committed Republican: cool toward Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and seriously concerned about his successor's leadership potential. Nitze's wartime appraisal of Truman was “less than favorable … When he became president I had visions of this country being turned over to political cronies of his … My wife Phyllis caused me to change my mind about Mr. Truman. When I came home from Europe in 1945 I found her convinced that the Trumans—Mrs. Truman in particular—were wonderful people of great integrity.”
25
Throughout the early stages of the Cold War, Nitze came to warmly support the president's hard-edged diplomacy and was particularly impressed by the Truman Doctrine, caring little whether or not the commitments enunciated were open-ended. Truman had proved himself to be a leader of “courage and guts,” in Nitze's estimation, who intuitively understood that the United States had to assume the preponderant burden “of leadership of the free world, no matter what was required.”
26
The Wilsonian elements of Truman's approach that worried Kennan—linking America's liberty to the extension of freedom to all nations—roused only the warmest support in Nitze.

Nitze was based in the State Department's Office of International Trade Policy during the genesis of the Marshall Plan. After Kennan and Lippmann had thrashed out the basics of a reconstruction program, Nitze found himself in disagreement with its sole European focus. He suggested to his close friend Will Clayton, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, that the government disburse $5 billion of aid per annum, over a five-year period, to offset a balance of payments of surplus of a similar amount. But Nitze wanted this funding allocated “on a worldwide basis rather than concentrating it all in Europe.” Kennan was hostile to the idea of spreading aid thinly, and to areas of the world whose prospects he deemed tangential to America's national interest. Nitze's view was, “Why Europe? The problem [of the communist threat] was a worldwide problem. Why not do it on a broader scale? But the decision finally was in favor of Kennan's approach of just an aid program to support Europe, not worldwide.”
27
Nitze was forming a strong difference with Kennan on what constituted an appropriate range of America's overseas interests.

After he lost this debate, Nitze picked himself up with little fuss or self-recrimination and started adding substance to the Marshall Plan's bare outline. He called in favors to borrow some protocomputers from Prudential Life Insurance and began figuring out exactly what each European nation required. Nitze was in his quantitative element, compiling charts and graphs, identifying each nation's economic strengths and weaknesses, predicting the likely agricultural productivity of each, matching American surpluses in raw materials to European shortfalls. This paragon of Wall Street was a splendid statist, warming to the powers and certainties of centralized planning. Clayton described Nitze as “young, able and a hard worker. Moreover he knows more about the Marshall Plan than perhaps any other individual around here.” Nitze was called to testify before a hostile Congress on the Marshall Plan's substance and purpose. It was a rough ride, but he managed to convince many Republicans of its merits, including Arthur Vandenberg, who observed that it was “backed by more hard work and careful research than almost any other bill to come before Congress.”
28
Kennan's ideas and Nitze's logistical prowess had worked well in tandem.

On balance, however, discord between Nitze and Kennan was a more common response than concord to the salient geostrategic issues. President Truman's Point Four Program, for example, designed to deploy American science, industry, and aid to modernize the underdeveloped world, garnered Nitze's strong support. He was concerned that U.S. policy in Asia focused so intently on China and Japan, to the exclusion of a vast area: “The rest of Asia, except for the Philippines, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, was generally unfamiliar territory that festered with problems—anticolonialism, social unrest, overcrowded populations, and economies that despite their resources and potential wealth remained underdeveloped.”
29
Kennan evinced little concern for the Third World, for it mattered little to Washington if those nations continued to stagnate or flourished. It was preferable if poorer nations became richer, but it did not fall upon the United States to facilitate this process, the costs of which would eventually outrun its resources. Nitze believed that the range of America's overseas interests had no geographical boundaries, and that its latent capabilities would simply have to expand to take the strain. If that required a tax hike or the restructuring of the American economy—well, so be it.

Of course, Kennan's conception of the national interest had not diverged only from Nitze's but from every senior figure in the Truman administration. He liked Nitze personally, found him highly capable, and was relaxed at the prospect of him succeeding him. When Nitze joined PPS as his deputy in the summer of 1949, Kennan vacated his office for him and moved to work in a conference room down the hall. There could hardly have been a clearer signal that Kennan had anointed his successor. Then the H-bomb debate intervened, Kennan fell farther to the margins, and he began to have second thoughts. He wrote to Chip Bohlen that the “question must soon be faced as to who should succeed me. My own inclination would be to say that unless you yourself would feel like coming home … they should leave it vacant for a while.”
30
But the die had already been cast. Nitze had momentum and had forged a close working relationship with Dean Acheson. After relocating to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—where he eventually won over the mathematicians who were skeptical about his lack of academic bona fides—Kennan found it difficult to accept the manner of his eclipse. In the summer of 1950, Kennan half joked to Nitze and Acheson that “when I left the department, it never occurred to me that you two would make foreign policy without having first consulted me.”
31

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