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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
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.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
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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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
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.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
There was a brown volume and I pulled it down and it was the works of William Shakespeare. And my response to it was, "I want to find a speech that I can read out to everybody." Not, "I want to take this book off into a corner and I want to discover about a whole play, and I want to read it privately to myself." And so, with a strange precocity, I would stand in the corner of the room and I would deliver Shakespeare's speeches, with no sense whatsoever of the context, or of the role that I was playing. I mean, I would gradually begin to put two and two together with these speeches, and begin to understand what must be going on in the play. I still have that volume, because my aunt gave it to me when I was going off to university. That's a very treasured possession. But, I just have to be grateful for whatever gift was handed on to me. In terms of performing, yes of course, I used to feel nerves. I used to feel adrenaline, but I also used to feel a huge magnetism. I really want to do this. I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or performances being canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
I have been through experiences with given productions, where I felt to an acute degree, "I can't do this." or "I can't do this, anymore. Whatever judgment I had it's gone." It's a hard lesson to learn, too. You would think, as you do plays, or works for television, works on film, that you pick up where you left off. You assume that you have learned all the lessons of your last outing and then you pick up right where you left off, and the truth is you don't. You pick up somewhere in the midst of an unknown project and you flounder often the same way. You repeat mistakes that you've made before. You say to yourself, "I don't believe that. I made that mistake 10 years ago, how have I done that again? And how did I not see I was doing that again?" So, yes. All of those things have happened to me. And equally, I've experienced the opposite. I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm. And then, that's been sort of a launch pad for a very good period, you know. "I do know what I'm doing. I do trust my ideas. That odd dream that I had two nights ago, I'm going to go with that. This imagery in there, I think I know what that's about, and I'm going to go with that. And I'm going to apply that to this play." You know, there's a lot of potentially hubristic activity in directing, following a random idea and trusting to it. But then of course, the pendulum can swing too far the other way, and you continue to trust your craziest of ideas and you come crashing down.
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