Timelines

A director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, Nitze came to Germany in the final days of the war to interview Nazi leaders, including Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments. Speer was articulate, brilliant, and awe-inspiring in his technical knowledge. A colleague of Nitze’s would recall that Speer "evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed."

After the bombing of Hiroshima, Nitze traveled to Japan to try to determine how destructive the bomb was and how big a role it played in ending the war. Thus began a lifetime of inquiry into the effects of the weapon.

When Nitze came on board as Kennan’s deputy, he wrote his mother, "the Russians gloat over our problems and cleverly spread dissension amongst us and I am supposed to come up with good and workable ideas on all problems what-so-ever."

Having replaced Kennan as head of the Policy Planning Staff in the beginning of 1950, Nitze now wrote a document that called for a massive increase in American military spending. Kennan denounced the document. Nitze declared that it "This paper more realistically set forth the requirements necessary to assure success of George Kennan's idea of containment."

Both Nitze and Kennan had hoped to keep powerful jobs in the Eisenhower Administration. But both were rejected. Kennan was denied a role after giving a speech considered critical of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Nitze was blocked by conservative republicans who considered him too weak.

As part of a Council on Foreign Relations study group, Nitze floated the notion that the U.S. could use "tactical atomic devices in a limited war." A young participant in those meetings, Henry Kissinger, would take that idea and turn it into a best-selling book---beginning a feud with Nitze that would pass across decades.

Nitze participated in a study group advising president Eisenhower on nuclear strategy. The U.S. did not only need to spend more, the report declared; the country had to switch its strategy toward what later became known as "counterforce." What mattered was whether America’s arsenal was structured so it could withstand, and retaliate to, a surprise Soviet attack. The report was rejected, even though it appeared directly on the heals of the USSR’s successful Sputnik satellite launch.

After serving as a top adviser to Senator John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Nitze is offered his choice of three top choices. He picks deputy secretary of defense, but the offer is soon withdrawn and Nitze ends up with the more junior position of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Nitze is a close adviser to the president during these fateful days. Although conflicted about whether the U.S. should bomb or blockade, he clashes with president Kennedy and his distance from the inner White House circle grows. Kennan finds himself completely removed from all the news and decisions.

An early critic of US engagement in the Vietnam War, Nitze traveled to Vietnam in June of 1965 and became convinced that we would not win. He could not convince Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, however, and he buckled in a crucial meeting with Lyndon Johnson in July---declaring that the war was winnable if we sent in more troops.

Tens of thousands of angry protesters march against the Pentagon and try to levitate it. Nitze helps to organize the defense of the building and also works in a secret task force with future Secretary of State Warren Christopher to undermine the students.

After Robert McNamara resigned as secretary of defense, Nitze was again passed over for the top job. But the new secretary, Clark Clifford, did not have extensive experience. And so president Johnson asked Nitze to testify in favor of his proposed troop buildup. Nitze declined. LBJ declared him "just insubordinate. "

Nitze was not offered a job at the beginning of the Nixon Administration. He decided then to form a lobbying group in favor of a system of missile defense called safeguard. He chose four interns, all of whom would go on to have prominent careers in Washington: Edward Luttwak, Richard Perle, Peter Wilson, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Nitze is a key member of the United States delegation to Helsinki and Vienna. Nitze’s goal was to propose a grand trade in which the United States would give up missile defense in exchange for the Soviets abandoning their heavy weapons.

Secret documents describing defense department policy during the Vietnam War begin appearing in the New York Times. Nitze is one of the few people who had an original set of the papers. Nixon is told erroneously by his aide John Ehrlichman that Nitze was involved.

The Soviets and Americans agree to limit their construction of both missile defense systems and ballistic missiles. To his dismay, Nitze is kept away from the signing ceremony until the very last minute.

Frustrated with Kissinger and with Nixon’s deceit during the Watergate scandal, Nitze walks out of the SALT talks. He makes public a blistering letter denouncing the administration and then passes information to friends on Capitol Hill that help them undermine Henry Kissinger during a hearing.

One night the phone rang in the home of one of Nitze’s best friends in Washington, Admiral Bud Zumwalt. An unfamiliar voice gave a brief message: "You should know that on at least two occasions recently Kissinger has said to Dobrynin ‘an accident should happen to Admiral Zumwalt.’" The caller then hung up, and Zumwalt reported the call to Nitze.

Nitze supported Carter early in the presidential primaries and was invited to a meeting in the summer before the general election to give advice on defense policy. But he is far too aggressive and worried about the Soviet threat for the nominee’s tastes. "He was a lion in a den of Daniels," recalled one participant. Nitze ends up as the only person at that meeting who doesn’t get a good job in the administration.

Nitze is brought in at the end of the Gerald Ford administration as part of an outside team arguing that the CIA was underestimating Soviet strength. They wrote a harsh report and then confronted the CIA analysts at Langley in a tense meeting. "We were overmatched," said one CIA analyst. "People like Nitze ate us for lunch." Details of the report soon leaked to the press through a mysterious operative named John Paisley.

Warnke, an old friend of Nitze’s was nominated by Carter to run the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the SALT Delegation. Jealous and frustrated, Nitze berated his old friend in Senate hearings. At one point he claimed that he was a better American than Warnke. Afterwards, many of Nitze’s friends criticized his behavior. But he received a kind note from George Kennan.

Long a harsh critic of Jimmy Carter’s SALT II treaty, Nitze helped to deal it its death blow by playing a key role in leaking to the press the news that a so-called "Cuban Brigade" of Soviet soldiers was based in Havana. The story was old, but it had a devastating effect on the treaty.

Nitze had campaigned for Reagan and then consulted with the CIA early in the new president’s term. Six months in he was given a job as one of the administration’s chief arms negotiators.

With the INF talks at a stalemate, Nitze commits one of the most astonishing acts of insubordination in U.S.-Soviet history: he goes on a walk with his Soviet counter-part, Yuli Kvitsinsky, and negotiates his own arms deal. Both men ignore the instructions sent down by their superiors and both men find the idea rejected when they present it to their colleagues. But when news of Nitze’s solo march for peace hits the press, he becomes a hero in the eyes of many of his previous critics.

Without consulting with his aides, Reagan announces a plan to develop a giant shield to swat down enemy missiles. Nitze is deeply skeptical that it can work or that it will be efficient to build. But he nonetheless sees an opportunity to use it as a bargaining chip with Moscow.

Gorbachev and Reagan meet in Geneva and famously bond in a fireside chat. Beforehand, Nitze intensively briefs the president, but the president doesn’t seem to care. According to one of Reagan’s biographers, who was there at a session, ""I got the impression of a man too polite to say that he thought the distinctions Paul Nitze drew between mobile MIRVed ICBMs (worth banning because of the stabilizing effect of a reduced target-to-warhead ratio) and mobile unMIRVed ICBMs (worth preserving because they would permit a Midgetman RV system to counteract deployment of the SS-25) might just as well differentiate two cans of spinach."

Nitze pulls a near all-nighter negotiating with the Soviets and gets within inches of a comprehensive arms deal. "I haven’t had so much fun in years," he told Secretary of State George Shultz at 6:30 in the morning after working 10 hours straight. But at the end, the deal falls apart over Reagan and Gorbachev’s inability to agree on missile defense. Nitze is despondent.

The Soviets and the U.S. agree on arms treaty that eliminated all intermediate- and short-range ground-based nuclear weapons from Europe. It is one of the crowning achievements of Nitze’s long career.