At the time of your famous "walk in the woods," the negotiations on Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe had stalled. At the time, many people around the world, especially in Europe, believed that the U.S. wasn't really interested in negotiating an arms control agreement with the Soviets. There were people on the U.S. side who had talked about winning a limited nuclear exchange. Was that why the Europeans were so skeptical?
Paul Nitze: There were certain people on the U.S. side who made it difficult to persuade the Europeans that we were really trying to negotiate on their behalf. I was persuaded that this negotiation on INF -- in that negotiation we were really representing the interests of our European partners more than the interest of the United States. Our European partners were all on the front line. They were right next to the Soviet forces. They were the only ones who were threatened by the Soviet intermediate range forces. They were subject to destruction by those forces overnight. We weren't. They couldn't reach the United States. Our interest in the INF business was because of our interest in our European partners, what the world would look like in the event they were defeated. So that we were really negotiating, or should be negotiating on behalf of their interest. Therefore, it was important to consult with them regularly, take into account their interest. You can't lead somebody unless the people you are leading feel that you are representing their interests. That was the important thing, and I think the walk in the woods contributed to giving them the feeling that we were negotiating, trying to take care of their interests.
How did the walk in the woods come about?
Paul Nitze: It was in the summer, June of '82, when the negotiations with respect to the INF treaty had reached a crisis. It was just before we were to begin the deployment of our Pershing IIs and our ground launch cruise missiles in Germany, England and various other countries of Europe. The Russians were threatening that in the event we did that, they would walk out of the talks.
But my opposite member, Ambassador Yuli Kvitsinsky on the Soviet side, had described to me a big review conference that they had called where they were going to definitize their policy with respect to the INF negotiations. And he said unless we got something done quickly, that would be definitized in a way which would not be favorable to further progress.
I thought he was right, so I came back with a proposal that he and I see whether we couldn't, by ourselves, work out concessions on both sides which would make possible a summit meeting between Brezhnev and the President later in the year. So we tried to figure out how to have offsetting concessions on the two sides which -- if simultaneously agreed to by our two governments -- would in fact cure this problem and make a true peace possible between us.
We came up with a piece of paper which both of us agreed to support with our governments. He wasn't very hopeful that he would be able to get support in his government. I was hopeful that I could get support in my government, but it was quite different than anything that had been cleared by our administration in advance. When I took it back and took it up with the President and his immediate advisors, they were really quite impressed with it. They thought this really might be the breakthrough everybody had been looking for.
If Kvitsinsky found support for this in Moscow, he would let me know through a man in their embassy in Washington. But the weeks went by, and I never did hear from this man in their embassy in Washington. So I became persuaded that he hadn't found any support amongst the Russians. Then later, people on the U.S. side began to object, so the whole thing met an early death.
Was it similar to what eventually resolved the talks?
Paul Nitze: Not quite. But it did have one great impact. When it leaked that Kvitsinsky and I had arrived at a deal between us, which might have been acceptable to the two sides, people in Europe were fairly convinced. When they found out that I had tried this, they became persuaded that the U.S. wasn't really trying to block negotiations. We were truly trying to find a way to make progress in this field. Many people had the illusion that the Americans weren't really prepared to work something out with the Soviets, and that got thoroughly eliminated. They knew we were really trying.
After that, the first real progress came during the summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. Initially, there were no great expectations for that meeting. Can you tell us about that? What were your expectations?
Paul Nitze: We knew more about what the Soviet position was going to be than the public had been led to believe.
Ambassador Dobrynin, who was the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, had gone off to India to meet with the new Indian prime minister. And in the course of his discussions there, he had said, "This meeting in Reykjavik is going to be a much more important meeting than the world has realized today. When Mr. Gorbachev arrives there, he is going to make really very substantial concessions to the American side, and the Americans will overestimate those concessions and they will demand more, and then we will turn the tables on them. We will then hold them up to public scorn around the world for having blocked the chances for real progress." When we heard this report of what Dobrynin had told the Indians, then the question was, well what should we do? Should we call the meeting off? Because earlier, the Soviets had told us this was going to be a very pro forma meeting, not going to discuss anything much, it was only going to talk about INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) and about nothing else. So this meeting should be called off, or should we go forward with it? My recommendation, we should go forward with it. We should await Mr. Gorbachev's marvelous concessions. We should then say we take all those concessions, but we shouldn't give anything more. Therefore we should come out winning without cost out of these negotiations.
Mr. Shultz agreed, the others agreed. So we went in having some idea what was going to happen. We were prepared to meet the propaganda attack that we had barred real progress. So that's what happened that afternoon. Gorbachev had made really quite substantial concessions, so that the real test came during that night session where Akhromeyev and I were negotiating between us.
We rather suspected that we were being set up for propaganda offensive by the composition of the Soviet delegation. Generally the Soviet delegations had been one-third KGB, one-third military, and one-third Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But in this delegation, there were no visible KGB people, half were propaganda types -- people who were the editors of newspapers or propaganda organizations, people who make public statements. All these people were really masters of the propaganda art. They were also professionals in the substantive end, but it was clear that the whole trend of the Soviet team was for the purposes of propaganda exploitation.
Was there a moment in these negotiations when you realized that a real breakthrough was possible, that something had changed?
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Paul Nitze: There was indeed. It occurred in the middle of the night, on the first night of the negotiations at Reykjavik. During the morning, President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev had met at some length, and they had made some serious progress. After they adjourned, at five in the afternoon, the President came back and talked to the rest of us. He said that two teams would meet during the night to carry on the negotiations. One team would deal with the national security issues, the defense issues. They would be headed on the Soviet side by Marshal Akhromeyev, who was Chief of Staff of the Soviet military forces, and on the American side would be a team headed by me. We were to meet with the Soviet team at the Hoffdie house where the President and Mr. Gorbachev had met during the afternoon. We were to meet at eight o'clock p.m., and we were to do our best. We were given no further instruction than just to conduct these negotiations as best we could.
So we arrived at eight o'clock and Marshal Akhromeyev was there waiting for us, and we sat down and we negotiated for one hour, for another hour, for another hour. We agreed to go through all the various issues one by one, and if we got to a deadlock on one issue we would move on to another. So we had covered all the issues two or three times, but the same problem was blocking further progress. On the Soviet side, they insisted on having equal reductions, item by item, from where the two sides were at that time. This would result in a 50 percent reduction on both sides, item by item. I was insisting that the outcome should be even between the two sides. Perhaps that outcome could be 50 percent lower than the net of all the present divergences between the two sides, but we should get there by unequal reductions between the two sides, to an equal end point. That affected everything we were negotiating on.
At two o'clock in the morning, Marshal Akhromeyev suddenly rose from his chair and said that he was leaving, and I thought that was the end of the negotiations, at least for that night. But, then he turned at the door as he was leaving the room, and he said, "I will be back at three [o'clock in the morning]." So, Bob Leonard, who was the White House member of my team, he and I talked about it and we decided to go to the hotel at which Secretary George Shultz was staying and wake him up, and tell him exactly where we were in the negotiations and get guidance from him as to what we should do next. So we went to the hotel, woke George Shultz up, and he met us in the sitting room attached to his bedroom, and we sat there while Bob and I described, blow by blow, how the negotiations had gone to that point. Part of the difficulty had been on our side. Some of my team wouldn't let me do some of the things that I wanted to do. They finally were unanimous against my making the concessions to the Soviet side that I thought might be necessary in order to get the negotiations really moving, but finally at the end of all of this, Mr. Shultz said, "Paul, you go back there and do the best job you can and don't let yourself be diverted by divergences on your own side." Bob Leonard and I went back and rejoined the others there and Marshal Akhromeyev walked in and he sat down and he said, "I'm authorized to change the position which I have been insisting upon up to now." We on our side agree to look for an equal end point through unequal reductions. So that on the main thing that had been blocking us, apparently Mr. Gorbachev had authorized him to move over to our position, and it was at that point that I thought with that basic change in the Soviet position, we probably could move on from there to really, finally working out an agreement that we could live with, and which they would accept.
In spite of that, once the Soviets had accepted your position to go to an equal outcome, you started talking about some dramatic reductions in nuclear weapons.
Paul Nitze: We did. We made some very real progress in how to go about designing a START (strategic arms reduction) agreement. We developed counting rules as to how you would count bombers carrying anti-gravity bombs, which would have hung us up for months and months. We discussed how you would count cruise missiles of various ranges and various types. So we made an immense amount of progress during those few hours, from three o'clock a.m. to 6:30 a.m. when the meeting broke up.
In the talks between President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev, there was talk of even more sweeping changes. Almost a complete elimination of nuclear weapons. To what extent were the advisors on both sides involved in that? Were you surprised when you found out what the President was discussing with Gorbachev?
Paul Nitze: That all came about at the luncheon the next day after this long all-night session. The morning session did not make much progress. Then it was decided to continue the session for one more afternoon. It was agreed to have a luncheon between (Soviet Foreign minister) Edvard Shevardnadze and Mr. Shultz, and each one could have some advisors with them. I was on Mr. Shultz's left-hand side and Bob Leonard was on his right.
Mr. Shultz was trying to summarize the discussion so far between the President and Mr. Gorbachev, and what issues remained to be decided. Shevardnadze interrupted and said, "There is no use in doing that. There is only one issue which we should be discussing. And that is whether or not you agree not to deploy SDI for a period of ten years." That caused people on both sides of Mr. Shultz to begin trying to work out how one would respond to that.
Leonard, and the admiral who was his boss, came up with a piece of paper which they had also cleared with Richard Perle, who was sitting on that end. It was a paper which proposed that we would be prepared to follow a 50 percent reduction in long-range strategic weapons, which included bombers and submarine-based missiles and so forth, in the first five years, but following with an agreement for both sides to eliminate all the remaining ballistic missiles in the second five years. If we could get rid of all ballistic missiles, we would also agree not to deploy defenses against them. This was agreed to by the President, and everyone at the meeting on the U.S. side, that this was how we should answer the Soviets, and that is what the President did propose.
But in the discussion, Gorbachev kept insisting that the only thing that he would agree to was the total elimination of all strategic systems, not just ballistic missiles. At one point, the President got somewhat confused about the distinction between strategic systems and ballistic missiles, and I think he led Mr. Gorbachev to believe that he, the President, also inclined to the elimination of the remaining strategic systems in the second five-year period. Mr. Shultz quickly corrected him and pointed out to him that his earlier position, the one he really meant, was that there had to be an elimination of ballistic missiles on two sides, not strategic systems. That distinction is very important indeed. Because we were fully equal to the Soviets with respect to the non-ballistic missile systems. We had better bombers, better systems of all kinds other than ballistic. Their great advantage was in these big, heavy ballistic missiles. So if we could get rid of all the ballistic missiles, we would have been way ahead of the game.
Did you get a sense at that meeting of Gorbachev as a gambler? Someone willing to change things in a radical way in order to enhance his own position?
Paul Nitze: No, I didn't get that impression. I got the feeling that he was being very careful to stick to the position that he had outlined before the meeting, so he wasn't about to get misled into agreeing to what we were proposing. What we were proposing technically met the demand he had made. We were prepared to live without the deployment of SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative -- a space-based defense system) for ten years, but the conditions under which we were prepared to do that were very much to our advantage, not to the Soviet advantage.
That's what caused Gorbachev to walk out. On the U.S. side it was Gorbachev's definition of what was a laboratory that caused the President to say "No, I will not agree." Gorbachev was insisting that work could only be done in a laboratory, and a laboratory was a thing in four walls, and that wasn't our understanding of where one did experiments, particularly with space systems. One did them in the atmosphere. We were talking about laboratory experiments, but to have them just within four walls seemed to the President to be intolerable.
When the meeting broke up, and Mr. Gorbachev got up and left his meeting with the President and all the Soviet team followed after Mr. Gorbachev. I was standing at the bottom of the stairs. The meeting between the President and Gorbachev was on the ground floor and the room where we secondary people had been meeting - and been up for 48 hours - was up above it. I'd come down the stairs to be there to see what was going on, and I was standing right on the bottom step when the Soviet team walked out the door from this hearing room on the ground floor. The last person out was Marshal Akhromeyev. He turned to me and he said that, "It wasn't my fault, Mr. Nitze." What he meant by that was the breakup hadn't been due to his demanding it. He hadn't wanted to see the meeting break up in the way it did.
Did you ever have the chance to discuss this afterward with the others who participated in these negotiations?
Paul Nitze: I have.
Shortly after Reykjavik, I sat down with Marshal Akhromeyev. Marshal Akhromeyev is ten years younger than I, but I think he looks ten years older. I was complimenting Marshal Akhromeyev on his stamina during that all-night session because he never tired at all. He returned the compliment. So, Marshal Akhromeyev got along very well together personally, in part because we'd had this intense experience. Very few people are locked in really intense negotiations beginning at eight o'clock (in the evening) and lasting until 6:30 the next morning; not everybody has that opportunity.
We are now (1990) seeing a tremendous change in our relationship with the Soviets and inside the Soviet Union. What has prompted the change?
Paul Nitze: The Soviets themselves have come to a conclusion that they'd gone too far, devoted too much of the gross national product, of their productive capabilities, to this contest. After all, their economy basically is perhaps half the size of that of the United States. They've got more people and just as many resources as we have, but it is not as an advanced economy as ours. But, for them to put the effort that they put into it, which really is as great or greater than the effort we put into it, and it meant that instead of, when we have put 5.5 to 6 percent of our Gross National Product in defense, they were putting 25 to 30 percent of their Gross National Product into defense. That was so good, so demanding, required such enormous sacrifices on such a great percentage of their population, that it was intolerable after a period of time. And, it's intolerable still today. It's hard to see how they are going to come back from damage which was done by that excessive effort.
Let's talk about Gorbachev. Tell us when you first encountered Gorbachev and what your view was of him then. How has that view evolved?
Paul Nitze: I first encountered Mr. Gorbachev as a part of Secretary Shultz's team when he began negotiating directly with Mr. Gorbachev. I guess that was in '85 or '86. Thereafter I was with Mr. Shultz whenever he negotiated with Mr. Gorbachev and with Shevardnadze. We used to go every other month to Moscow to see Shevardnadze for the foreign ministers' meeting, but Gorbachev would always see us and give us four or five hours of conversation. When Mr. Gorbachev came to Washington, of course, we would see both men at those meetings.
It was a very frequent matter to talk to Mr. Gorbachev and I think I got to know him as well as the next man on our side. I was very impressed with him right away. He seemed to me a very intelligent man. He was very lucid, clear, and didn't let himself be pushed about. He knew what he wanted to do, was forceful in the way he presented it and I came to the conclusion that if he had been an American he would have risen to some high position in the United States as a Director of Finance or some position. He was a true strategist who had some idea as to where he wanted the Soviet Union to be, and some idea as to how to get from where the Soviet Union was to where he thought would be a better position for it to be. I estimated what he was going to do next on the basis of my appreciation of him as a great strategist. And, I found that every time I was wrong. I never got it right once during those years when I looked upon him as being a strategist. So, I decided there was something wrong with my hypothesis as to what kind of a man he was and what made him tick. One would do better if one had started from the premise that he was a great tactician, that he knew how to see the divisions that existed amongst his opponents and concentrate on one group of them and get them off in some isolated position, then hop on them, suddenly by surprise and totally do them in and eliminate them from the landscape so he didn't have to worry about that group any more. After that decision, I found that my estimates as to what he would do in the future were right about 50 percent of the time, but only 50 percent of the time. I still didn't have it right. Then, watching him when he came to the United States, went first to Canada and then came and talked before our Congress -- this was not too long ago -- he was full of self-confidence. He wasn't at all discouraged about anything, even though everything was falling apart back in the USSR at the same time. How could that be? He was too intelligent both as a strategist and tactician to not be concerned about that. I came to the conclusion he was neither a strategist nor a tactician. He was, in fact, a Zen Buddhist, that he believed in "the Force," and he believed that the Force was with him, and that he was closer to understanding the Force and the Force was going to carry him on to great victories, no matter what the strategic or tactical situation happened to be. That's why he radiated such confidence at all times. And, from that moment on, my predictions as to what he was going to do next have been almost totally right.
Except in recent months, I have changed my view. The Force isn't wholly with him. His timing is wrong. He should have been moving more rapidly in order to stay with the Force. I think he has gotten slow in his reactions and it is not necessarily in tune with it. He was very adept at staying on the top, and now it's gotten a little bit ahead of him.
What about the Strategic Defense Initiative -- the space-based defense proposal some people called "Star Wars?" Did you see SDI as an actual defense system against the Soviets, or was it really more effective as a psychological and economic lever against the Soviets?
Paul Nitze: I was never quite sure the ideas behind SDI could be translated into workable military systems. I made a speech outlining what I thought the criteria must be before we really should go into SDI deployment. The systems had to be effective -- had to be able to shoot down these missiles. It had to be cost effective, it had to be less costly for us to add to our SDI deployment than it would be for the Soviet side to add to its offensive, to defeat SDI. And it had to be defensible against a direct attack, because that would be the logical course for the Soviets, to direct their initial effort at defeating the SDI and destroying the components thereof. Those were the major elements: that it be effective, that it be cost effective at the margin, that it be defensible against a concentrated attack against SDI itself. I outlined it in this speech, and it met with wide approval. They weren't original ideas, I borrowed them from Admiral Watkins and he from somebody else, but I think they were more succinct and more clearly stated in that speech of mine than elsewhere. They became known as the "Nitze Criteria," and they were adopted by the Reagan administration and by Congress, and they are now part of the law, so it is illegal to begin the deployment of any SDI system unless it meets those three criteria.
The Soviets were terribly preoccupied with our SDI program. Was their fear that we would actually come up with a workable system, or was their fear that the competition to come up with a system would cost them so dearly that they would not be able to keep up?
Paul Nitze: Aren't the two interrelated? If they can't keep up, then we might really have an effective system, if we have mastered the technology.
Mr. Gorbachev, I believe, was truly impressed with the tenacity and the will with which Mr. Reagan continued to back SDI against the most ardent threats, explanations, opposition that Mr. Gorbachev could advance against it. I think he finally came to the conclusion that Mr. Reagan could not be that determined to preserve SDI unless he knew something about the SDI program that he -- Gorbachev and his advisors -- did not know. And so, he took it very seriously indeed. Perhaps more seriously than I thought, having tried to get the scientists to explain to me how it was going to work -- being unable to get them to tell me how they were going to meet these criteria. He (Gorbachev) was more persuaded about its potential efficacy than I was.
Gorbachev was convinced because the President seemed convinced?
Paul Nitze: Yes, the president was convinced by people that I don't think should have been able to convince him, but that's another matter.
You don't find the case for SDI nearly as persuasive as its most ardent supporters, do you?
Paul Nitze: I don't, no. Because I don't think they have come up with a program which would meet these three criteria, even if it worked as designed.
Let's go back to your childhood and go in chronological order to some extent. Did you have any sense when you were young of what you wanted to do with your life?
Paul Nitze: Well, it took me some time to make up my mind.
My father was a professor of French literature and languages and was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, a most distinguished faculty. But, I watched what they were able to do during World War I and they were ineffective. No one really listened to them. And, it seemed to me that the things that were going on in the world were dangerous, weren't being handled right, and I would like to be involved in trying to do better than my father and his friends were able to do. And, I thought one needed to go into something different than academia in order to be effective in world affairs.
And you wanted to have some influence on world affairs?
Paul Nitze: I did indeed. I thought that World War I had been a tragedy beyond measure. We lived through parts of World War I, and I was just horrified.
How old were you then?
Paul Nitze: At the beginning of the war I was seven and we were in Austria, climbing mountains in 1914 when the Austrian Archduke was murdered at Sarajevo. And, that's what set off the powder chain that led to the outbreak of World War I. We saw it happen, we saw the mountaineers in Austria being mobilized for war. My father decided it had become dangerous in Austria, decided to go to a safe country. So, he took us all off to Germany and we arrived in Munich on the day that Germany declared war on Russia. Bombs were thrown in the railroad station. Then, we lived through the early days of the war when the Germans were marching to the western front. Most of them were eventually killed in that war. But, we saw the wounded come back, so the horror of that war -- I had a second cousin who was killed on the eastern front by the Russians at the battle of Tannenberg (Königsberg), where the Russians were defeated. He lost his life in that. We finally got out through Holland and came back to the United States, but that memory of what happened during World War I stuck with me. It still sticks with me. It's one of the most moving, dreadful events that I lived through.
Was that when you started to think that there had to be a better way to deal with these things, and that you would like to be a part of that process?
Paul Nitze: I am convinced that is true, but particularly because of the disasters of the peace.
I went to a school in Chicago called the Elementary School, associated with the University of Chicago, and we used to have not just a current events course there, but we also used to act out some of the big events that were taking place in little plays that were put on by the students. And, I remember acting the part of Walther Rathenau, who was the representative of Germany in the peace negotiations, and finally had to sign the surrender terms. And, then later I read (John Maynard) Keynes's book on the economic consequences of the war and became persuaded that this was -- that that peace treaty was a totally unjust, very negative peace treaty that had in it the seeds of a second world war, and that this was another horror beyond belief. One really ought to do what one could to see whether one could avoid a second world war.
Another experience you've mentioned in the past, that may have taught you a couple of things, was your association with the Scotti Brothers.
Paul Nitze: The Elementary School, as I said, was associated with the University of Chicago. It was later called the Lab School. It was really founded by John Dewey. Those were largely the children of people who were at the University of Chicago, and of the rich Jewish families who lived in the South Side of Chicago. But it was totally different from the community within which the university was situated, and that was a very tough, hard-boiled community. All the gang life of Chicago originated there in the South Side.
There was a school called the Ray School between our house and the school to which I went, and I would have to pass by that every day. And there, the boys would pick on me and beat me up and make life miserable. The people who were most nasty to me were people from a gang -- it was on the same block that our house was on -- called the Musik Brothers. They were the ones who really made my life nasty. But then, there was another group, a gang on the next block, called the Scotti Brothers, run by the elder Scotti brother. He was red-haired, tall, thin, and a true leader, charismatic leader. I joined his gang because he would protect me against the Musik Brothers. I did whatever the older Scotti brother wanted me to do. One time he gave me a directive to rob the construction site across the way from our house, where a whole row of houses were being built and liberate them (the tools) for the use of the gang. And, I liberated them, and turned them over to the gang.
What did you turn over to them?
Paul Nitze: The tools that were being used to build that house. The saws, hammers, pliers and things of that kind.
Did that endear you to the leader of the Scotti gang?
Paul Nitze: It did indeed. I never confessed that to anyone else!
Do you think that experience with the Scotti Brothers taught you something about the exercise of power?
Paul Nitze: It did indeed, and it also taught me something about leadership. The elder Scotti was a true leader. All the members of his gang were extremely loyal to him, and he defended them all. By the time I was 21, and came back to Chicago, all the members of the various gangs had all killed each other or been arrested, hung, or something or other. Not just the Musik Brothers or the Scotti Brothers, but also the Colosimo gang and the other gangs in the neighborhood. There was hardly a man of those that were still alive. That gang warfare in Chicago was bloody, intense and destructive.
What were you like in school? What kind of activities did you pursue?
Paul Nitze: We are all interested in athletics, so I played baseball and soccer and football, but I was not a naturally talented athlete. There were classmates who were really very good athletes. One of my classmates was George Lott, who later became a world famous tennis player. We had a teacher that taught us how to throw a baseball, and George could pitch a curve by the second day. I never was able to pitch a decent curve ball, but George could do everything right off the bat. Another classmate was Gene Goodwillie. He was the first high school athlete to run the 100-yard dash in less than 10 seconds. So being just an ordinary kid surrounded by much better athletes gave one some sense of humility.
What books made a big impression on you when you were growing up?
Paul Nitze: I first of all remember reading Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon and other Tom Swift stories, an infinite number of Tom Swift stories. Then the Rover Boys were very much my generation. Then The Boys of 1776 which was a very inspirational story about the Revolutionary War. After that, Hans and the Silver Hand, then after that, Treasure Island, but particularly The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, which was an absolutely glorious book. Then after that, Charles Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth. I'm still in love with the girl with the violet eyes which (the hero) was passionate for in The Cloister and the Hearth. After that, I guess also Conrad made the deepest impression upon me. My sister for a while was ill and was threatened with the loss of her eyesight. So, my mother used to read out loud to her and I would sit and listen while she read various things from Conrad and that made a deep impression upon me. After that, I guess Dostoyevsky, and other Russian novelists, and then Kafka. But those are later.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Paul Nitze: First I decided I wanted to be an artist, a painter. That didn't work, I wasn't talented enough for that. So I decided I wanted to be an art dealer and collect art, but I didn't have enough money. I did acquire a few things and I have loved it ever since. I think we have a glorious collection of things today. When I was 16, I went to Austria with my mother. We got to Vienna at the height of the Austrian inflation when the currency was virtually worthless. There was an exhibition of new paintings, modern art. I disliked most of it, but there were two paintings I bought at that time, in 1923, and still have them. Both very handsome I think, great paintings. They were by a man by the name of Hans Grüss. One of them is right there. At one point I thought of becoming an art dealer, but I came to have a distaste for art dealers. They had converted what I thought was a noble interest into a "dollars first" kind of corruption of that instinct.
How about your studies? What interested you most in school?
Paul Nitze: I studied mathematics first, then physics. I decided that I was not a good enough mathematician to go down that route. So then I studied the history and literature of the Renaissance, and fell in love with the beauty of the Italian Renaissance, but I decided there wasn't a career in that. So I took up economics and sociology, and graduated from Harvard in the field of economics and sociology.
You mentioned two or three times that there were things that interested you, but that you decided you weren't talented enough in that area. Did you often approach something and decide it wasn't right for you because your aptitude wasn't good enough to succeed in that area?
Paul Nitze: Yes, that did strike me from time to time. I was interested in too many things and therefore I wasn't concentrating enough on one thing. With respect to that mathematics and physics problem, it wasn't that I wasn't good at math. I really was quite good at mathematics, but I found that with integral calculus, you really had to do some work. It didn't just come off the top of your head the way differential calculus did. I was not in a mood at that particular time to do the necessary kind of work over a long period of time.
Have you ever regretted that, or thought that you might have been a scientist?
Paul Nitze: Yes I have. I used to think that. I've always been very interested in science. I learned enough about science so that I've always been able to talk coherently to the great mathematicians and the great physicists. Many of them have become my friends.
What about your parents? Did they have a sense of where they wanted you to head in your life?
Paul Nitze: I think my father would have liked me to have become a great philologist, a philosopher, a teacher, an academic type. But he understood early that it wasn't my nature. He didn't try to make me do something that I wasn't really equipped to do. My mother left it up to me. I had a feeling that I didn't get enough guidance from my parents. Perhaps it was good for me, I don't know. But at the time I was unhappy with it. I would have liked more advice.
Were there teachers that had more of an influence on your life?
Paul Nitze: When I was in high school in Chicago, there was a professor, Barnard, who taught us Greek Literature and History. He had an enormous influence on me and upon others in that class. He was a first class professor, and he inspired us with an admiration for Greek culture and the great Greek authors which stuck with us forever after. And there was a mathematics professor -- he made mathematics much clearer than anyone else had. Then there was a professor at Harvard by the name of Rafael Demos who taught Plato. His lectures were so moving, I can remember weeping at the end of a lecture because it was so moving. Then there was a professor of sociology by the name of Carver. Some of the ideas he started with, he would then carry to a point where the limits of their applicability became clear. That taught me that truth is finite and definable within a given area, but when you carry it too far out, it breaks down. You saw what the consequences were of an intellectually consistent set of ideas. It's true, for example, in physics. Classical physics is still true, except when you get out to very high velocities and very small things, and very great distances. But in everyday life, Newtonian mechanics works perfectly. It's only when you get way out to the extremes that it doesn't work. That is true of many things, where you have to be careful if you carry logic out too far. You have to bring it back to reality from time to time.
When did you become interested in business, finance and economics?
Paul Nitze: I had that in the back of my mind since the time I was at Harvard. I started work as a cost accountant in a paper mill, and then moved to office manager of a box factory in Bridgeport. I finally resigned from that and did a study on whether or not to invest money in Germany in 1929, and came back from that having determined that anyone who invested money in Germany in those days should have his head examined. That report impressed Mr. Clarence Dillon of Dillon, Read and Company, and he hired me. I began to work on Wall Street on October 1, which was just three weeks before the great stock market crash, which began the Great Depression. I lived through the worst part of the economic situation in the United States and in the world, and came out alive financially, having learned a great deal.
How much role do you think luck has played in what you have done and what you have accomplished?
Paul Nitze: Enormous role. My father, being a philologist, had looked into the origins of our name, Nitze, and came to the conclusion that it came from the same Sanskrit root that the word nike in Greek comes from, which means victory. So we were brought up with the tradition that Nitze meant victory, and that luck was on our side. That's a great belief to have. I do believe it to be true that luck has been on my side. Many of the things that seemed to be totally unfortunate at the time turned out, in hindsight, to have been very fortunate developments.
When I was a senior at college I became ill with infectious jaundice and was very ill and couldn't go to graduate school. The fact that I went straight into business and learned something about accounting and running an office early in life, when you can really absorb it fast, turned out to be very fortunate indeed. I've never regretted not having gone straight to graduate school, thereafter. Having entered Wall Street just days before the Great Depression, I lost my shirt right away of course, as far as assets in hand. Boy, that was great experience, to live through all of the disasters that can befall one in the economic world, and see it happen to others. How do you weave through those kinds of economic difficulties? Learned there is an invaluable lesson in learning how to deal with complicated financial problems. So, those of us who had jobs during the Great Depression, I think we learned more and learned it faster than one could have learned otherwise. So that generation of Wall Street fellows, we all ended up knowing something about not just economics in practice, but world finance as well.
Were there people outside of academia who taught you things in life?
Paul Nitze: Mr. Clarence Dillon, who was my first real boss on Wall Street, was the most brilliant man I've ever worked with or for. I think he had an extremely intelligent mind, and I learned a great deal about analyzing situations. Well, the main lesson that I learned from him was that there was a contrast between analyzing a situation, and then doing something about it. Those were two different worlds. When you are analyzing something, you want to be coldly objective. You want to try to find the facts, find everybody's advice about it. Look at it without prior bias of any kind. But, then once you'd made up your mind, what needed to be done, then you wanted to change your personality. You didn't want to be disturbed by re-thinking it, you wanted to act. And, you want to act decisively, and produce the intended result without deviation, and only if you got way off, if it turned out that you were way wrong, did you want to reconsider what you had made your decision on.
Was there anything else about your philosophy, your attitude toward life, that was changed by those Depression years?
Paul Nitze: I don't believe so really. There was the temptation to change it. I can remember having a long discussion one day in the very depths of the Depression with two of my friends, both of whom had joined the Communist party. Wasn't it true that things had to be changed? The old pattern of doing things had led to this horrible situation, with 20 million unemployed in the United States, with people starving. Clearly, things did have to be changed. But should one go all the way to adopting the Communist idea? They thought one should, and that it was merely lack of courage that kept me from becoming a Communist. I could not accept the idea of the total unification of people's minds to one set of ideas, laid down by some dictator. Is that what life is all about? I came to the conclusion that it was not. So I would not join the Communist party and condemned them for so doing. But I gained a certain certainty about that judgment, which I think stood me in good stead thereafter.
There are some things you have mentioned reading that influenced your thinking. Spengler's Decline of the West for instance.
Paul Nitze: I read that later. It appeared clear from where I was in Wall Street, that things were going on in Europe -- in Germany and in the USSR and Italy -- which seemed to be extremely dangerous, things that I didn't fully understand. I thought the way to learn more about them was to go back to Harvard for graduate school. So I resigned from Dillon, Read and Company to see whether I couldn't find out more about those things. Amongst other things, I studied Spengler. One of the courses I took was a course given my a man named Sorokin, who had been Minister of Labor in the Kerensky government in Moscow. He told me that in this course I would learn what was wrong with Spengler. The truth of the matter was, Spengler was a much greater man than Sorokin. And Sorokin himself on the last day of the course admitted that. He said, "You know Mr. Nitze, Spengler was a great man. I am merely trying to make this course interesting."
A lot of people have brains and potential and work hard, and yet don't succeed as much as you have in your chosen areas. Why do you think you have succeeded where others have not?
Paul Nitze: Well, I did give myself lots of chances to succeed. I didn't have much money, so the risks that I could take in the financial world were small, but I tried to find those risky, high-growth ventures that I could make some real money in. I guess 90 percent of them failed, perhaps 95 percent. But I finally hit on one or two that really did work and became tremendous successes, so I made a lot of money early.
What do you draw from that? You have to take a lot of chances?
Paul Nitze: That was certainly true in my case. But when you do find something that looks as though it is going to turn out well, not to get out on a minor profit. Stay with it and build on it. I stuck with this first one. It was a vitamin company called U.S. Vitamin and Pharmaceutical. My partners in that business sold out after a period of time, but I didn't. I stayed with it right straight through, and the result was we finally sold it to Revlon for a tremendous profit.
Would you say the first big break in your life was meeting Mr. Dillon?
Paul Nitze: That was the first big break. The second was that...
I lost a lot of money for the firm quite soon. And he (Clarence Dillon) ceased to know who I was. I was a non-person. So, after he threw me out -- I was his personal assistant for some years -- and then suddenly I was a non-person. But, then all the other partners in Dillon Read, who had hated me when I was the boss's white-haired boy, they suddenly decided, "Maybe there is some virtue in this fellow that Dillon has stepped upon mightily." So, they took me up and I became a friend of Jim Forrestal's and Dean Mathey's. And then when he (Forrestal) went to Washington, he took me with him to Washington. That's how I ended up in Washington.
At the end of the war, you were in Germany, and you took a look at Hitler's bunker, didn't you?
Paul Nitze: It was shortly after the surrender.
We were down at Flensburg during that period when the Dönitz government was still in command, but their area of jurisdiction was only Flensburg, and a little bit behind it. I had gone down there to interrogate Albert Speer and he was at a place called Glucksburg Castle. But, then we got word from General Rook, our commanding general then, he said, "We are going to arrest all these people two days from now, so you've got two days to finish your interrogation of Speer, and he will no longer be available to you." So on that last day we dropped everything else we were asking about and asked Speer to tell us about the last days in the bunker, and what happened and his attempts to influence Hitler in the last days. So, he described that all to us, and we had one whole day of testimony from him on the last days in the bunker. And, that was all stolen from us by a British man by the name of Trevor-Roper and I think he wrote some book about the last days in the Bunker, all based upon this transcript of our interrogation of Speer. I was furious at the British at that time. We'd also gotten out of Speer the combination to his safe in Munich. And, I sent a fellow, an intelligence officer down there to Munich with the combination and the key to these safes in a bank in Munich. He came back with all the things that we had asked for and they were Speer's private communications directly to Hitler, and Hitler's back to him, and some other reports of one kind or another, but also this trowel, with which Hitler had dedicated the West Wall, that protective wall that he created opposite the Maginot Line to keep the French from attacking into Germany from that area of the world. This engraved, silver trowel I'd proposed that we give to Harvard University, but this was abstracted by a British fellow, a British economist that I loathed. He somehow abstracted it and gave it to Oxford instead. And, there it is in Oxford.
After talking to Speer, you went and visited the bunker. It must have been a pretty eerie experience.
Paul Nitze: It had been pretty well looted by everyone else prior to our arrival, so there wasn't much left there. As I said, the only thing I could pick up was this mother's medal. (A medal which honors mothers with more than eight children).
You also went to see the results of the atomic weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Could you tell us about that?
Paul Nitze: We got there very shortly after it happened. Those atomic weapons were dropped in August of 1945, and we got over there in September. There were three of us heading up this mission to investigate the effects of air power in the Pacific theater, but particularly to do a study of the effects of the atomic weapons dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We finally had a team of some 500 scientists, physicists, weapons experts, damage measuring teams, doctors and psychologists with us.
I had an administrative aide who was working for me, and he was a very able man. I sent him to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see where we were going to be able to put up these 500 scientists to do the investigation. He came back and said, "Mr. Nitze, this isn't the usual kind of place. There is nothing at either place to requisition. Buildings don't exist anymore." I said, "Colonel Strickland, what do you recommend?" He recommended he be sent to Yokosuka where the U.S. Navy headquarters were, where he could talk to the admirals to see what they have to recommend. Maybe they could make some ships available for us. So he came back from that and said, "They have offered you a list of 50 ships you can take your choice from, because there is no way of getting them back to the United States right away, and they are not doing anything, and they'd rather see them occupied than just loafing here. So you can have your choice of five battle ships, and three aircraft carriers, and 42 destroyer escorts, etc." So we selected various ships, putting one in the Nagasaki harbor and another in a harbor near Hiroshima, and we put our men on those ships. We had good communications equipment, a printing plant, and so forth. So the whole thing worked out very well.
When we first got there to look at Hiroshima, literally there was very little standing. But, one was impressed with the fact that the trains were already running through Hiroshima. The railroad tracks weren't damaged. We interrogated the survivors, went to the hospitals and talked to those who had survived, found some very extraordinary things. For instance, a man sitting in a railroad car, with the window closed, the glass had been shattered by the explosion. He was cut badly by the glass, but the window had absorbed most of the radiation, and he survived. While the man sitting opposite him was next to an open window, and received -- he wasn't hit by the flying glass but he had the full radiation, instantaneous radiation, and he died right away. So that you found out all kinds of things from the just the people you talked to, the visual experience of seeing this, that and the other thing which gave you an impression of what these effects were at various distances from the point from which it had been dropped.
After what you saw there, did you think there could be a limited war with nuclear weapons?
Paul Nitze: We were asked, amongst other things, to recommend the organization of our defense forces in preparation for a world in which not only nuclear weapons, but thermonuclear weapons might be possible. We made these recommendations bearing in mind the following points. The first was that other nations would also master the art of making nuclear weapons. Secondly, that the USSR would be amongst those countries, and would be the principal threat to the United States and to its allies. And thirdly, that the power of an individual plane carrying a nuclear weapon was 100 to 250 times as destructive as one carrying the optimum mix of conventional weapons.
Another point was that those weapons were dropped with no warning of any kind. Those Japanese that had gotten into the aircraft shelters, which existed in both cities, they all survived pretty well. Very few of those people were killed. There weren't any defenses against incoming bombers. So you have to imagine a lot of different circumstances than those that actually existed there at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We thought it would be very hard to envisage a war restricted to limited engagements, but they might be necessary to give you the positions you needed to defend yourself against an enemy that had nuclear weapons themselves.
At the time, did you sense the atomic bomb and the H-bomb had changed the course of international politics and diplomacy and military competition? Was there a fundamental change in the way we approach those kinds of issues?
Paul Nitze: Both true and false. Certainly, there was a change. If you increase the destructiveness of weapons by hundreds of fold -- thousands of fold with thermonuclear weapons -- certainly you have an enormous change in what the Soviets would call "degree." But is it really a change in kind? It still was possible, we thought, for one side or the other to come out better than the opponent. If you looked at what would happen if you had a nuclear war and lost it, there was a difference. It was important to try to maintain such degree of superiority as you could over any potential enemy as might be possible. One of the analysts at the RAND Corporation came to the conclusion that the mere existence of nuclear weapons had so changed things that war had become an impossibility. We did not believe that to be true.
At some point people must have seen that there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Paul Nitze: One could try, and that was tried. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report tried to think the problem through, and that was followed with the Baruch Plan. The Baruch Plan proposed that there be a subsidiary of the United Nations which would take title to all the deposits of uranium and thorium and other things which could possibly be used as the raw material for nuclear weapons, and of all the facilities that might be created for the separation of those raw materials into usable material for nuclear weapons. All the testing and development of weapons should be monopolized by this UN agency. The control of this agency was to be in the hands of a three-man group. One representing the USSR, one representing the U.S. and the third, appointed by the United Nations. We presented the Baruch Plan to the Soviets. The Soviets said "Nyet" in unmistakable terms.
They had been working on nuclear weapons themselves for a long period of time during the war. They had learned a great deal from their spies in the United States. We didn't at that time know how much they had learned, but we found out shortly thereafter. They were determined not to be second to us in the nuclear field. They were not going to negotiate with us until they were at least equal, and hopefully from their standpoint, superior to us. So they just had no interest in the Baruch Plan at all.
When people are involved in public life, and have great demands on their time, it's often difficult to balance the professional and the personal. Were you able to do that?
Paul Nitze: I found that the most difficult issues were those where there was a conflict between my family life and my professional government life. And, that became most clear right at the end of the war, when I'd finished my work with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and gotten the final report drafted and it had gone to the press and that was finished. Then should I return to Wall Street, or should I not? And, I was asked by J.H. Whitney whether I would come up and become a managing partner of a new firm that he was creating called J.H. Whitney and Company. He was going to put up all the money, $10 million, and I would have a big interest in the profits because I would be running this business. He and I discussed the various ventures we would go into and we had some very exciting ideas. Right at the end of the war there were lots of things that needed to be done. If somebody had some venture capital at that time, this was a great opportunity. So, we cooked up three or four ideas that we were going to go into right away. And, I came back here to Washington to tell my wife and my children that this was what we were going to do. We had four children; we had a German nurse who took care of the youngest one. I looked around the table, and everybody said, "Yes daddy, if that's what you intend to do, we'll all go with you," but tears were streaming down five faces. I decided maybe this wasn't such a good decision after all. Then a week later, Will Clayton, who was Undersecretary of State, asked me whether I would come and work for him in the State Department. I decided I would not go back to Wall Street because my family didn't want to do so, and I had done that business sort of thing, financially we didn't need to do that and so I followed the demands of family life rather than the demands of a business career, stayed here in Washington and have never regretted it.
That choice has placed you at the center of some fascinating issues and events.
Paul Nitze: That isn't why I did it, really. I did it because of the five weeping faces around the table.
What was it that upset them? The thought of changing schools, moving, neighborhoods?
Paul Nitze: That's right.
After the war, you were very involved in the creation of the Marshall Plan. That began as a rather sketchy outline, didn't it?
Paul Nitze: That's correct. The idea was that something was needed to cure the economic difficulties of world trade, not just our economic situation.
We were in pretty good economic shape, very good economic shape. The problem was that one country after another was going bankrupt because they were spending their gold and dollar reserves, and wanted to buy things from the United States. So we were running a persistent balance and payment surplus with the rest of the world of some $5 to $8 billion per year. And, you could see that over a few years, why the gold and dollar reserves of all the rest of the world would go down to close to zero and trade would stop. And therefore, something had to be done, and had to be done by us in order to limit this drain upon the rest of the world. And, I guess I was the first one to prepare a piece of paper arguing this point and saying we needed to have a plan which would pump something of the order of $5 billion per year into the world economy, over and above what it would earn through sales to the United States.
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Will Clayton took a serious interest in this piece of paper. In the meantime, George Kennan and the Policy Planning staff had been working on the same problem, but they were working on the economic recovery of Europe, and their theory was that if Europe were to recover, then the result would help all the rest of the world.
Those ideas were picked up by Mr. Acheson, and he gave a speech in Mississippi in which he laid them out fairly clearly. That Cleveland, Mississippi speech of Dean Acheson's was well received, but it required more political support. General Marshall had been scheduled, in any case, to give an address at Harvard commencement. So Chip Bohlen was directed to convert the ideas that had already been in Acheson's speech into a much more concise and pointed speech for General Marshall to give at Harvard. If you read the speech today, you will find that there are really only five paragraphs which go to the substance of the point. Chip did an outstanding job of drafting those five paragraphs. One of the points he made was that the program was directed not against any enemy, but was directed against destruction, disease, and despair in Europe. And that we would welcome any country that was prepared to join in, including the USSR. The plan was really to be developed by the Europeans themselves. If they would develop a plan of mutual self-help to make economic recovery in Europe work promptly, then we would survey what we could do in order to help, since our help was absolutely necessary.
That concept was the content of the speech that General Marshall gave at Harvard. The idea really got off the ground when it was picked up by Ernest Bevin in England and he put together what was called the CEEC, the Committee for European Economic Cooperation, with Sir Oliver Franks as Chairman. I worked very closely with Oliver Franks to see to it that there was coordination between what they were coming up with, and what we thought might be salable in the United States. The upshot was that we finally did get the thing translated from being just a concept, to being a plan which had been worked out by the Europeans, which we had gone over in detail, so we could really defend it before the Congress and get the authorizations and appropriations to make it work.
How bad was the economy in Europe at that time, and what did the Marshall Plan do to change that?
Paul Nitze: It was very bad indeed.
The factories (in Europe) had pretty well closed down that could produce civilian goods. There not being enough civilian goods to attract -- so there wasn't enough for the farmers to buy things and sell their wheat and agriculture surplus and get supplies too. So the farmers ceased to make food available. Coal wasn't available. Coal wasn't adequately produced, and everything was grinding to a stop. Clearly the Communists thought that they were going to take over all of Europe as a result of the economic difficulties in Germany and France, Belgium, Holland and England as well. I went to a meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions in London at that time, and the whole discussion was, "What European country would be the first to join the Communist ranks?" I think the vote was that it would be Italy, and that the second France, the third Germany, and that Britain wouldn't succumb to internal communism for maybe two years. But, the view was that the Communist takeover of Europe couldn't be delayed by anybody for more than two years from that time.
Because things were so desperate?
Paul Nitze: That's right, and getting worse, and the Communists were determined to see that things did get worse until they achieved political power.
So the idea of the Marshall Plan was to jump-start the western European economies.
Paul Nitze: That's right, but not make it directed against the Communists, which it wasn't. But then Mr. Stalin refused to have anything to do with it. The Czechs wanted to become participants in the Marshall Plan, but he refused to let them do that. It was that which created the division between East and Western Europe.
If you look at Eastern Europe today (1990), the state of the economy, the inability to provide goods and feed its people, some might compare Eastern Europe today to Western Europe sometime shortly after World War II.
Paul Nitze: That's correct. One thing though, that I think one tends to forget, is that the Communists were much better at it right after the war than they have been in the long run. For a long period of time, that command economy of theirs seemed to work quite well, and seemed to work better than we were doing in the west, certainly better than Europe was doing, where nothing seemed to work. It's only over the years that the deficiencies of the Communist way of doing things have become manifest.
Many of those things were very demanding not only of your time, but also in terms of energy and concentration. What did you do to keep fresh and creative? Did you have hobbies?
Paul Nitze: I had a particular philosophy as to how to keep oneself healthy, and that was not to do regular exercise of any kind, but to beat your body up at least once every two months. Go off and shoot quail, ski hard, play five sets of tennis a day, or do some outrageous thing that got your body used to adjusting to violent change. It was my theory that this was a better way of maintaining your health than regular exercise. People who did regular exercise got into a rut, then some strange thing would happen and they would get a heart attack. I thought my method was much better. Doctors all disapproved of it, thought this was outrageous. But, I did follow that for many years.
Now I have decided that maybe the years have caught up with me, so I do need to do some daily exercise, which I do today. But I'm almost 84 now, so it's a different situation.
In those days you were going for the periodic purge.
Paul Nitze: And loved it.
That did seem to be a good strategy to prepare you for the unforeseen events of working in public service.
Paul Nitze: It did indeed.
One time during the Marshall Plan days, when I had to defend the Marshall Plan appropriations before the House Appropriations Committee, I appeared for some, I think it was 38 consecutive sessions before John Taber, who was the chairman of that committee. During that course of those sessions, which were stretched over three or four months, I lost 15 pounds and was a mere wraith of my former self at the end of those hearings. We finally got it approved by the Committee, but that was a long and tedious and hard row to hoe.
You were also very involved in the arms build-up that began after World War II, and for many years thereafter. You participated in a lot of the early studies. Looking back, was there anything the U.S. could have done differently, or were our actions largely dictated by the actions of others?
Paul Nitze: I find it hard, even looking back with hindsight, to see how we could have done things radically different, and more constructively.
There are those who say that we grossly overestimated the dangers of a Soviet attack. We didn't really think there was going to be a Soviet attack. We knew the damage that they had suffered during World War II and that it was unlikely that they would wish to physically attack Europe. The question was really one of a longer range question. Weren't they really dedicated to the idea that the world as a whole needed to end up with one side or the other being victorious? This was certainly the essence of Marxist-Leninism that either they or we were going to win in the long run and they were dedicated to the proposition that the world should be a socialist, a Communist world. Now, were we right in estimating that that was their long range doctrine? I think everything we found since confirms that that was true. It wasn't a matter of immediate risk of war, it was what was the whole campaign aimed at. And, I don't think we got that wrong. So, I don't see how one could have had another option other than to maintain deterrence during that long period, and do what was necessary and in order to contain the Soviet Union and keep it from expanding further.
They had been gaining by a continuing process of expansion. We had to contain them if we were going to bring about long-term change in the Soviet Union. Maybe we didn't do this as intelligently day by day as we could have, but I think the basic policy was right, and today it's demonstrable that it was right.
As far back as the 1940s you believed we would eventually prevail over the Soviets because of our economic power, that they just would not be able to keep up with us. That seems to be what in fact happened, though it took a little bit longer than you might have anticipated.
Paul Nitze: Oh much longer, yes. George Kennan and I, when we were cooking up the containment policy, the question arose, "How long do you have to continue containment to make it work?" My recollection was that he thought it would take ten to 15 years. And I thought it was one or two generations. But both of us were way off. It took 40 years.
And several periods of doubling and tripling our military expenditures to make the point.
Paul Nitze: Right. The amazing thing was that the American people kept supporting it.
Are you amazed by that?
Paul Nitze: I was at the time, and I am in retrospect.
Modesty aside, how do you feel about the contributions you have made in the areas you have been involved in, diplomacy, negotiations, U.S./Soviet relations?
Paul Nitze: I think I have been extremely lucky. I have been around at a time when important things needed to be done. I had that feeling of participation in great events. Dean Acheson called his book Present at the Creation, and in a way I was also present at the creation.
You often worked with Dean Acheson, during the war and in the post-war Truman administration, when he became Secretary of State. What was your opinion of him?
Paul Nitze: He was one of the most brilliant men that I have ever worked with. Sharp, witty, knowledgeable, great lawyer. But he had the defects of his virtues. He was apt to be sharp and witty even when it was not appropriate to the occasion. He would make fun of all of his friends at some time or another. He couldn't resist humiliating them with some bright, cutting remark. He certainly managed to humiliate me from time to time. Chris Herter was a great friend of his. He so humiliated Chris one day that Chris never forgave him for it. So he had immense brilliance but also a cockiness and a wit which could cut the other way as well.
He (Dean Acheson) had come to the conclusion that I was not a deep thinker, that I was a pain in the neck as far as he was concerned during World War II because I was running a lot of the economic programs and wasn't paying much attention to guidance from the State Department and he thought I was the heart of the revolt by the working level in the other agencies to insist that if the State Department wanted to give us guidance, they had better put it in writing. I wasn't prepared just to by some verbal indication he would prefer to have it done this way, or that. So, he took a different view. He blackballed my becoming a deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff when George Kennan suggested I do that. But, then when Dean left the department and went back into the private practice of law, he was gone from the scene. So, George called me up and said, "The ogre had disappeared, so why don't you come and be my deputy?" So I did. When he (Acheson) came back to the department, I was already installed. It was an unusual relationship. But later, when that administration was over, and he was in retirement, I called him up one day and asked him to have lunch. He said, "You know, Paul, you're the first person that has invited me to have lunch since I was Secretary of State. So, from that point on we had lunch every week, once a week. And we then became the closest of friends. And, I think I ended up being his closest friend. But, it was only after this kind of rocky background of opposition. He once, when I decided to accept an offer to become a negotiator on arms control, he thoroughly disapproved of that. He thought I ought to stay in the main line of policy and not get myself diverted in this miserable business of arms control and he went around town telling everybody that "Paul has gone soft on communism." That was his report on me at that time, which I resented. I really deeply resented it.
After World War II, the scientific community, which had been fairly unanimous in the development of the atomic bomb, was divided over developing the hydrogen bomb. At the center of that controversy was the division between Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer. Looking back on that, what do you make of that whole dispute?
Paul Nitze: I had just taken over as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department. The thing that got me interested was that I received a call from Robert LaBaron in the Pentagon, director of the liaison between the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. He asked whether I would meet with three colonels, who were called "the atomic colonels." Those colonels worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they specialized in understanding nuclear weapons. They told me we were making a great mistake, that it was now technically possible to make a thermonuclear weapon, and that the people that were inhibiting the U.S. from going forward with this were the scientists, led by Robert Oppenheimer. They hoped that we would agree with the Pentagon that this be changed and the joint Atomic Energy Commission be overruled. They suggested I talk next to Edward Teller. He spent three hours at the blackboard describing to me how he thought it would be possible to make this thermonuclear reaction work. He had two different ways of getting at it, and he wasn't sure if either of them would work, but that the idea could be made to work somehow.
So I talked to Robert Oppenheimer, who was the technical advisor to the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. He said that Teller's ideas were not correct. That (a) it was dubious if the reaction could be made to work at all, and (b) if it were technically feasible, it would be very expensive of nuclear material. You could produce more bang with a large number of fission weapons than you could with a small number of fusion weapons using the same amount of nuclear material. In any case, if you could make the thing work it would weigh so much that it wouldn't be transportable in any airplane and couldn't possibly be delivered as a weapon.
My argument was that if we don't develop it the Russians might. Oppenheimer said, "Impossible!" because they were behind us in nuclear physics and would continue to be so because they didn't permit their scientists to publish their works as our scientists do. They would only be able to do it if we demonstrate a reaction and therefore prove the principle. Unless we demonstrate it first, they won't be able to do it.
So, I went back and talked this over with Teller, and he said, "Well, you ought to talk to Dr. Lawrence of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory because he's the one who's really done more work with young scientists in this field than anybody else3. So he'll tell you all about what makes those fellows work, how this business runs." So, I got hold of Lawrence and he came over, flew to Washington and saw me. He said, "One thing I will guarantee you and that is the - Oppenheimer's point - that because of the practice of the American scientists to publish, that this will make a difference." He said, "Nobody in this field today is worth a damn who's older than 27. Most of the people who are producing the new ideas in the field of nuclear reactions are 19, 20, 21, up to 27. But, I don't know of any new and brilliant person older than that in this field. All these people that are working for me and others, they're all working on classified projects. They can't publish in any case. What makes them tick? What makes them tick is the thrill of feeling that you are breaking through the frontiers of knowledge. The satisfaction of working on new things where you are really at the front end of exploration, and they do value the respect of your peers. But, you don't need to publish for your peers to know what you're doing. The same is undoubtedly true in the Soviet Union. Their scientist, just like our scientists don't publish. They are not permitted to publish. But, they don't need that. They work in the same way our scientists are."
So Oppenheimer's obvious point on that was just wrong. After listening to all this, I came to the conclusion that it was safer for us to go forward on this thing, but I hoped that it wouldn't work, and that even if it was feasible, you couldn't do it usefully or economically. The thing that frightened me was the thought that the Soviets might do this and we would be blind-sided. I recommended to Mr. Acheson that we side with the Pentagon in this round.
But there was one difficulty involved. Lilienthal, director of the AEC, thought that we hadn't thought through the political consequences. We hadn't really done a national basic review of the national security policy, what we should be doing in the foreign defense policy field in the event this were feasible. What would our policy be? I thought Lilienthal had a point, so I drafted a decision paper for Mr. Acheson to take up with Mr. Truman which authorized the beginning of a deliberate program of developing thermonuclear weapons, seeing whether it was feasible or not. Concurrently, directing the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense to undertake a basic review of our national policy in light of the existence of nuclear weapons and the possible existence of thermonuclear weapons. The president signed that. That led to the review which ended up being NSC 68 (National Security Council Resolution 68).
You've faced setbacks and disappointments in your career as well. Are there instances you would point to that had a major impact, or taught you something?
Paul Nitze: I've gotten fired from the government for instance, which normally is a bad thing. But, I've resigned from the government a number of times. The New York Times once looked at all the people who had resigned in anger from the American government who were presidential appointees and made a big thing of their resignation. Did they ever come back to government in the United States? In England, the case has been that all the great men in English politics have resigned at one time or another on matters of principle. But, in the U.S. government, was that true? And, they looked and found perhaps 180 people who had resigned from presidential appointments and they could find only three that had ever been re-appointed after having resigned. One of them is Dean Acheson. I forget who the other two were. But, it just isn't the tradition in American politics that somebody who resigns from government is valued thereafter. Loyalty, we have so little loyalty in politics, that if you're trying to run a government, the one thing you want are people who are going to be loyal to you -- loyal to the party and loyal to whoever is president. So, loyalty is a very important asset in the politics of the United States, more so than it is in England. So, to resign from the government was a risky thing to do. To be fired from the government was -- but I managed to weave through those. I've developed some talent at being able to separate my career from party politics and from the short-range issues of policy, and concentrate upon the longer range issues. That came about in part from my having been fired so often, resigned so often.
How do you account for your frequent disagreements with the administrations you served? Were they always over defense issues, or sometimes over more domestic matters?
Paul Nitze: I guess my first difficulties were during the Korean War. That was earlier, in the '50s. And my plea then was that what we should do is to have a tax on automobiles over one hundred horsepower. It would be a higher tax for every excess horsepower that any car had. You could have one, but you had to pay, I don't know, one hundred dollars per horsepower for horsepower over one hundred. And, that would get the size of our cars down and save us rubber and save steel and save oil and gas, enable us to meet the raw material requirements and bring in a degree of revenue. And so, between bringing in some revenue and cutting the requirements for copper, rubber and so forth, we could get our raw materials into balance and our fiscal affairs into balance. And, that idea was pooh-poohed by everybody. I couldn't find a soul who thought that was worthwhile.
When President Eisenhower was elected, Dean Acheson was replaced as Secretary of State by John Foster Dulles. What did you think about Dulles?
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?
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?
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.
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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...
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.
Another president you worked for briefly was Jimmy Carter.
Paul Nitze: Yes.
The year before Jimmy Carter was nominated, we had a Fourth of July celebration out at my farm. During the course of the shooting fireworks off, we talked politics. My children all said "Pa, your generation ought to move over for the younger generation." I finally said, "I'm sure you are right about that, but whom would you choose?" And they said, "A man by the name of Jimmy Carter, a governor. You ought to look into him." Following my children's advice, I looked into Jimmy Carter, decided I would send him some of the speeches I had recently made, and I'd send him a contribution, which I did. Then I ran into him in Washington at some function that he was at and he knew who I was, had read these speeches and told me that he agreed with them. So of course, I thought he was a marvelous man. So, I contributed more money to his campaign. This was before he'd been nominated. Then some press fellow asked him, "Who is your advisor on defense issues?" and he said, "Well, Paul Nitze." Then he waited for another 20 seconds and said, "...and Paul Warnke." At that time I realized the jig was up. If he couldn't distinguish between my views and those of Paul Warnke, we weren't going to have a happy relationship together. And that's what turned out that his views and my views were not reconcilable. So, I think I was the first person who had been close to him who decided this wasn't for me. I just left him. I left him before he was elected. I left after he was nominated, but before he was elected.
Have you ever had any second thoughts about that, that you might have been able to influence him more?
Paul Nitze: I don't believe so. I couldn't compete with Rosalyn. I think she thought that she and Jimmy Carter had a direct line to getting advice from the Almighty. I believe in the Almighty, but I don't believe that I have a direct line.
Or that anyone else does?
Paul Nitze: Well, I'm not sure that those two do either. But it can lead to extremism and illusion and it is beyond any practical sense. It can take you away from common sense. I believe in common sense as a great corrective.
Tell us about the president who first dealt with Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan.
Paul Nitze: Originally, being a Democrat, I was rather suspicious of Reagan. But, I got to know him early before he was nominated. He suggested he wanted to see me. So, I invited him to have dinner at our house in Washington. He came with (Ed) Meese and another close advisor of his. Then it also turned out he also wanted Gene Rostow there, so we were five of us at dinner at my house. He, I found, was really a very natural kind of a person, a likeable kind of a person. He wasn't the demon that I thought he would be. I think he was rather impressed with us, too. So, we got along very well. But then, later I thought some of his advisors were not well grounded in what they were trying to do, particularly some of his economists with his new -- their new -- economics, which did seem to me to be "voodoo economics."
To quote another Republican.
Paul Nitze: Exactly.
When I started to work for him (Reagan), I came to the conclusion this was really a man who deeply felt the things that he believed in and that he really deeply believed in the superiority of a liberal democratic system to a totalitarian system and that this was an unmovable and unshakable belief which he could radiate. After the last summit meeting that we had in Moscow, he then went on to the Pilgrim Society in London and delivered himself a speech about the superiority of the liberal system to the totalitarian system, which was a brilliant job. He had a good speech writer. A fellow by the name of Tony Doyle wrote that for him. But in any case, he delivered it well and all the sentiments were right, and Tony Doyle, sure, had written the speech, but he'd followed the instructions from the President. And he won that intellectual battle, that battle for the mind of the world, as to which system really was the system of the future. That of the liberal democracies or that of the totalitarian Marxist-Leninism, and he won that battle hands down. So, any man who is that effective at winning the major battle, the battle of ideology -- more than ideology. He won that hands down, and therefore I ended up with great admiration for President Reagan.
Do you think that strength overcame his lack of interest in details, his lack of curiosity about the intricacies of the policies his administration was pursuing?
Paul Nitze: I thought so. (Secretary of State) George Shultz helped him a great deal. Shultz kept him from more errors than he otherwise would have been tempted to make. He couldn't keep him from all, but I think Shultz was a great man, operating under very difficult circumstances.
Is it true that Mr. Shultz was constantly at odds with the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger?
Paul Nitze: Yes, and constantly at odds with others.
It's been said that the Defense Department under Mr. Weinberger was spending money faster than it could keep track of. Was that so?
Paul Nitze: Yes I think it was. I don't think Cap was a very good organizer. His passionate interest was litigation. He loved to sue people. And that isn't the business of the Secretary of Defense, to sue everybody around the world. When Shultz and he were both in the Bechtel company, I heard somebody describe their relationship as being quite poisonous, because Shultz thought the business was the largest construction company in the world, and they were building plants here and dams there, and who knows what, and they had more clients than they knew how to take care of. And here Cap, the lawyer of the group, was suing all their clients. Finally Mr. Bechtel decided that issue. He said, "We are not in business to sue clients, so stop it." The President never had the same authority over him when he was suing everybody from his job as Secretary of Defense, including the Congress.
Some argue that our huge increase in military expenditures in the 1980s was the straw that broke the Soviets' back, but wasn't there also a great cost to the American economy?
Paul Nitze: I think few people recognize it, even if Reagan's requests were less than what Carter had budgeted for that period. Reagan really cut defense expenditures below what Carter had projected.
So you think they would have had to go up regardless of who had been in there?
Paul Nitze: Didn't have to go up. The question is whether it was wise to make them go up. That in turn depends upon how effectively the defense establishment is run. I thought we did about as good a job as you could do during the Robert McNamara administration. We certainly didn't tolerate any waste that we could find, and McNamara was a dog about ferreting out duplication and excess expenditure. He really worked at it tooth and nail. I tried to continue that while I was Deputy Secretary of Defense. I think we did a pretty damn good job. It wasn't perfect by any means. But, I don't think anybody did better later.
Over the years, you've been criticized from every side, some thinking you were too far to the right, others too soft, too liberal. As a hawk at one point, a dove at another. On your wall you have an article about you from the Soviet newspaper Pravda, where they described you as "the darling of the hawks." Are you amused by these interpretations of your views and your actions?
Paul Nitze: Yes, because I have talked to the editors and friends of the editors of Pravda. They described how these things are written. They don't really reflect the serious views of the government. They have quite different purposes. So I can't let myself be bothered by a piece like that in Pravda. There was an even more serious attack upon me in Izvestia, the other leading Soviet paper, which had a great two-inch headline all across the back side, which read, "Criminal Covers His Tracks with Lies". The article describes me and how dreadful I am. They are all lies. I think I have had full treatment by the Soviets, but underneath all that, I have had very close relations with many of these people, closer relations than almost any other American has had, I think.
You have spent so many years trying to anticipate what would happen next. Are we now (1990) at a point where the Cold War is over? Where do we go from here?
Paul Nitze: For the last forty years (1950-1990), the backbone of U.S. foreign and defense policy has been containment of the Soviet Union, containment of Soviet expansionism, while building a better world amongst the free nations. And, those two were intimately linked. You had to construct the positive end of our policy was constructing a world order of some kind for those who wanted to participate in it. While doing that, you had to defend it against those who were trying to destroy it, particularly the Communists and their allies. That we have done, and the surprising thing is the persistence with which the American people have backed that policy over 40 years. Nobody thought they could do it and that the American people would have that degree of persistence. Certainly neither George Kennan nor I anticipated that it would take that long. George thought it might take ten to 15 years, I thought it would take one to two generations for containment to bring the Soviets to a realization that they ought to change the focus of what they were about. And, it took twice that long, at least. But, now that they have changed their focus, what does that do? What is the substitute for containment as the backbone of our foreign policy? We should have such a new line of foreign policy. I believe that it ought to be the promotion of both diversity and order. Diversity within an order established by the organs of the UN, the regional organizations. We ought to back them on the order part of it, and we ought to promote greater diversity amongst the various parts that don't threaten the structure as a whole.
I have been trying to stimulate a debate about this question of what the main line of our policy should be for the future. We started, but then it was overtaken by the attack by Saddam Hussein into Kuwait. So now the question is not what the long-term heart of our policy should be, it is how do we deal with Saddam and the problem in the Persian Gulf. And unless we deal with it well, we are not going to have that kind of future. If we do deal with it well, then we will have that question in the future. But we first have to deal with Iraq and its occupation of Kuwait.
While we are looking at the future, if you were growing up now, as a high school student, perhaps a college student, what would you see on the horizon as the most fascinating issues, the most promising fields, the greatest discoveries to pursue?
Paul Nitze: At the moment I think it is all dominated by the questions in the Persian Gulf. The whole future for everyone will be determined by how that works out. Now you can make the assumption that that will end up favorable for our interests, in which event we will be the sole real superpower. Granted, the Soviets will have long range nuclear capabilities equal or perhaps superior to ours, but that will be the only realm in which they will have superpower capabilities. So the only nation which combines great military potential with economic potential -- granted we are not developing that potential today, but we do have it -- combined with political experience and some sense of world politics, and that is the United States.
Look around the world. Who is going to run the affairs in the Far East if we don't do it or don't participate with others in doing it? It will be Japan and I don't think Japan knows how to do it, won't do it very well and there will be all kinds of trouble unless we participate in bringing some degree -- or maintaining some degree -- of order out there. Look at Europe. Who is apt to run it if we don't participate? It'll be the Germans. The Germans aren't going to do it well by themselves. Neither we or the Russians are not going to permit them to get nuclear weapons of their own unless we are involved in it. The Russians will dominate it just from the fact that they have superior military capability. You can't back out of Europe. Look at the Middle East. What will happen if we don't play some role there? It will be dominated by the radical Muslims. That isn't going to be good for anybody. So we have an inescapable role, I think. It is very hard to see how we're going to get out of that. There are burdens upon us, and now the question is, "How do we handle those burdens intelligently?"
I would say one of the principal things is to get our economic house in order, so people who can contribute to getting our economic house in order should have a very important role. I think the legal profession could help promote a rule of law in the world. What should that rule of law be? What should its parameters be? I think there is an enormous opportunity there. Now with the Soviets in a secondary position, those things can be done when they couldn't be done before. If you look at the arts, communications, there are many opportunities there. Insofar as we are dominant in any one field, it is in the content of communications, creating the news, among other things. So there are lots of fields available for exploitation. Whether or not that is the particular thing one wants to concentrate on, I think does depend upon how the Persian Gulf thing works out.
Communications has changed tremendously. One result of our vast information is that people don't read as they once did.
Paul Nitze: They watch too much!
Have you ever had any doubts about your work? You have been challenged many times, criticized many times. Were there times when you doubted the views that you held so dearly?
Paul Nitze: I've often had doubts. Almost all the time. If you are dealing with the important issues, none of them are clear. Why do they hire people in the policy business? Because policy issues wouldn't be policy issues if you could just put them into a computer and get the answer to it. They're policy issues because the odds that one side or the other of a given issue is right are probably in the range of 48 percent to 52 [percent], or something like that. There isn't a clear choice. Then you have got to make up your mind on something that is very complex and decide that the odds are better for this side of the issue than that side, but it's touch and go. It's a hazardous business to deal with policy. That's why you get well treated if you are in the policy business because it is a hazardous game.
Throughout your career, you have had fairly strong and clear views. Sometimes they were embraced, sometimes criticized and you were shown the door.
Paul Nitze: That's right, shown the door time and time again.
But your views haven't changed much through all this.
Paul Nitze: No, they haven't..
Administrations change, but I don't think my views change that much. People claimed that I was the absolutely fantastic dove and about to sell the United States down the river. A number of people have accused me of having been positively a traitor to the United States for appeasement. At the same time, others have accused me of being the ultimate hard-liner. I don't know. It's just poor little me.
Thank you so much for taking all of this time to talk with us. We certainly appreciate it.
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This page last revised on Feb 28, 2008 13:28 EDT
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