He was a canny and successful Wall Street investment banker while still in his 20s, a yuppie before his time. But in 1937, at the age of 30, Paul Nitze experienced a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion. He took a leave from the firm of Dillon, Read & Co. to tour his family's ancestral homeland, Germany. Deeply disturbed by what he saw of Adolf Hitler's rule, he returned home -- but not to the world of high finance and private wealth. Instead, he went back to his alma mater, Harvard, to study history, sociology and philosophy: "There were big issues, big questions, big problems in the world. $ I wanted to come to terms with them. I couldn't do that making money."
So Nitze threw himself into the great debates of the past half-century over how America should use its power and cope with its enemies. He is one of the last of a breed of patrician policymakers who, immediately after World War II, helped rebuild Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and defend it by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And last week Nitze, who turns 81 in January, hovered in the background like the spirit of summits past.
With his full head of silver hair, his impeccably tailored pinstripe suits and his still trim figure, he certainly looked the part of the quintessential elder statesman. But he is no mere ornament in this, the seventh of the Administrations he has served. "I've advised every President since Roosevelt," said Nitze last week. "And all, to some extent, have sought and taken that advice." That pointedly includes Ronald Reagan. As special adviser to the President and Secretary of State for Arms Control, Nitze played a key, sometimes controversial part in crafting last week's treaty on intermediate- range nuclear forces (INF). He was chairman of the high-level American "working group" on arms control during the summit. And he is embroiled in a fierce struggle to bring about a much more ambitious strategic-arms agreement next year.
Nitze has devoted much of his life to public service in part because he could afford to. He came from a well-to-do family, and his wife of 54 1/2 years, Phyllis, who died in June, was an heiress of the Standard Oil fortune. In addition to having a few silver spoons come his way, he had something of a Midas touch. He was a wunderkind of the investment-banking world in the 1930s -- "the last man hired on Wall Street before the Crash," he says with a wry smile -- and later helped develop the Aspen, Colo., resort where he plans to take some of his eleven grandchildren skiing in two weeks. (Nitze has two sons and two daughters; there is also one great-grandchild so far, but at age three he is not yet up to the intermediate slopes that Nitze favors.) On his 1,900-acre farm in Maryland, which produces corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle, pigs and sheep, he keeps 16 horses and rides on weekends. He owns a summer house on an island in Maine, where he played tennis almost every day last August. Serious tennis. Once, a much younger man whom Nitze had just trounced in singles asked him how he kept so fit at his age. "My body," he replied, "does what I tell it to."