New Cold War book review from NJ Star Ledger

Books: 'The Hawk and the Dove,' a cold war history

By Star-Ledger Staff

January 16, 2010, 5:58PM

T

he Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War

Nicholas Thompson
Henry Holt and Company,
403 pp., $27.50

Reviewed by
Jonathan E. Lazarus

George Kennan and Paul Nitze were establishment pillars and true Washington insiders who, nonetheless, spent much time on the margins. Kennan labored for years as an underappreciated diplomat before authoring the successful containment policy against the Soviets and then went off to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where he wrote histories and brooded about the state of man and the world. Nitze made serious money on Wall Street and left to become the driving force behind several postwar military buildups in a variety of arms posts, all key but never quite at the top, and it continually tormented him.

Kennan lived to 101, Nitze to 97. Both served presidents from FDR to Bush I, with their careers overlapping and diverging as they developed their views of the Kremlin. Nitze's grandson, editor Nicholas Thompson of Wired magazine, deftly juxtaposes the two giants — and their abundance of flaws and fortitude — in parallel portraits that are more hinged than conjoined. The reader is not left with a favorite, but rather with a sense of wonder that so many transformational decisions could be compressed into two lives.

Kennan made his mark as the author of the legendary Long Telegram in 1946. After years of having his suggestions disregarded by the State Department, the man who spoke better Russian than Stalin, who was interned by the Germans after the outbreak of hostilities and who would win a Pulitzer and numerous other awards for his graceful histories and essays, fired off nearly 6,000 words to his minders outlining what became of the containment policy. He enlarged on this in the equally famous X article of 1947 where he boldly predicted the collapse of the Kremlin because of its vegetative leaders and ideas.

Nitze, wandering the radioactive ruins of Hiroshima as co-chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey, came to different conclusions and applied new calculus. The United States, if the numbers were crunched properly and forces built to daunting levels, could prevail in a showdown with the Soviets. His opus magnus, Nation Security Council Directive 68, refused to rule out a first nuclear strike, as had Kennan, and emphasized a massive military buildup, again at odds with Kennan's stress on economic and political pushback.

Nitze would serve into his 80s as an arms negotiator for Ronald Reagan and, in his 90s, became a reckless bridge player. Kennan, who sacrificed ambassadorships to Moscow and Yugoslavia with tart appraisals of the regimes, lived long enough to tell a grandchild, "Missiles are boring. Conrad is interesting."

Jonathan E. Lazarus is a former news editor of The Star-Ledger. He may be reached at gjlazarus@comcast.net.