Paul Nitze Interview (page: 8 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

When President Eisenhower was elected, Dean Acheson was replaced as Secretary of State by John Foster Dulles. What did you think about Dulles?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: I had known him (John Foster Dulles) in Wall Street, and he had been a lawyer and a senior partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, and they had represented, been the lawyers for a man named Harrison Williams, and we were the bankers for Harrison Williams, and Harrison Williams had created a company called the North American Company which was a big pyramided utility company like the Insull set of companies. He was, I guess, the first billionaire in the United States. He decided he wanted to expand still further and create a holding company on top of the North American Company called Blue Ridge, and something on top of that, the Shenandoah Corporation. And, old man Dillon decided that this was unsound, that this pyramid was getting too high, it was going to collapse eventually. And so, he refused to let us at Dillon Read and Company do any further - sell these securities. And, I think quite rightly. Then it was taken over by Goldman Sachs, but Foster stayed with Harrison Williams and continued to represent him, and created all these corporations which eventually collapsed with total disaster for everybody who invested in them. But, I got the feeling that Foster was carried away by trying to do things for his clients without having any real regard for whether the deals were sound or not. He was also head of the National Council of Churches, so he had this very "holier-than-thou" attitude about him, and I formed a low opinion of him in Wall Street, came down here, and when he came down as Secretary of State, I formed an even lower opinion of him. So, I was not a great admirer of Foster.

Did his concept of "massive retaliation" have anything to do with it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: I thought massive retaliation was the stupidest doctrine I had heard of for years, absolutely contrary to all good sense, everything that Dean Acheson and I had been trying to do was to get away from that. We could see that over a period of time the net value to the United States of nuclear weapons was going to decrease more and more and more as the Soviets had nuclear weapons of their own. That over the long run, we would have to build up our conventional capabilities because those were the only usable weapons. We both -- the Soviets and we -- had such dreadful panoplies of nuclear weapons, that you couldn't afford to get into a nuclear war. We were each self-deterred from doing that. So that, the cutting edge of policy would probably be determined by conventional weapons in the long run and not by -- well, against an equality of nuclear weapons -- then the cutting edge would be conventional weapons. So, we were trying to get away from sole reliance upon nuclear weapons and Foster just leaps into that trap and just cancels most of the work on trying to get away from reliance on nuclear weapons, to "weapons of our choice at places of our choice," which I thought was a totally unsound doctrine.

There has been so much written about the Cuban missile crisis in the last few years, as we have come to know more and taken second and third looks at it. Looking back, what is your view? Is there anything that has come to light recently that you find illuminating?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: It seemed to me at the time and it seemed to me since that the questions were easy in the Cuban missile crisis. We had both a conventional superiority around Cuba -- which we demonstrated thoroughly by making all their submarines surface -- and God knows what on sea and land and air. So, we had total local control over Cuba. And we had clear and dominant strategic nuclear superiority at the time. There wasn't any doubt about that. If we let those missiles actually continue in deployment there at Cuba, then it would have become doubtful. Therefore, it was essential for us to get those missiles out of Cuba. But, until they had gotten them operational and ready to use them, we were in a dominant position and the Soviets couldn't contemplate going to war with us at the time, either in Berlin or any other place because they would risk that we would be the ones that would escalate to a nuclear war and they couldn't tolerate that. Therefore, it seemed to me, we could operate with full confidence. We ought to do it with a minimum use of force that was necessary to get the results we wanted. The clear way to do that was to start with a blockade, we called it a quarantine. If that worked, why the show was over. If they withdrew their weapons from Cuba as a result of that quarantine, then we had won. If they didn't, we might have to attack those weapons before they could be fired, take them out. If we could do that, then the show was over and we had won. If we couldn't do that, if the Russians wouldn't take them out, then we had to invade the islands. Capture them, dig them out by hand. In the meantime, I thought there was zero chance, almost zero -- you could never be sure that somebody wouldn't be a madman -- but very little chance that the Soviets would retaliate because they weren't in a position to so do. So I was not worried during the crisis.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

I was worried by the fact that we didn't follow up on our advantages to the extent we should have. But here, all the rest of these people talk about agonizing and that we were in terrible shape, that I have misrepresented this, that I said it was only a nuclear superiority that gave us the advantage. I haven't said that. I said it was a combination of local conventional advantage plus a nuclear advantage which should have given us -- and certainly gave me -- great confidence that we could do what we were doing, provided we did it sensibly, and didn't recklessly use greater force than was absolutely necessary.

It gave you the confidence that the outcome could very well be a peaceful one if the U.S. just kept the leverage it had.

Paul Nitze: That's exactly right. Not only could, it was almost certain to be a peaceful one. When I say peaceful, I mean not resulting in a general nuclear war.

What are your recollections of President Lyndon Johnson?

Paul Nitze: Well, I thought he was a peculiar kind of a person. He combined a certain breadth of viewpoint while being an instinctive bastard. Crude, vile, nasty.

Didn't he make that work for him?

Paul Nitze: It didn't really work for him. He tried to, but it didn't work.

Yet he was successful to some extent, in using those attributes against his former fellow members of Congress.

Paul Nitze: Well, in a way, but he wasn't really very successful.

Do you think most of his accomplishments were based on the Kennedy aura?

Paul Nitze: What were his accomplishments? Spending money on the Great Society? That's an easy thing to do. That doesn't take any real guts, if your object is to spend, spend, tax, tax. That goes way back to the early Roosevelt administration. They did it by printing paper.

We seem to have some troubles getting out of that now.

Paul Nitze: That's right, but I ran into that when I first got here in 1940 with Tommy Corcoran who was Jim Forrestal's closest advisor on things political at that time. Tommy would come and have dinner with us and bring Ben Cohen along, and their whole plea was, "This is an unbeatable formula. Spend, spend, spend, tax, tax, tax and you can't lose."

The deficit problem we're living with now (1990), is it that we spent too much on the military, or that we didn't bring in enough to pay for it?

Paul Nitze: Didn't bring in enough to pay for it. That was the whole problem. Instead of raising taxes, we cut taxes. That began in the Kennedy administration if you remember. Kennedy cut taxes when he shouldn't have. Everybody applauded him, but it was a mistake.

Did you point that out?

Paul Nitze: I did at the time.

How was that received?

Paul Nitze: It didn't get anywhere at all.

After the Johnson administration you were called in again to work with President Nixon. How did you find working with President Nixon and his foreign policy advisors?

Paul Nitze: He had been a congressman when I first knew him. He had been a member of a select committee which had gone to Europe in the early days of the design of the Marshall Plan. That committee had been headed by Christian Herter, who later became Secretary of State. His wife and my wife were first cousins and great friends, so he was one of my close friends. And...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The secretary of this committee was Philip Watts. He came back from this trip that this select committee had made to Europe studying the conditions in Europe, and he reported to me that by and large, these congressmen were not very competent, but there was one extraordinarily competent congressman amongst them and his name was Richard Nixon. He had agreed to become his advisor because Richard Nixon was going to run for the Senate. He did run for the Senate and Philip Watts became his first staff member. Phil asked me whether I wanted to become an advisor to Nixon, so when Nixon became Senator, I was his first foreign policy advisor and I was supposed to educate him about foreign policy, which I tried to do. He was really a very quick study. He could understand things right away and had a very good instinct about foreign policy. He was, however, also an egotist.

The one thing that he had on his mind, what he considered to be his triumph, were the Hiss hearings, when he got the conviction of Alger Hiss, whom he considered to be a liar, covering up his membership in the Communist party. He would be reminded of the Hiss hearings by something I had said, and he would get into a disposition on the Hiss hearings, and he would hold out for hours on that subject. It was his vanity, as opposed to his innate ability as a quick student of foreign policy matters that made it difficult for him to listen.

He was really five different types of people. He had learned from his mother, who was a religious preacher, something about how you talk inspirationally to religious groups. He was also a great admirer of those who managed to claw their way to the top in the economic field. You may remember he greatly admired a man by the name of Abplanalp who had developed some sort of a valve for hairspray and made millions on that. Nixon had this intense admiration for clawing your way from the lower middle class up to great power. He was really quite a cynical person in a certain way. He combined all these various qualities, one with another, and he couldn't keep all these balls in the air simultaneously. That's what tripped him up. He couldn't move from one to the other without dropping the ball from time to time.

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