Worldmaking (51 page)

Upon taking the reins at the PPS, Nitze effected a transformation in its manner of operation. Alluding to his predecessor's foibles, Nitze observed, “There was no point in producing a marvelous piece of paper if it didn't get read.”
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The main problem with Kennan's PPS was that it resembled an artist's studio in Renaissance Florence. Each of the staffers gained valuable experience and proximity to a genius, and many, in turn, went on to become substantial figures in their own right. But the papers that emerged were unmistakably Kennan's—as the paintings and sculptures were Donatello's or Michelangelo's. True collaboration was not possible in the master-apprentice relationship favored by Kennan, meaning all documents that emerged from the PPS had a single voice. This was hardly surprising, as Kennan's mode of operation was to discuss an issue with his staff and then sequester himself away to write alone without interruption. All policy papers had literary consistency, but when the audience became uncongenial, as happened with Acheson, the papers ceased to matter in the policymaking crucible. The Policy Planning Staff's output throughout 1949 came to consist primarily of minority reports and dissenting opinions—valuable for posterity but peripheral to the times.

Reporting on Nitze's appointment,
The Washington Star
quoted an unnamed source at the State Department who observed perceptively that “Kennan's leadership of the Policy Planning Staff was a little like a gallant cavalry charge with George brandishing a saber in the lead, astride the most spirited horse in the regiment. Nitze operates more like a chief of staff—or like the editor of a great research project. He presides, listens, and suggests. He organizes, deputizes, and supervises. He weighs, balances, analyzes, and sums up.”
33
This marked difference in style owed a lot to Nitze's career on Wall Street, as well as to the logistical nature of his wartime service and his work on the Marshall Plan. But due to his disciplinary preferences, it also stood to reason that Nitze would prefer the collaborative model of research common to the natural and social sciences, ahead of the lone scholar version common to the arts and humanities.

Nitze had developed many close links with the RAND Corporation (an acronym for research and development), which was established in 1946 to offer quantitative analysis to the U.S. Air Force, but which struck out as a nonprofit think tank in 1948 with seed money from the Ford Foundation. RAND's motto is simple: “To help improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis.” According to the historian Alex Abella, its headquarters in Santa Monica, California, were “designed to be like a campus without students, just faculty thinking about the vicissitudes of their specialty.”
34
RAND's approach was interdisciplinary, bringing together natural and social scientists to offer recommendations informed by the fledgling discipline of systems analysis. Nitze had long sought to quantify problems, eradicating the requirement for subjective value judgment in the process. He believed that the practice of international relations could be made more scientific, reducing the margin for error.

Nitze was given an opportunity to deploy these RAND-favored methods when President Truman issued a directive on January 31 that the State and Defense Departments “undertake a re-examination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear capability of the Soviet Union.”
35
Acheson delegated this task to Nitze, who immediately gathered an abundance of numerical data, which included predictions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Soviet Union could have in its armory some 135 atomic bombs by mid-1953. If the figures were correct, the response was clear: the United States had to spend much more on both its nuclear and conventional deterrents. Nitze identified the likeliest opponents of military expansion and hired them as consultants to the project, persuading the likes of Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant—the president of Harvard University and consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission—that the Soviet threat was as ominous as the JCS suggested. Nitze also convinced Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett to abandon the Pentagon's plans for a separate review and instead collaborate with his team at the PPS. Through a deft bureaucratic sleight of hand, Nitze used new classification rules to shield his deliberations from the Treasury and budget bureau.
36
Through force of personality and example, Nitze inspired his team to work unrelenting hours in preparing a comprehensive response to Truman's request. The report that emerged, NSC-68, was very much a team effort, with PPS staffers such as John Paton Davies crafting some of its most memorable phrases. But its primary author and booster was Paul Nitze.

The manner of NSC-68's planning and execution was far removed from the style favored by Kennan. Its contents were too. NSC-68's estimate of threat assessment was influenced by Nathan Leites, a RAND social scientist who would write the important book
The Operational Code of the Politburo
. Nitze came to know Leites's work through his connections with RAND, and he was impressed by his insights, drawn mainly from psychology and psychoanalysis, regarding the relentless expansionary instincts of the Politburo. NSC-68 follows Leites in identifying a series of “rules” or “codes” that drove Soviet behavior—referred to in the document as the drivers behind a cohesive Soviet “design.” Indeed, the word “design” is used some fifty times in NSC-68 and is deployed to imply malevolence, rather than “purpose” or “strategy,” which suggest normality in diplomatic intention. So the third section of NSC-68, “The Fundamental Design of the Kremlin,” describes Soviet intentions in the following terms:

The design … calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.
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A very different manner of expression had entered the American diplomatic lexicon.

Interpretative certainty conveyed in searing language courses through NSC-68's seventy-one pages. The following sentences provide a good example: “The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis.” The violence of the language was designed to carve out latitude in implementing a response. Defeating the designs of a “slave state,” the ultimate purpose of which is to eliminate “freedom,” justifies recourse to just about anything in whatever location the threat arises. And this is what Nitze demanded. Kennan's Long Telegram and X Article were imprecise in delineating the full range of vital American interests. There is no such ambiguity in NSC-68. The document identifies and confronts a major problem: that Marxism-Leninism holds the greatest appeal to underdeveloped nations emerging from colonial rule, hostile to a “West” synonymous not with progress and freedom but with exploitation:

The ideological pretensions of the Kremlin are another great source of strength … They have found a particularly receptive audience in Asia, especially as the Asiatics have been impressed by what has been plausibly portrayed to them as the rapid advance of the USSR from a backward society to a position of great world power … The Kremlin cynically identifies itself with the genuine aspirations of large numbers of people, and places itself at the head of an international crusade with all of the benefits which derive therefrom.

To remedy this situation, Nitze advocated greater “assistance in economic development,” but that on its own is insufficient. “The assault on free institutions is world-wide now,” he wrote, “and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” The Cold War had been truly transformed into a zero-sum game, in which few Soviet provocations—real or perceived—could be ignored. Here was a doctrine of considerable force. In combating a broad-front Soviet assault, NSC-68 cautions against letting anything slip:

The shadow of Soviet force falls darkly on Western Europe and Asia and supports a policy of encroachment. The free world lacks adequate means—in the form of forces in being—to thwart such expansion locally. The United States will therefore be confronted more frequently with the dilemma of reacting totally to a limited extension of Soviet control or of not reacting at all … Continuation of present trends is likely to lead, therefore, to a gradual withdrawal under the direct or indirect pressure of the Soviet Union, until we discover one day that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest. In other words, the United States would have chosen, by lack of the necessary decisions and actions, to fall back to isolation in the Western Hemisphere.

This dilemma can be rephrased as an old adage: give an inch and Moscow will take a mile. NSC-68 calls for the creation of a flexible U.S. capability to respond to all manner of provocation at all geographical points. American credibility was at stake everywhere, for ignoring transgressions would invite subsequent aggression on a larger scale. All citizens needed to realize that “the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”

Despite its militant language, NSC-68 did not countenance waging a premeditated war against the Soviet Union—America reserved the right to
respond
symmetrically or asymmetrically depending on circumstances. “It goes without saying,” Nitze clarified, “that the idea of ‘preventive' war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans … Although the American people would probably rally in support of the war effort, the shock of responsibility for a surprise attack would be morally corrosive.” Instead NSC-68 called for a “more rapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength,” to a point of sufficiency where the United States had “the military power to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions of a limited or total character.”

Defensive capabilities of this sort were not likely to come cheap, and Nitze, before submitting the report, asked Acheson for advice on whether to include a realistic cost estimate. “Paul,” Acheson said, “don't put any such figure into this report … One first ought to decide whether this is the kind of policy one wants to follow. The extent to which one actually implements it with appropriations is a separate question which involves the domestic economy and other considerations. So don't get into that hassle at this stage.”
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Acheson later commented that the purpose of NSC-68 was to “bludgeon the mass mind of government.”
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Nitze wielded the bludgeon, certainly, but Acheson was wise to counsel against revealing the true cost of waging the global Cold War. The actual cost was arguably more frightening than the presentation of an expansionist Soviet slave state. The U.S. defense budget quadrupled from 1950 to 1951: from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion.
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In some ways Nitze was following Alfred Mahan in emphasizing the need for greater military preparedness. But Mahan made his case when the United States was a second-tier military power; Nitze did so when the United States was utterly dominant at sea and in possession of the world's most advanced weaponry. NSC-68 truly created what Dwight Eisenhower would later identify with concern as the “military-industrial complex.”

Senator Arthur Vandenberg had told Truman and Acheson that they would “have to scare hell out of the American people” to secure the necessary support for the containment strategy.
41
NSC-68 was written for a supposedly less credulous and twitchy audience: the government and bureaucracy. But it scared people all the same. Nitze submitted the report to President Truman on April 7, 1950, who passed a copy to his chief domestic adviser, Charles Murphy, for his assessment. Murphy took the report home, read it, and was so shaken by Nitze's diagnosis of Soviet intentions that he took the following day off work, reading key passages again and again, worrying about the war that was all but certain to visit the world.
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Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson was less impressed. A thrifty man, Johnson immediately understood that the document's planning prescriptions, though unspecified in cost terms, would require a fundamental restructuring of the American economy. At a March 22 meeting called to discuss the report, Johnson stormed in, accused Nitze of hatching a “conspiracy” designed to undermine his efforts to control the budget, and stormed out again. News of the meeting spread throughout the Truman administration, generating sympathy for Nitze—a rare occurrence—and scorn for Johnson's supposedly intemperate stance. A few weeks later, while Johnson was in Europe on NATO business, the report made its way to the president. Nitze recalled that Johnson “made kind of an ass of himself.”
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The secretary of defense had also lost control of the planning process and, with it, the budget.

George Kennan took a predictably dim view of NSC-68: “With the preparation of NSC-68 I had nothing to do. I was disgusted about the assumptions concerning Soviet intentions.”
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It was histrionic, adjective laden, belligerent, and informed by insights from the social sciences, and contained an explicit rebuttal of his containment doctrine. It had taken just weeks for Nitze to jettison Kennan's cautious and carefully calibrated diplomatic legacy. Chip Bohlen joined Kennan's side in decrying the manner in which the report “gave too much emphasis to Soviet ambitions for expansion.” Acheson stepped in to arbitrate the dispute but found Bohlen's critique unpersuasive. The language stood; all that remained was a presidential signature.