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Some of the more doctrinaire opponents of arms control in the Administration feared that Warnke might be right. Richard Perle, whom Nitze brought to Washington in the late '60s and who served as an Assistant Secretary of Defense until earlier this year, remarked, "Paul is an inveterate problem solver." He did not mean it as a compliment. Nitze, however, took it as one, and he has lived up to Perle's apprehensions.
In 1982 he embarked on one of the most extraordinary episodes of creative insubordination in the annals of diplomacy. He entered a covert and unauthorized negotiation-within-the-negotiation with his Soviet counterpart in the INF talks, Yuli Kvitsinsky. During a stroll in a forest outside Geneva, the famous "walk in the woods," they reached a tentative compromise. Back in Washington, Perle and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger led a successful campaign to repudiate the deal and reprimand Nitze.
When Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986, Nitze headed the U.S. delegation in an all-night negotiating session. It produced important breakthroughs in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), the Reagan Administration's attempt to improve on the much maligned SALT process. The encounter was, says Nitze, "one of the most exciting experiences of my life -- and potentially one of the most productive." Nitze believes a START agreement may be possible, perhaps in time to be signed at a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow next year -- but only if the U.S. is willing to accept some limits on the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.
Nitze's advocacy of compromise on SDI has exposed him once again to fire from right-wing Senators and to blasts from the conservative press. The attacks are eerily reminiscent of the ones against him in the early '50s and '60s, and they have been painful to the proud old hawk. "It's no fun and damned unfair being depicted as a giveaway artist," he confided to a colleague recently.
Reagan has grown wary of Nitze's desire to cut a deal on SDI, so much so that the President passed him over for the directorship of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency despite a recommendation from George Shultz. Even so, Nitze's principal opponents within the Administration, Weinberger and Perle, have resigned. That leaves Paul Nitze on the inside, and who knows? Perhaps next year there will be one more opportunity to "work the problem" of arms control, one more chance to be part of the spirit of a superpower summit.