WASHINGTON – Paul H Nitze, who pursued a hard-line approach toward the Kremlin as he helped shape US diplomatic and military strategy during the Cold War, is dead at 97.
He died last week at his home in the Georgetown area of Washington. Nitze’s long career, which began with success on Wall Street as a young investment banker and included government service under eight presidents, was capped last April in Bath, Maine, as he witnessed the christening of a warship bearing his name.President Ronald Reagan awarded Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, in 1985.A self-described “hard-nosed pragmatist”, Nitze as director of the State Department’s policy planning staff in 1950 helped frame the strategy of building up US forces to keep the Soviets contained in Eastern Europe.He wrote in a 1950 national security paper that the Soviets were “animated by a new, fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, which seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world”.”I didn’t think we should go to war with the Soviets and I don’t think they wanted to go to war with us,” Nitze said three decades later.”But how do you conduct things so that the Soviets would be deterred from foreign expansion and be forced to look inward at their own problems?” The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington was founded in 1943 by Nitze and the late former Secretary of State Christian Herter.At the school’s annual banquet earlier this month, Secretary of State Colin Powell paid tribute to his long government service.Recalling their time working together in the Reagan administration, when Powell was national security adviser, Powell said sitting with Nitze at the same table “was like having Moses at the table”.Last week, Powell issued a statement remembering Nitze as a personal mentor and “a giant of US foreign and defence policy and an inspiration” to State Department employees.Nitze, a conservative Democrat, was a natural fit for Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration that began in 1981 because they both opposed President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union.Along with a few other prominent conservative Democrats, organised as the Committee on the Present Danger, they contended the treaty could not be verified and would enable the Soviets to strengthen their nuclear arsenal.Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.The hard-line Democrats, convinced their party had drifted leftward, swung to support Reagan, himself a former Democrat.Nitze took charge of negotiating reductions in intermediate range missiles with the Soviet Union in 1981 for Reagan, who had changed direction to support arms control accords.The negotiations were marked by a July 1982 “walk in the woods” near Geneva, Switzerland, with the Soviet negotiator, Yuli Kvitsinsky, that produced a compromise breakthrough, but the treaty was not concluded at the time.Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, the son of William Albert Nitze, a Romance languages scholar, Nitze grew up in Chicago, graduated from Harvard University in 1927 and worked for 12 years as an investment banker at Dillon Read & Co, before taking his first government post in 1940 in the Franklin D Roosevelt administration.In 1986, reflecting on the Soviet Union, which was to disintegrate five years later, Nitze said negotiating with the Soviets was like working with a defective vending machine.”You put your quarter in, but you don’t get anything out,” he said.”You can shake it.You can talk to it.But you know it won’t do any good.It just won’t talk back to you.”- Nampa-APNitze’s long career, which began with success on Wall Street as a young investment banker and included government service under eight presidents, was capped last April in Bath, Maine, as he witnessed the christening of a warship bearing his name.President Ronald Reagan awarded Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, in 1985.A self-described “hard-nosed pragmatist”, Nitze as director of the State Department’s policy planning staff in 1950 helped frame the strategy of building up US forces to keep the Soviets contained in Eastern Europe.He wrote in a 1950 national security paper that the Soviets were “animated by a new, fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, which seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world”.”I didn’t think we should go to war with the Soviets and I don’t think they wanted to go to war with us,” Nitze said three decades later.”But how do you conduct things so that the Soviets would be deterred from foreign expansion and be forced to look inward at their own problems?” The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington was founded in 1943 by Nitze and the late former Secretary of State Christian Herter.At the school’s annual banquet earlier this month, Secretary of State Colin Powell paid tribute to his long government service.Recalling their time working together in the Reagan administration, when Powell was national security adviser, Powell said sitting with Nitze at the same table “was like having Moses at the table”.Last week, Powell issued a statement remembering Nitze as a personal mentor and “a giant of US foreign and defence policy and an inspiration” to State Department employees.Nitze, a conservative Democrat, was a natural fit for Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration that began in 1981 because they both opposed President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union.Along with a few other prominent conservative Democrats, organised as the Committee on the Present Danger, they contended the treaty could not be verified and would enable the Soviets to strengthen their nuclear arsenal.Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.The hard-line Democrats, convinced their party had drifted leftward, swung to support Reagan, himself a former Democrat.Nitze took charge of negotiating reductions in intermediate range missiles with the Soviet Union in 1981 for Reagan, who had changed direction to support arms control accords.The negotiations were marked by a July 1982 “walk in the woods” near Geneva, Switzerland, with the Soviet negotiator, Yuli Kvitsinsky, that produced a compromise breakthrough, but the treaty was not concluded at the time.Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, the son of William Albert Nitze, a Romance languages scholar, Nitze grew up in Chicago, graduated from Harvard University in 1927 and worked for 12 years as an investment banker at Dillon Read & Co, before taking his first government post in 1940 in the Franklin D Roosevelt administration.In 1986, reflecting on the Soviet Union, which was to disintegrate five years later, Nitze said negotiating with the Soviets was like working with a defective vending machine.”You put your quarter in, but you don’t get anything out,” he said.”You can shake it.You can talk to it.But you know it won’t do any good.It just won’t talk back to you.”- Nampa-AP
