Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Henry Holt and Co., 2009)
Two icons of the Cold War and the foreign policy establishment, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, are analyzed in Nicholas Thompson’s new book in their influence on and shaping of the Cold War. Kennan, the father of U.S. containment policy, was the more cerebral and intellectual of the two, preferring to think and write on his own. Nitze, on the other hand, was a man of action, the bureaucratic infighter who liked to work in committees and build networks, who put forward the intellectual rationale for building up the military to counter the Soviets as a crucial part of containment, thereby feeding a dangerous arms race that came close to ending civilization as we know it.
What comes across perhaps most starkly in this twin biography-cum-history of the Cold War is the extraordinarily perilous journey humanity was forced to traverse as a result of the advent of nuclear weapons. For decades, the United States and the Soviet Union glared across the nuclear divide while the fate of the world hung in the balance.
Also striking is how, in spite of the enormous differences in political systems, the United States and the Soviet Union paralleled each other in mutually paranoid suspicion, which nearly overcame their fervent desire to avoid nuclear war. That deeply held mistrust, added to mundane domestic pressures from their respective military-industrial complexes, nearly resulted in a nuclear war. It is difficult to fathom how the world came so close to a nuclear holocaust when neither side wanted it.
The title of the book, The Hawk and the Dove, is somewhat deceptive in that both Kennan and Nitze were Cold Warriors; both were implacably opposed to the Soviet Union and Communism; and both acted, in different ways, on their beliefs. What set them apart was their readiness to countenance the use of nuclear weapons. Nitze, in spite of, or perhaps because of, having seen and studied the aftermath of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, pushed for military superiority in nuclear weapons without realizing that the effect on the Soviet Union was to stiffen their resolve to match the United States in nuclear capabilities even while feeding suspicions and strengthening hard liners in the Kremlin. Nitze argued for the plausibility of administering nuclear weapons, making them an instrument of policy, up to and including in conventional and nuclear war, whereas Kennan withdrew in horror from the prospect of it.
Nitze’s position was essentially that nuclear weapons were only an extension, if a gigantic one, of the destructive power of weapons of conventional war - a change in quantity, not in the essence or quality, of the destructive nature of war. Nuclear weaponry was more of the same: one more, if more fearful, instrument to use in realpolitik. To Nitze, nuclear weapons were not a game changer. That is, he did not see those weapons as a phenomenon that made war obsolete in that there would be no winners after a full-scale nuclear exchange.
Kennan, on the other hand, thought the use of nuclear weapons was self-defeating, both on moral and practical grounds. The death and destruction would be so great that there could not possibly be any justification in risking, much less waging, nuclear war.
Both men aspired to reach the pinnacle of policy making in foreign affairs but neither succeeded, due in no small part to their personal characteristics. Perhaps it is just as well, given their personalities, outlook, and thinking. Kennan, the more brilliant thinker, was somewhat outside the political mainstream in his elitism and deep suspicion of democracy. Along these lines, he had strange notions about merging the United States with Canada and the United Kingdom, having the capital moved to Windsor or Ottawa and splitting the nation into four regions. Often, he confided to his diary that he wished “there were much more of what we have become accustomed to calling unemployment”. He even went so far as to propose a benevolent dictatorship.
Kennan married an extraordinary capacity for strategic thinking with a tin ear for politics; he would rather be right than be in power, and he held on too long to ideas that had been superseded and discarded, not only by history, but for his personal fortunes and advancement, by his superiors. He was prone to sticking his foot in his mouth and was simply too far out of the political mainstream.
Nitze was pugnacious to the point of being imprudent in his dealings with superiors. He supported the use of nuclear weapons and believed that victory could be achieved in a nuclear war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he advocated a strategic strike against the Soviet Union. Nitze said, “We could in some real sense be victorious,” sounding like air force general Bat Guano. Reputed to have been patterned after legendary air force general Curtis LeMay in Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie Dr. Strangelove, he advocated an all out nuclear attack against the Soviet Union by maintaining that the losses would be worth victory.
These two men, true warriors of the Cold War, were more enduring, more far sighted (in the case of Kennan), more tenacious (in the case of Nitze), and more influential than nearly all of their contemporaries in the foreign policy establishment, some whom reached the highest positions in government.