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When his mind told him to go back to Harvard nearly 50 years ago, he threw himself into the study of the piano and developed an enduring passion for Bach. For years afterward he would relax by playing the partitas. He found himself fascinated by such scholars as the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian emigre who saw ominous parallels between Nazism and Soviet Communism. Nitze shared that lesson with his mentor, Dillon, Read's president James Forrestal, who later became the nation's first -- and most obsessively anti- Communist -- Secretary of Defense. Forrestal brought Nitze to Washington to work for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Ronald Reagan played George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American that year, and Mikhail Gorbachev was nine years old.
In 1946, as part of a group of American observers who stood in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nitze contemplated the implications of the atom bomb for the postwar world. His conclusion: once the Soviets got their own bomb, they might use it as an instrument of political intimidation and perhaps of war; to deter Soviet aggression, the U.S. would have to build up its own conventional and nuclear military strength. That has been the nub of his message to his countrymen ever since.
In March 1983 Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world." Harsh words, but no harsher than what Nitze said in 1950 in a report to Harry Truman called National Security Council Directive No. 68, one of the seminal documents of the cold war ("The Kremlin is inescapably militant"). Nitze supervised the preparation of NSC-68 as director of the State Department's policy planning staff. His desk was only a conference room away from that of his friend and boss, Secretary of State Dean Acheson. His office in Foggy Bottom today, its walls decorated with memorabilia and impressionist art, is almost as close to George Shultz's.
Another Reagan theme -- that the U.S. is losing the arms race with the Soviet Union and that the Kremlin could wage a pre-emptive attack against the U.S. -- is one that Nitze has been sounding for more than 30 years. Much of his life has been a Paul Revere's ride to alert America that the Russians are coming. NSC-68 predicted that by 1954 the Soviets would have enough nuclear- armed bombers to "seriously damage this country" by striking "swiftly and with stealth." These were more than just words to Nitze. At his Maryland farm there is a bomb shelter, which for years he kept stocked with emergency provisions.
In 1957 Nitze was an author of the so-called Gaither report to Dwight Eisenhower, which warned that within two years the Soviets would be able to carry out a "disarming attack" against "our deterrent power." That alarm helped John F. Kennedy proclaim the "missile gap" in his campaign against Richard Nixon. Nitze, an adviser to Kennedy, was rewarded with a Pentagon appointment, first as an Assistant Secretary of Defense, then as Secretary of the Navy. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, he was at the heart of the action as a member of J.F.K.'s ad hoc Executive committee.