The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the Cold
War
By Nicholas Thompson
(Henry Holt, 416 pages, $27.50)
THE UNITED STATES WAGED THE COLD WAR for 40 years, and for 40
years George Kennan and Paul Nitze were perennial players in the
struggle—from its beginning, which Kennan catalyzed, to its end.
They were also longtime friends, but friends who disagreed
stridently about how best to protect America, with Kennan
typically (but not always) advocating diplomacy and disarmament
and Nitze usually (but not always) arguing for a stronger
military defense. They were friends, too, who could hardly have
been more dissimilar in their personalities and styles. Kennan
was cerebral, aloof, elitist—a pessimistic thinker removed from
political skirmishing. The chummy Nitze tended idealistic,
thrived not on deep thoughts but on numbers, data, charts, and
graphs, and was, as the Washington Post wrote of him in
1988, “the consummate Washington insider.”
Nicholas Thompson, in his new book, The Hawk and the
Dove, recounts the careers of both men. Thompson is an
editor at Wired magazine and a fellow at the New America
Foundation; he is also Nitze’s grandson. The familial ties do not
interfere, though, for Thompson’s is a balanced depiction of both
of his subjects and their works. In fact, a tad less balance and
a smidgen more bite from the author would have made The Hawk
and the Dove a more piquant read.
Thompson’s story begins, fittingly, with the fall of Nazi
Germany. A middle-aged Kennan, an expert in Russian history and
language and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in
Moscow, is perched on the embassy’s balcony on May 9, 1945,
gazing out over a crowd of Russian revelers. The deputy chief,
unlike the throngs below him, is not overjoyed. Kennan had long
perceived the USSR’s police-state scaf-folding, and he knew that
Stalin was tailoring Marx’s Communism to fit a totalitarian
figure. Kennan also knew that the Soviet Union and the United
States were, as of that day in 1945, the world’s sole powers—and
fundamentally oppositional ones. He fretted; few in America
understood the emerging Soviet danger.
At 9 p.m. on February 22, 1946, what would become known as the
Long Telegram was dispatched from the American embassy. For the
preceding few days Kennan had been laid up with a fever and a
tooth-ache but had used the convalescent hours to organize his
many scattered thoughts about U.S.-Soviet rela-tions. He turned
them into an essay-length polemic which, within weeks, was
required reading in the State Department and in every U.S.
embassy in the world.
The Soviet Union, the Long Telegram asserted, was convinced it
lived “in antagonistic ‘capitalist en-circlement’ with which in
the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.” The
telegram was unambiguous about the USSR: “In summary, we have
here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that
with [the] U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi”
and “that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony
of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be
destroyed, the interna-tional authority of our state be broken,
if Soviet power is to be secure.” How to counterbalance the
threat? Kennan laid out a plan the next year in an article in
Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” from
which germinated the doctrine of containment. The U.S., Kennan
wrote, must confront the Soviets “with unalterable counter-force
at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the
interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
In the year that Kennan sent the Long Telegram, Paul Nitze was
looking for work. The former Wall Street whiz had just completed
a report for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and was
hoping to remain involved in government. Through his connections
to James Forrestal, then the secretary of the navy, Nitze got a
job in late 1946 on the State Department’s newly formed policy
planning staff. It was headed by George Kennan.
Nitze brought to his State Department work an affinity for
numbers and details and charts, which could complement Kennan’s
penchant for broader thinking. In 1948, the two men worked
closely together to push the Marshall Plan through Congress:
“Kennan,” Thompson writes, “had the big ideas and thought through
the grand strategy; Nitze understood the economics and managed
the fight.”
Gradually, though, Kennan’s dour realism worked against him. As
he argued against NATO, against the Truman
Doctrine (which he had unintentionally helped formulate),
against recognition of Israel, and against the
UN, Kennan’s influence waned. Thompson notes that he became “like
Justice Holmes: a man recognized mainly for his formidable
dissents.” Nitze, by contrast, grew ever more influ-ential at
State, in no small part because of his enthusiasm and idealism.
In 1950, Kennan left the policy planning staff, and Nitze took
over.
The two men’s ideological divergence had started the previous
year, in fact. When the USSR deto-nated an atom bomb in the fall
of 1949, Kennan and Nitze argued for rival American responses.
Kennan counseled restraint and diplomacy, and Nitze pushed for
developing a hydrogen bomb (Nitze’s view pre-vailed). Nitze also
directed production of the now-famous NSC-68 strategic review,
which declared that the U.S. could and should pay for a massive
weapons buildup to counter the Soviet menace. Weeks after
NSC-68’s publication, North Korean troops invaded their southern
neighbor, and top American officials turned to Nitze’s document
for guidance. Defense spending exploded, and the arms race that
Kennan so feared com-menced.
SO BEGINS THE DECADES-LONG story of Kennan and Nitze’s shaping of
the Cold War in their individual and competing ways. Nitze
remained in Washington and went on to serve in powerful positions
in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations.
Kennan did not. He decamped for Princeton, where he spent most of
the remainder of his life concentrating on writing, an activity
for which he always had flair. He published 18 books all told,
one of which, Russia Leaves the War, won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1954. He continued to believe that his ideas about
containment—most notably, that military strength must be
part-nered with economic and diplomatic fortitude and
exertion—had been usurped by Nitze and militarized. Kennan, with
his pen, was relentless in criticizing the nuclear buildup that
his friend Nitze oversaw (oversaw until the 1980s, that is, when
Nitze helped effect a nuclear drawdown).
The Hawk and the Dove is a fine report of the events of
the Cold War and of Nitze’s and Kennan’s in-volvement in them.
Thompson has furnished all the old information, and even some new
bits, having un-covered papers previously unperused by
researchers and writers. Missing from the book, though, is that
verve that animates the best historical biographies. To make the
past, as they say, come alive, details are essential. But The
Hawk and the Dove reads in too many spots like something
extracted from A4 of the local daily—just the facts. It’s hard to
fault Thompson overmuch for this. He undertook to build a grand
edifice on a small patch of real estate—his work covers some 60
years of the lives of two very complex and significant men in
just over 300 pages—and so there simply isn’t room for
descriptions of houses, local bars, and morning commutes.
Nonetheless, The Hawk and the Dove would have benefited
from some.
It would have benefited, too, had its author been more willing to
poke and prod his subjects. Thomp-son, to his credit, is not
looking to make or break post-humous reputations, but his caution
is not always judicious; sometimes it seems obsequious. His
conclusion that both men were right—because “each was profoundly
right at some moments, and profoundly wrong at others”—is too
easy. Kennan and Nitze em-braced quite divergent views about how
to wage and win the Cold War. Surely Thompson has an opinion
about which man’s judgments were more sound, more often.
And yet, the book succeeds in an important way: its foundation is
proved strong. After closing the covers of The Hawk and the
Dove, the reader cannot for a moment doubt the veracity of
Thompson’s in-troductory claim that “one can understand much of
the story of the United States during the Cold War by examining
the often parallel and sometimes perpendicular lives of George
Kennan and Paul Nitze.”
